[A]lain D’Anjou’s high-end balsam firs get their start in the soil of Vermont’s northeastern-most town, Canaan. After 10 years of growth and trimming, they’re bundled up and shipped nearly 1,000 miles southeast to the gulf stream island of Bermuda to decorate corporate headquarters and high-end homes.
D’Anjou’s Bermuda business is just part of the picture at his 120-acre former dairy farm, where he has about 60,000 trees on 60 acres. Lodged at the point where New Hampshire, Vermont and Quebec come together, the 50-year-old tree operation sends 4,000 to 5,000 trees each year to Boston and other points south. This year, 700 trees will also go to Florida.
The items shipped to Bermuda are some of D’Anjou’s most high-end trees, and are priced accordingly. D’Anjou carefully shapes them as they grow and he sends photos to prospective buyers in Bermuda so they can approve them.
“They have to be really top-notch,” he said. “Some are buying three or four large trees.”
With no corporate or individual income tax, Bermuda’s a well-known tax haven for large companies such as Bacardi. It also has one of the highest costs of living in the world, and a population of just 65,000.
“I can only imagine some of the houses these trees go into,” D’Anjou said. “The average house in Bermuda sells for over half a million dollars.”
D’Anjou grew up in the tree business, growing his own trees and importing Scotch Pines from Quebec in the 1970s to sell in the Boston area with his brother.
“We had a heck of a business going,” he said.
In the 1990s, inspectors from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture asked him if he would be interested in shipping trees to Bermuda. He started with two 40-foot containers, at 500 trees per container. Since then, his distributors in Bermuda have changed many times, but he’s stayed on the account. This year, he’s only sending 250 trees to the island. He said that’s all he can manage to cut because this season’s early snow has made the trees inaccessible.
“We’re stalled out,” he said. “We’ve got about 1,000 trees that we still could cut. It might happen.”
The trees that go to Bermuda need to be inspected every year for pine needle scale, a pest that is the bane of Christmas tree growers around the country.
“The balsam areas that we take trees from seem to be free of it,” he said.
The Christmas tree supply is boom and bust, and D’Anjou said right now buyers are seeing a bust, with a shortage caused by drought in the Pacific Northwest, development pressure on land in the Carolinas, fungus and other factors.
And there seems to be less interest in Christmas tree farming. D’Anjou says in his area at least, young people don’t seem interested in taking over family Christmas tree farms. A report from ResearchAndMarkets.com said the global Christmas tree market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 3.25 percent between now and 2022.
But D’Anjou said demand is complex. Another pest that imperils the natural tree market is artificial trees, which can be purchased pre-lit and pre-decorated with high-tech amenities.
The National Christmas Tree Association used a Nielsen/Harris Poll to survey 2,000 U.S. consumers on their tree-buying habits and found a year-over-year increase in fake tree purchases between 2016 and 2017. The number of real tree purchases stayed the same.
D’Anjou sees Quebec, a huge Christmas tree supplier, as crucial in keeping consumers interested in natural trees. Canada exported nearly 2 million fresh-cut Christmas trees in 2016 worth $43 million, according to Statistics Canada.
“If it wasn’t for Quebec, I think the Christmas tree market might fizzle out,” D’Anjou said. “You need enough trees on the market to keep people from buying artificial trees; once they buy an artificial tree you have probably lost that client for some years. So we depend on the Canadians to fly most of our trees on the East Coast.”