A Christmas Tree Farmer
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One of the most important days of the year for a Christmas tree farmer is the day after thanksgiving, ving opening day.

Opening day is big. Uh, you know, you prepped all year and you open for tree sales. And the worst thing you can get a bunch of rain.

that's sheldon coursey. He's a Christmas tree farmer and the owner, of course, tree farm near since adio, ohio. And his farm people can come and pick out their own trees, cut them down and take them home.

So one day is opening day and IT is pouring and i'm so can wet, you know, trying to run around, get laus minute stuff done. I got eight or ten or twelve employees here about that many customers when I should have hat, hundreds and hundreds customers. So i'm standing in the barn and i'm looking out over the field and in generally feel and pretty sorry for myself and this lady came up and I don't know who he was and SHE said, are you mr.

cosey? And I said, yes, I am and SHE grab me and give me a big hug and he said I just wanted thank you for what you do because it's such a big part of our Christmas and um I thought I will never forget that because IT made me realized that that's a different aspect to this job that not everybody, very few people, you get thanked for what they do. For eleven month a year, I am just another farmer, but for a month a year, i've got a lot of people that thank me or what I do.

That's what really separate this type agriculture from a lot of other types is the fact that you have that one on one relationship with your customers, but yet they have a bad experience. I've had people basically accuse me of growing their Christmas. So you know, they take you pretty serious.

I'm dan heath, and this is what it's like to be. In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession, a cattle rancher, a nurse, a professional santa laws. We want to know what they do all day at work.

Today, we ll ask sheldon coursey what it's like to be a Christmas tree farmer. We will talk about what you have to do to make a Christmas tree look like a Christmas tree, how you fight all the posts that can keep them from growing. And bonus, he'll give you some tips on picking out a great tree for your family.

Stay with us. So I have a new book coming out. It's a little weird to me that some of you may not even know i'm an author, but there IT is i've written or code written five business books in the past, including the power of moments and made to stick.

And i've got a six book coming out in january that's called reset, how to change what's not working. It's a book intended to help you and your team get unstuck to overcome the gravity of the way things have always work and make positive change. It's coming out january twenty first, but I wanted to give you heads up here if you want to learn more about the book or preorder IT, god bless you.

We've set up a special link what it's like dot com slash book. You don't even need to remember the name of the book, just remember it's a book, what it's like that com slash book that link will take you to the amazon page, but course is available anywhere you like to buy books. Thanks, and back to the show. Shelton's Christmas trees don't begin their lives on his farm, so don't picture him planting seats in the soil. He buys them a couple of years old from another former.

planting seed and raising them to A C playing or a transplant. That kind of a science in itself that I don't really know anything about.

It's so crazy to me to hear how much specialization there is. It's like there are people that are good at raising a tree up through daycare and then um you take over in the keep them through to adult or something.

Yeah I mean and the guys that raised the plants that I buy, they don't collect their own seed. You know for the most part, I believe they collect seed. They buy seed from companies that go out and collect seeds.

By the time the Christmas ries get to sheldon, they've already spent a year in a field, so they've proven and they can make IT.

I planned about five thousand in a year. And I like to start with three sitter in the fifteen to eighteen and size .

at about four dollars a pop. Once their ship, that's twenty dollars a year in costs, just as a starting place.

So I have my trees shift to me, usually until the last week of march. And then I have a walk in cooler. And I put the trees in the color.

wow, you can get five thousand trees in the cooler.

Yeah, on the size trees on planting. It's a squeak. You, their own pilots in crates. I doubled that on, and I can put about five thousand trees in my caller.

He likes to plant in early April. He puts them in rose with five feet between each tree and eight feet between the rose, which is wide enough to run his tractor through. All in all, he's got a hundred acre farm, sixty percent of which has planted with trees, about fifty five thousand Christmas tree es. In all.

if you translate the number of trees or number of Bakers to miles of rosa trees, i've got about fifty miles of trees.

Like if you just laid all the trees up in a row with, wow, fifty miles of trees once they're planted. IT takes a typical Christmas story about seven or eight years to get to accessible size, and that growth is not slow and steady.

You don't know what you're gonna for the next Christmas until they go through their growing spell, which is late April through about early june. That's when they do all they're growing. And then from about midon, they're finished for the year.

And when they during that growing period, it's amazing how fast they grow. You'll go from like on some trees that grow really fast, like a norwest Bruce ah they might grow two to three feet a year and heights, and they do that all within a two month period. So it's pretty amazing.

