An extremely dry summer in Boone County is going to have long-lasting effects, including ones that won’t be seen until December 2019.
The extensive summer drought has affected not only corn and soybean fields in the area, but also the county’s Christmas tree farms.
Christmas in July at Dull’s Tree Farm in Thorntown was no party this year as owners Tom and Kerry Dull saw roughly 3,500 trees die. They planted about 4,000 seedlings this past spring.
“The problem was, not only did we not have the rain, but we had such extreme temperatures,” Kerry said. “If we’d had the drought without the extreme temperatures, then we might have been in better shape.”
Because nearly all the trees that died were the seedlings, not even a year old, the 2012 holiday season at the farm will be as usual, Kerry said. The change will come in seven to eight years, when those seedlings would have come to market, meaning they had grown large enough to sell.
To make up for the lost trees, Kerry said they do a double planting this spring — planting 8,000 seedlings instead of the usual 4,000. So come Christmas 2019, the trees being sold will be a year younger than normal and about a foot shorter.
“If you’re used to getting a certain size tree, maybe one year you won’t have that,” Kerry said. She added that they might ship in some supplementary larger trees that year to help.
But there are creative ways to help a smaller tree look taller, she said. People can build a small platform to put the tree on, which gives the illusion that it’s taller, especially from outside the home.
But for the next few years, it will be business as usual. The more established trees with deeper root systems were able to withstand the drought, Kerry said. They did also lose some two-year-old trees.
“We just take it as a business loss,” she said. “We have found there’s no insurance program out there for trees. If there were, they’d be insuring the tree for eight years of weather, and that’s a pretty high risk.”
The Dulls did try to water the young seedlings a few times in June. They took a tank with a sprayer and went down each aisle, dousing the little trees with water. Some parts of the seedlings fields they did not water, and Kerry said the mortality rate is the same.
An irrigation system would have saved the trees, but the cost is “pretty salty,” Kerry said. But after this intense of a summer, Tom said they are looking into the possibility of using a spring-fed lake they own across the street to at least water the young trees.
The Dulls went through something similar in 1988. Extreme drought conditions brought about the same struggles. But the difference was the couple had just started planting trees for the first time in 1985. So though it was a financial loss, they just delayed opening the tree farm, opening a year later than they’d originally planned.
“But now we’re open, the machine is churning, and we can’t delay a year,” Tom said.
The financial impact of a summer like this year’s is tough. Each seedling costs about $2. Adding in the cost of labor to plant them all, it ends up they invest about $4 per tree, Tom said. Losing 3,500, already that’s a $14,000 loss.
But add in the cost of the seedlings and labor for the double planting this spring, and that ends up costing the Dulls $8 per tree lost. The total financial hit is $28,000.
And, Tom said, “it hits pretty hard.”
The financial impact at Watts Christmas Tree Farm and Sparkle Shop in Zionsville wasn’t nearly as steep, said owner Deborah Watts. The farm lost roughly 600 trees.
“They just outright died,” she said. “It isn’t a real impact for us as far as costing us money, but the cost will come in removing the dead trees.” The Watts farm doesn’t harvest nearly as many trees from its own field, Watts said. They bring in many trees from other farms to sell at the location. So this year, she will be looking to import trees from areas that were not as affected by the drought.
In Watts experience, it wasn’t so much the age of the tree that caused it to survive or die, but the hardiness of it. Some types of trees are more resistant to drought. And some trees did not outright die, but have been compromised by the drought and need extra time to recover.
“We’ll definitely be steering people away from the less hardy varieties this year,” she said. “The longer-needle trees will probably do better because they hold in more moisture.”
If a tree is compromised, it may look fine in the field but not survive very long inside once cut down, she said. Some trees, though at market age, will not be sold this year because they need longer to recover.
One thing they are doing to help trees recover is pruning. Cutting the trees back takes some of the stress off because there is less foliage for the tree to support.
Though watering was impossible with that many trees, Watts said there was one thing she did.
“All you can do is pray for rain, which I did many a time,” she said.
For a completely opposite rain-related issue, Kerry said they will be a little short on Canaan Firs this year. Ironically, a few years ago the field the Canaans are in flooded, and they lost quite a few. And that’s where the challenge comes in — educating the public because they don’t remember weather patterns from years ago.
“We just have to do a good job of educating the public on why this happens,” she said. “It’s really hard because, unlike corn and soybeans, which are annual crops that you plant and see the affect of weather that year and then harvest, we plant, see the affect of eight years of weather and then harvest.”
That’s important to keep in mind when shopping for a Christmas tree, Kerry said, and stay flexible and creative to use what’s available.
It’s also important to remember that some trees are more drought-resistant than others, Tom said, proven by some older trees standing side-by-side in the same field. One is bright red, and the other a healthy deep green. Trees that are the same age and the same type also turn out different heights and different colors.
“Trees are like people,” he said. “They’re all different.”
Nelson’s Christmas Tree Farm in Lizton could not be reached for comment.