 This is a fish river tree, Christmas tree farm. My name is Steve Mannhardt. A lot of the Christmas tree farms do other operations also in what generally is called the ag retainment business. And Christmas tree farms are a type of ag retainment. Yeah, they're buying a product that they're also buying an experience out on a farm. So it's ag retainment. Tree farming is very different than regular rock rock. The Christmas tree farm is unique because it's a direct marketing kind of operation if you go choosing cut, which means that all of a sudden you go from being a farmer 11 months to having a retail store type operation out in the weather and in outside, which has its own set of complications with the wind and the rain and the storm and all of that. It takes a lot of work and it takes employees. And so suddenly you're going from being a farmer out here by yourself all the time to having to manage an operation. And in our case, it's 25, maybe 20, as many as 25 employees when we're really busy. And most of it's weekend and part time. But it's a chore and you've got to be ready for it. That all needs to go into the master plan, by the way. The unique thing about growing Christmas trees in Alabama, particularly here on the coast, is how fast they grow. As opposed to a Christmas tree in Michigan. So the difference is in Michigan when they plant, let's say, a fir tree, a balsam fir, they're planting a tree, maybe a foot tall, a transplant, which is also a couple of years old already from seed. At any rate, they'll plant that. And that tree will grow approximately one foot a year. It puts on a flush of growth in April and May. And then in July, they come back and they may, if it's bigger, they may trim it a little bit on the top. Then it sets buds up on top, and the buds sit there until the following spring. So they're getting about a foot of growth a year. Here we're getting three or four feet of growth a year, even on our pine tree. So the result of that is that they have to be trimmed more often. For instance, this tree here was probably trimmed three times this year, not to mention the fact that the top has to be cut back quite a bit to make it fill in this particular species especially. It's hard to get the top filled in, so you have to cut it back. You can see where I cut that back and so forth. Well, that's part of growing them here in the South Alabama as opposed to up north. It's much more intensive. So while they're taking a vacation from January, actually the wholesalers December, December, January, February, March, they'll plant maybe in April. They're not doing anything all winter long. Here, we're planting as soon as we finish selling. And by late February and March, everything's growing already, so we're already fertilizing. We're in a couple of months, we'd be herbicide in the end of March for herbicide. Herbicide and already, the bugs are going already, so we add the pesticide and all the stuff. They don't do that until way into summer. So it's a different field, but producing them faster means you've got to work harder. But there's a benefit to producing them faster. The return on them is faster. So anybody starting in the business, they don't have to wait 10 years to sell their first tree. They can do it in three or four years. That's a big difference. Most of the Christmas tree farms in Alabama and in this area of the South, they have a number of different major parts to it. So for instance, here we have five or six. There's the choosing cut aspect of the farm. So that's one major part of our operation. So the customers come with their families and so forth, and they grab a saw, and they head out, and they cut the tree down, and they bring it, and we shake it out for them, and let them, and help them get it on their vehicle and away they go. That's how most of the farms were started, and it's relatively easy for us, except for growing the trees, of course. The second part of our operation is that we also have fir trees that are shipped in from up north. That adds a major dimension to the operation, but there's so many customers in this county that that's what they want, because that's what they grew up with. You have to unload the trucks. The trees have to be stored. They have to be brought up on a very regular basis. They have to be unwrapped. They have to be basal pruned, butt pruned for the trunk. They have to be shook out. They have to be drilled. They have to be the bottom cut and put in a stand and tagged. So there's seven, eight different operations. This involves a lot of employees doing a lot of stuff. And then here they are all set up here where we set up fir trees in these stands with water in them. And then here come the customers. And then, all right, I'll take that one. Well, then you have to get it out of the stand and take it over and net it, and so forth. So there's a pretty good size of operation involved in selling fir tree. But we sell a lot of them, so it's worth it. And then I don't have to spend forever growing these trees. I just have to manage like many act those two, three weeks where we're selling them. So that's