When pulling up to Grandpa’s Farm in Loudon each year to cut their own tree, families likely don’t realize that the hardy Christmas fir they strap to the roof of their cars has taken years to grow, and well, a lot of babying along the way to ensure it’s ready to be the heart of the holiday season.
No one understands the business better than Rodney Phillips, the grandpa on Grandpa’s Farm. For the past 12 years, he has grown Christmas trees from seedling to full-grown, cut-your-own, size.
“They take seven to 10 years, roughly, and that’s to get a marketable tree, so six to eight feet. The first step is getting good land. Not all land is good for Christmas trees, just like a lot of crops,” said Phillips. “They don’t like it too acidic. They like the right kind of soil to grow in. They also don’t like it very wet. They like it moist but well-drained. So the key is your land, type of land, and then to get your soil nutrients just right before you plant.”
Phillips plants up to 1,200 seedlings in the spring, does the maintenance and upkeep, and gets them ready to be cut and sold after Thanksgiving and before Christmas. Fortunately for this grandpa, he has family to help.
Rodney’s son Nate — a firefighter in Belmont — and his son, Chase, are regulars at the farm and help out wherever they can. The whole family becomes consumed by the Christmas spirit when the farm opens its gates for three days in late November. They sell each tree for $60, which includes the equipment, the experience of cutting it, free coffee and snacks and other activities for families.
“My favorite part of this farm is being able to run around the farm. Me and my sister play around it all the time. I have a walkie-talkie, so we just use the walkie-talkies to talk to each other,” said Rodney’s young grandson, Chase.
Rodney manages the farm year-round in his green Grandpa’s Farm sweatshirt, and the logo is a caricature of his father’s portrait, Wilbur Phillips, whom the farm is named in honor of. His father owned Phillips Farm Produce in Tilton.
Much more goes into growing Christmas trees than just watering them. Any multitude of things can go wrong in the process, from deer eating the leaves poking through the snow and fungi destroying trees to droughts and floods affecting their growth.
“Growing and selling Christmas trees certainly isn’t something that just happens, and realizing an income isn’t going to begin right away. This is especially true if you are starting a new tree farm right from the seedlings. This is going to require a significant commitment of time, energy, and money to get to that marketable product designed to entice people to come to your farm,” wrote Ray Berthiaume, the Coos County forester and field specialist for the University of New Hampshire’s Cooperative Extension, in an article about growing Christmas trees.
Phillips is a former software developer, and he’s partnered with the UNH Extension to understand his farm better and provide valuable information for agroforestry research in the state. The weather station in the field of trees sends information right into the home for up-to-date tracking of conditions and data collection.
“If everything goes well, and you don’t have to have a lot of expenditures, and again, I’ve got a lot of stuff in place now for selling,” said Rodney Phillips. “We convert the workshop into a Christmas shop, and that’s when we decorate all our wreaths, and so we hold wreath decorating classes. We have a lot of stuff now, but something pops up, like a $16,000 repair on a tractor, and it goes to your home, a huge chunk of your yearly revenue.”
Last year, Phillips said he lost around 50% of his crop of blueberries, which grow near the trees. Moreover, the Christmas tree industry is not the most profitable business — especially when selling for only three days a year before stock runs out.
Phillips quoted an old saying.
“If you want to make a million dollars farming, start with $2 million, because you’re going to lose in farming. You don’t make a lot of money farming, and I will never make back all the money I’ve put into it before I sell it,” he said.
However, Rodney Phillips did not seem particularly shaken or upset by this prospective future. He’s happy with the freedom the farm lifestyle provided after stepping away from his desk job, allowing him to hike and serve as search and rescue personnel in the Lakes Region.
Currently, the farm sells about 300 trees per season and Rodney wants to scale it up year-over-year. On top of the coffee, cocoa, cookies, jam, syrups, and wreaths that the family sells from their shop during the three-day cut-your-own tree frenzy that occurs, they also offer “marriage saving tree stands,” which have a peg in the middle of the base to place your tree with a drilled hole.
“You buy the stand, but we’ll drill it for free. So we have people coming back now every year because they bought the stand,” said Nate Phillips.
When asked about what he enjoys most, Rodney Phillips said, “I’m gonna have to pick two things, the smell and the family part of it, because when I’m shearing trees in the summer, it smells like Christmas. The selling is the culmination of all the work. So to have the family here doing it, and I couldn’t do it without them.”
Alexander Rapp can be reached at arapp@cmonitor.com
