The State Growing The Most Christmas Trees

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 3, 7:27AM EST

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The State Growing The Most Christmas Trees — © Michael-Tatman / iStock via Getty Images

There are 25 to 30 million “real” Christmas trees sold annually in the US. They are called “real” to separate them from the fake trees people buy so they can rebuild the same tree yearly and not have to water it or worry about falling needles. The top provider of real Christmas trees in Oregon which produces about one out of every tree sold.

According to the National Christmas Tree Association, Christmas trees are grown in all 50 states. That means there won’t be an availability problem. Over 350 million acres are planted with trees. The average time to grow a 6 to 7-foot tree is about seven years. These are the states that produce the most Christmas trees.

Oregon means to keep its spot at the top of the Christmas tree sales list by state. The Oregon State University Extension Service has a program to grow the trees most likely to do well with tree consumers. This included the popular noble fir and Douglas fir. To find trees that may be popular in the future, the university has experimented with “Turkish, Trojan and Nordmann firs brought to Oregon from the mountains of Turkey and the Republic of Georgia.”

Several other states do not want to be bested by Oregon’s success. North Carolina promotes itself as the No.2 provider. It calls its primary Christmas tree crop the best tree available nationwide–the Fraser fir. The NC Cooperative Extension writes, “96% or more of production in NC is the state’s native tree, Fraser fir.” These are usually grown at between 2,000 and 4,500 feet above sea level.

Leaving aside state rankings, the Christmas tree business is good business. Nationwide, about 15,000 tree farms employ approximately 100,000 people.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.