number two. Number three is that this farm is a little bit unique in the fact that we also grow trees in containers. And we started that 15, 20 years ago. We call them living Christmas trees because the customers can take that tree that's grown in that container. And then they can decorate it inside their house. And then right after Christmas, they can take it out and plant them. But that enters the nursery business then, growing trees in containers. Then you're starting almost a separate business. Then you have to decide, OK, if I have any leftover, once the customer, what am I going to do with the, then you're into the nursery wholesale business. And you want to sell to this garden setter or this landscaper. And it becomes complicated. Anyway, we were going to go big into it, and we did. And then we started drawing it down to where it's just our customer. Because I'm getting too old to compete with all these nurseries that grow tree, I don't know. But that is another unique part. So that's number three. Number four is what we call the agritourism part, which involves a lot of time. But you've got to arrange for Santa to be here. You've got to arrange. We have a manger scene with animals in it. You've got to get that all set up. And then we have a little tree train that takes, well, not a little, but a tree train is a pony train. But it looks a little like a train. But anyway, it takes customers around on a tour on the farm. That's the agritainment part. That's number four. And then number five is kind of the concession stand gift shop aspect. We don't do a gift shop, but we do have a concession stand. And that keeps a guy busy. All day long, hot chocolate, and popcorn, and peanuts, and coaks, and water, and you name it. All that has to be planned and worked out, too. So for the Christmas tree farm that you can cut the one, there's those five parts. And you kind of have to have management of each part of it. And so all that falls on me. And I'm running around like a chicken with my head cut off sometime. And it gets really busy here. That's another part of it. You have to be ready for the busy peaks. And it's kind of like Walmart on Black Friday. And there's a Black Friday here, too. And then during the day, it peaks right in the middle of the day between 10 o'clock and 3 o'clock, unless you have the Alabama Auburn game. It peaks then. And if you're not ready for that peak, if you're not prepared for it, then you're going to fall flat on your face. You're going to run out of hot chocolate. You're going to run out of fir tree. You're going to run out of saws, tree cards, and netting, and you name it if you're not ready for that peak. So it gets kind of a management. It's a management thing. And after three, four weeks of that, I'm ready to go back to farm. Now, when we plant, this is the machine we use. It digs out a pretty good hole. So it's good to have an auger. There's two schools on planting this plant. One school is to just kind of loosen it up a little bit and put it in there like that. When I'm working on this tree, I'm going to stake it. As you can see, it's got a bad curve in it. Two years just pulls out of the ground fairly easily. And you can reuse it year after year after year after year. This is a Christmas tree farmer's product. Nursery, tie tape. So I usually tie this to the tree top. There's a hand machine called a tapener. They can do this a little faster, but I don't like it. They use staples. That was about the second thing. OK. Lastly, the third thing is that I will come at that end of February, early March, and put some slow-release fertilizer around. And I'll do that two months later and two months later and maybe two months later. And then in the summer, I'll put two schools, one on one side and one on the other. And I get my exercise going up and down these rows that way. OK, now, from the one we just planted, some of them get to be this size from March to end of October. So this is already on 5 and 1 half feet tall. Most of them are a little bit shorter. This happened to be pretty good size. All of that is root system stuff. The better that root system gets going, the bigger these things grow. This tree has probably been trimmed once already a little bit. Now, this particular tool is what we used to trim all the trees with all the time. It's called a shearing knife. It's like a little thin machete. And every grower that ever started in a business is what they started with. But most of them have advanced to other tools. The shearing knife, it's windy today, so this isn't a particularly good. The shearing knife works like this. By the way, I should have a shin guard on. Now, what this ends up doing is keeping that shape so it doesn't get too fat. And it helps to fill in whatever holes are there. And then usually you have to trim the top back a little bit. This one really doesn't need it, but you could. That's what I use this for. Now, most growers don't use the shearing knife because they've ruined their shoulders. But on a little tree like this, it's not too bad. When you get a big tree and you're reaching up and you're