Oh wow. So I mean, it's almost visible at that scale. I me like data day visible yeah IT .

is really and the thing is that the when the new growth when is grow in net faas, it's real fragile.

so fragile that even a bird landing at the top of IT can damage IT. For a while, sheldon waged a battle against black birds that we're nesting industries.

You know, I tried everything to get rid of my boat prop in, can you know, they go off and their super loud and you know.

I had five as like the noise as I know well.

I stationed about throughout the farm, you know, five canons and and once I get used to the noise is useless. I mean, i'll build next ten feet from one and you won. You know, you don't want to stand fifty feet from one, but theyll D A next, right, next one, they get used to.

Aside from the birds he's fending off insects like the pesky Bruce spider might and weeds of the weeds, he puts a good amount of mileage on his Moore.

So each time I move, I figure on moving over ninety miles at two passes pro. And the closer to one hundred miles, I do that four times a year.

And even after all the obsessing about weeds and pests, sometimes things still don't work out because he's always at the winds of the weather.

I used to plant a lot more trees, and I do now as plant like twenty five thousand trees a year, but I was put them closer together. I know one year, in particular, eighty eight, we had a drought. I lost all the trees I planted that year.

Oh, wow, all of them.

Yeah, yeah. So what I did was doubled up the next year and planted instead of plant twenty five. I planted probably forty thousand nine and completely double up.

Perhaps the most important thing that sheldon does to nurtures trees is called Sherry.

Sharing is where you're shaping the tree. The trees don't naturally grow to be a nice, uniform, symmetrical Christmas story. They might maintain a fairly good shape, but they have to be tried every year. Or shared .

sharing means you hack away a tree using a long, razor sharp lade to sculpt IT into the shape that you want. And really, hack isn't quite the right word, because sharing requires a lot of skill. Do IT right and not hurt yourself.

I probably knife sheer, oh, I would guess probably ten thousand or more trees a year. what? And yeah, I do IT by myself.

I don't have any help by yourself. Yeah, I kend the others. The smaller ones on pride share and another ten or fifteen thousand with the hedge clippers.

The Younger ones you don't really have to trim and use to theyve been in the ground for two or three years, and then you start the shaping process. And A I philosophe is make all your major corrections and get the shape established when they're in the two to five foot, two to six foot size. And then as they start to get closer to be in a marketable tree, uh, size wise, I lighten up on my trimming. I don't take as much off that way. The tree has a natural look, but has got a good shape.

I think I was not even enough to think that the Christmas trees just magically grew into Christmas trees, but apparently there's a lot of sculpting involved.

There is most people don't realize that, but the sharing is probably the most important adona. They're all the jobs are important. But i'll put IT this way that when somebody comes in, in my field and they're looking for a tree, what they see is the last sharing job that you put on IT.

So i'm real, real. Even when I had four, five, six boys helped me in the summertime treat and trees. Back when I had, I had more trees, and I do. Now I always start among the smaller trees, because the tree has a chance to grow out of any mistakes they make when you get into the bigger stuff.

You know, unless a guy really is a good tree, sheer and usually IT takes three or four weeks, have dawn IT me honor, but costly, they trying to get the best shop, you know, you you want him to be able to do IT pretty much like I do IT. You know, uh, they can't be making a lot of mistakes and swing a sharing kye is like swing a ball. Bet you you keep your eye on the ball when you're showing in a Sherry knife.

You want to look directly where you want to start your cut on the tree and then um you have a certain swing you use. And I started doing that when I was fifteen. My dad S A three growers, so I learned a knife share when I was about fifteen.

I've probably been sharing knife, sharing Christmas trees. Now that's a real knitted thing. But i've brightly been nive sharing Christmas tree longer, uh, than anybody in the world that still does IT.

yeah. I wonder if you might actually be the words like if there is an olympic knife sharing event. I wonder if you might be the gold.

Well, I don't know. I mean, no, I was a lot faster when I was Younger, but i'm pretty darn good now as far as getting the I mean, I go out and here in each tree, I have to make a lot of decisions on each tree, you know, not all of, but and I my objective is just to be able to stand back and look at IT and go. That's perfect.

That's exactly the way I want to share IT. If I can't hit within a quarter anger a half anchor where i'm aiming, then I won't get that perfection. And and you know let's how particularly I am and it's not rocky science, but IT does take a certain amount of skill because i've taught a lot of guys to knife sheer and nobody picks IT up right away.

How do you keep people from? How do you keep yourself for that matter, from self multing just stinging along knife around thousands of times seems dangerous.

Funny you should ask that ah because that has always been a problem is knife cuts if you're right handed, if you've got to keep your left hands out the way where gloves, but the biggest danger is cutting your leg on the even I always wear long pants, but I went fifty three years without cut myself until this summer you cut yourself .

for the first time this summer for .

the first time I I mean is something that man that you know was big enough and needed stitches and ah I had long pencil on but I hit myself in the knee and I cut right through my pants and cut my knee I don't know being my father's son, I didn't have time to go get IT so up. I didn't even to go the emergency room so I called my the shop in these three yeah I I call my doctor and I said, you know, I ask his reception.

I said, does he have time to sow me up? SHE said, if you can wait a couple hours and like now, I don't know so I ended up, you know, well, bleeding down my bottom part of my leg. I drove up to the drug store and got some, I think they call him stereo strips.

Now we always call him butterflies. And I, butterfly ed shot and was back in the field within an hour a half or whatever. You know, when he healed up beautifully.

most people who share Christmas trees injure themselves a lot sooner than that shell on's dad started the Christmas tree foreign business in the thousand nine hundred fifties and head equipped new sharing recruits with specialized gear.

He made everybody where ne guards, or basically it's catchers like guards.

oh, wow. And that's .

what ever body had to wear IT was IT was a pain aware you're out there in june. It's hard. And you know the first week, you know you hear clicks all over the place.

Guys work on those new guards lives. And then you know if you get to wear, you noticed that certain guys were no longer hitting their new guard. You say, okay, you you can do without IT. Now, yeah, just be careful .

what what are sort of the finishing touches like as you approach the time when a tree will finally be ready to sell in november, december? What's happening in the six months before that?

Well.

you know, the fact that decides trees, I plane, they take six, seven and eight years to grow over that period of time. They fly, had some frost damage. At some point they may be been rubb by a deer.

They maybe have had some spider mites or fungus, or this or that. And most of the trees will grow out of that kind of stuff. So really, what really matters is how they look that marketable year. When they get over about six or seven feet, you just put a real nice sharing job on him. And at this point in my career, since I don't have any help sharing every tree that gets sold that's been shared on the guy that shared IT.

And what's the perfect shape for a Christmas tree? Like when you step back, what are you looking for?

Well, ideally what they always said was A A sixty six percent or a two third taper. So a six foot ree should be roughly four feet wide on the bottom. So a nine foot ree should be six feet wide on the bottom.

I can attend to think that's a little on the wide side. I tend to try to sh trim trees in a little bit more of a tall, slender way. But trees are like people are you have some people or some trees that are short. Why do you have some trees that are tall and skinny? And that's their natural growing habit, and you really don't want to try to fight that too much, you know, going to go with IT.

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You're in, you're out and you feel like you've got some real tangible wisdom to integrate when it's over. Listen to the best advise, whatever you listen to what it's like to be. As I mention, sheldon's dad started the Christmas tree foremen business. He had a different business model, then sheldon's cut your own, he told trees wholesale. And for a time he supplied most of the Christmas trees at the cover grocery stores in the area.

day ahead about five hundred dakers and trees and um IT was a tough game. I never want to be a whole sale because yes, brutal. You know you're trying to load tractor trailers and you start in light probably late october and by thanksgiving, all the trees have to be harvested and shift.

wait. So you are like, if you're in the wholesale model, you're already cutting down Christmas tree es around halloween.

Oh yeah, before halloween. And so where the growers to do IT today, I mean, because one of your best weekends is the weekend following thanksgiving. And if you're processing, you know, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of trees, you can do that the week before thanksgiving. You have to start really, really early. And you try to grow trees that have really good needle attention so they can handle that, that long period of being cut in laus until Christmas because.

uh, with that logic, I mean some of the trees that we're buying, if if we buy them you at retail, they might be two months old by Christmas day. Uh, yeah, me, two months dead.

What to say? Yeah, too much. Yeah, too much late. They've been cut.

All of them probably have been cut for at least a month, maybe three weeks. And that's assuming they're on a lot by sankers giving, you know. And then theyve got another four weeks ago. So what commercial growers do as they grow pine trees, s and four, because they have really good needle retention and a lot of the trees that you see, most of the trees that you sea sold at the big package stores, big box stores like home, deep phone lows, they've been cut and hold several hundred miles. And when they're hold they're hold on an open truck, an open tractor trail usually. And um the trees that are down inside and not exposed to that eight or ten hours of sixty million our wind are usually they would stand the trip pretty well and there are the fresh ones. But if you go through like a tree lot and they've got a bunch trees and they were probably all cut the same time, but some of the real dry, it's very possible that tree was on the outside of the load being on the side or up on top and got exposed to that one.

Let me tell you something. Those those are the trees that I always end up picking out because my family always seems to pick a try about december and ninety. There's something and there's like a couple of gally look and trees left on the lot, probably the the very top tree on the load from what you're saying.

Yeah very possible. Yeah that that's why the .

Christmas street business has changed a lot since sheldon s. Dad first started in the fifties. For one thing, the number of people who want Christmas trees has dwindled .

when I was a kid back in the early to mid sixties and you're going to your body's houses and that in every house had a Christmas tree in IT and every tree was a real tree. There were no artificial trees back then and um when they did come up with artificial trees, they were pretty ugly in nowadays, probably way less than fifty percent um of the households actually put a Christmas story. I in their house.

I mean lot just don't do IT anymore. And the majority, the ones that do get put up a lot of of them are artificial trees. And I kind of get that as far as the convenience and the cleanliness and all that stuff, you know. So basically the tree farms like mine, you're trying to get a bigger slice of a lot smaller pie. And so that has made IT a real chAllenge, is trying to sell the number of trees that you're producing that you need to sell.

Sheldon charges ninety dollars for his trees, and when a tree doesn't sell, IT means he's born all the costs of raising IT over seven, eight years with no offsetting income. And he has to take care of IT for another year.

I wish I could, but I won't sell the number that I have that are ready to be harvest. And that can be a problem. I mean, yeah, they're gonna bigger and nice for next year, but i've got to take care of for another year and I have to trim for another year and I have to try and keep them healthy for another year. Um trees are kind of like and I know livestock itself the same way IT reaches a point where its its most marketable and from there he goes downhill and that's kind of the way trees or you want IT when they get in the six to nine foot size and they look really nice, you really that's when you want to sell them.

So sheldon, we always in our episodes with a quick lightning round of questions. Here we go. What is a word phrase that only someone from your profession would be likely to know? And what does that mean?

Ah, well, we all recovered that. I'd say sharing trees, most other parts you like planting, or this or that, is stuff that anybody in agriculture know what. But we start talking about sharing Christmas trees as something that only a Christmas ry farmer has ever done, you know? No, and nobody else is probably ever done that. They might prove ebata in our yard little bit, but we call the sharing.

What's the most insulting thing you could say about a Christmas story?

Farmers work well, and I know people all say IT to be insult ting, but it'll be like this time here and they say, well, you're get ready to get busy, aren't you? You know it's I mean, i'm busy all year.

Oh.

I see what you max, when I open for tree sales of got probably a dozen employees that are taking care of everything for me so that I can stand around and talk to people. And so when I open for tree sales, yeah busy, but you know i'm busy all year and people just they don't .

realize what's a tool specific deer profession that you really like using well.

as far as tools that are specific to this profession in whether not all like user or not. But one is a tree bailer six or seven years ago I bought real nice is called a how a tree bailer is kind of the state of the art and tree bellers um and .

that's the thing that like wraps up your tree so it's more compact .

yeah it's got a fun. Got a gas motor on and it's you stick the trunk e of the tree and the final and then you grab IT with a pair jars and IT pulls IT through and what IT pulls IT through, IT wraps twice around and every tree that get shipped any distance has been bailed.

What's a sound specific to your profession that you're likely to hear?

Well, it's a pretty quiet profession in general besides like tracked was running in staff, which I do. But um I would say the tree bail or each time the trees bail, you hear cycle, and that's kind of a unique sound, but other net and nothing real.

What does this sound like if I don't, if you have a tree bailer impression or not?

No, you're not gonna te me under that one.

No, I gotto try.

You can hear it's got a spoil that spans with a ballotings on IT. And then I oppose the trees of the final. That spinning real, that spinning hoop with with a bolotin hook to, uh, just IT makes a specific noise, is got rollers on IT. You can hear him. And of course, the final t pulls a tree through act like a microphone kind of know so it's kind .

aloud for those of us who aren't look enough to visit the course farm and and pick out our own tree if if we're stuck going to home deepo or the neighborhood lot like what is some advice you would offer us for picking out a great Christmas tree?

Well, I me know as far as the shape of the tree or the color people are, they're pretty much in tune with that. They know what a tree supposed to look like and what color supposed to be. If you feel the nails, if you just grab a branch and just with moderate pressure, just kind of pull your hand along the branch with the flower of the nails.

If not, never fAllen off. It's pretty fresh. I it's it's not fresh cut. Obviously, we talk about that but is still got plenty of moisture in IT and beyond that you know take at home and um put a fresh cut on the bottom because it's been cut for a while and the sap tends to seal IT up. And you know when you put the house, if you've got up, if you've got vents for your hv c system, you know you want to turn any of those off that around the trees. So they're not blowing more mayor on IT, then just make sure you don't let IT run out of water because if IT runs out of water in the sand, then the bottom of the tree where IT actually absorbs the water will seal over again in any quit absorbing water.

What appeals to you about this work?

You know, it's kind of funny. It's when I started, I was twenty five when I decided to come back and be the in the reason I did that, I was living out of state and my dad was want to retire. He was up in his late fifties, and I knew he was gone to sell this farm.

And if you sell this farm, you could understand why a person would fall in love with, that is a beautiful farm. And so I didn't want to see the farm get away. And I guess I kind of missed IT, so that's when I decided to come back and do IT. So anyway, twenty five years old is not a very exciting business.

You know you're not traveling, um you know you're work in the same piece of ground every day, but it's a kind of a business that I the older I got, the more appeal to me though all the things that kind of probably seemed boring or not real appealing in the beginning or exactly what most guys my age. If you going to sell work, you know that's what you want. You don't want to deal with bosses, employees you don't want to deal with, you just want to go out and do your job every day.

Every now then I just i'll be working out there and i'll be at a point a certain vantage point where I can see a large portion in the farm, nowhere you can see the whole farm. And I look out across these rolling fields of trees is not a view that a lot of people get on a daily basis. In most days, I got my head down and i'm working and i'm not really enjoying the view. But when I do see that, even after all these years, sometimes I just like me and I, you know, I got a but he knows .

he can't do the job forever, and he's making plans to wind things down.

I decide this is my last year planting trees, the trees that I planned at the spring. I will be in my mid seventies by the time they're ready to sell. And I figure, you know, I won't be able to do in any longer. So no need in planting trees that I won't be able to take care of.

There are mature stands of ever Green trees that sheldon planted thirty or forty years ago that is never harvested. If for when he sells the farm, they'll still be there.

But IT takes a lifetime to grow a tree. And i've spent a lifetime growing a lot of the trees that that i've left on the farm and is beautiful. This is my home.

I literally live on the farm now. The farm been in the family cent of is like, you know, thirteen or fourteen years old. I can marry.

Holiday was when dad first, but this place. So now you spend forty some years of your life on one hundred dakers. And I know this, I know every inch of this ground. I've got this hundred adkins memorize. I could go out there in the dark, and I could walk this farm and never stumble.

Sheldon coursey owns a Christmas tree farm near santa ani, ohio, will put a link to coursey tree farm and the show notes. The moment that hit me the hardest was when sheldon said he had planted the last trees who ever planned the moment he made that decision. The clock for the tree farm started ticking and has seven or eight years left until those trees grow up and get ready to sell.

And at first, I have to admit, I felt a little depressed about that ending. But later IT occurred to me, know, what a blessing, what a blessing that sheldon gets to end his work in a fashion and on a time line of his choosing. Farming is a hard career, regardless of which are growing.

But sheldon built a life where he's able to do things piz way. He's not behold, into the numbers game of whole sAiling. He hones the farm to a scale where he could manage the place almost single handily. It's big enough that he has to do a hard day's work every day to keep IT going.

And it's small enough that he can share every single tree into its most beautiful form, sharing trees, fighting the weeds and pests and blackbirds planting and fertilizing, and praying for good weather, and ultimately seeing thousands of happy families show up to pick out the tree that will light up their holidays. Folks, that's what it's like to be a Christmas tree farmer. We've had a flurry of recent reviews on apple podcast.

Thank you for that. Shout outs to why glen injury and ipa a bear silly person three raki dallas D M M A B C eleven bodow bananas and geek seven love you all. This episode was produced by map party. I'm dan heath. c. nx. time.