doing this thousands and thousands of time and you're trying to get through that greenery with this knife, you're going to ruin your shoulder. So I use this one a lot. See, this is lightweight stuff. You can even use this on larger ones, which I do. And a lot of growers use this one for touch-up right before they're ready to sell it, which I've been doing the last two, three weeks. Just a little touch-up, anything sticking way out that you don't like, you just kind of touch it up. Or you prune it off with the hand, with the tools. What did I do with those? There they are. All right, that's the number. That's the second one. The third trimmer, a lot of growers use a hedge trimmer like this. And this generally is for larger trees. It's heavier, but it's for larger trees and it's faster than that rotary head. That is what a Christmas tree farmer does a lot of throughout the year. Yeah, we touched on it. The other major task is that the trees have to be fertilized. That's also two, three, four times a year, depending on the tree. If it's real big tall ones, sometimes twice as climate. If it's little ones, you want to feed them constantly. So Christmas tree farmers, or maybe different than other crops, is a constant feeding. And it's a good idea to soil test once a year all over the farm to find out what you need for fertilizer. That is a major task, fertilizing these trees. The fertilizer is done around the drip line of the tree. I try not to fertilize this grass out here because I don't want it to grow any faster than it's already growing. Generally, if you herbicide here, that fertilizer is going to go right down to those tree roots. And that's why we like to kind of keep them clean right underneath the trees. All of the trees we're going to plant in a month or two from now. We grow all of them, we keep them here. And that's our potting mix. So in February, I get the little bitty ones and we take them and we plant them in here. And then we bring them over here and we take care of them for nine, 10, 11 months. This is a lot of work, but then you get a good product like this tree. Then we take this out in December or late December, January, and we plant it in the ground or we put it in a larger container. Speaking of larger container, for a containerized Christmas tree, we use an expensive injection molded pot. We chose this pot. This used to be the pot for pot and pot. So you'd add the other tree and another 15 gallon pot and it would go inside this pot. And then the whole thing would go into the ground. So we decided to get rid of the second pot because it wasn't necessary. So we plant right in this one. This is a good pot for what the customers did want it as a Christmas tree because it's nice and hard and flat on the bottom. All they have to do is put a saucer or a tub underneath it and then water it regularly, which a lot of them failed to do, but you got to water it regularly. And then when they're ready to take it out of the house and undecorate it and plant it there y'all. It's a chore planting them, but some of them, they come back to repeat customers. Once they get a tree that they had as a Christmas tree growing in their yard, it's a real good repeat that they'll come back and get another one the next year. And we put it over here. And that's, we put them over here for two, three, four months and hold them until we're ready to put them out in the ground. And they've been growing and we stake them, most of them make sure they're straight. And that is a chore getting those from there into the ground. Let's go to where we go into the ground. This is a Murray cypress that's been in this container for a year and a half. So it went from that size to this size and just a year and a half. So now we can just lift this tree right out of the ground and take it up to where we sell them. And this is a little bit different than most nurseries. Most nurseries would grow these real close together. They would jam these trees together and it's hard to get a Christmas tree when you jam them together like that. You got to spread them out so that they fill in. So that's one of the differences. And the other difference would be the pot in the ground deal. We've got four or five different varieties of trees. This is a Murray cypress. We grow Leland cypress. We grow Carolina sapphires, which is an Arizona cypress cultivar. And that's becoming fairly popular, it's blue shaded. We grow some green giant arborvita and we grow a juniper, which is more of a landscape tree because it's narrow or at least when it's young, it's narrow. So we basically have one or two other little varieties that we're experimenting with. So I always try to look for something new and better that'll sell and then fund it grow. But the extension ends up doing, and what's really valuable is when we end up with problems. We can kind of function day to day like we've been doing until all of a sudden, what's this insect eating up my tree? Or why are these seedlings dying? I planted them, I planted them the same way I planted them every year, well, what's happening here? That's when you have to bring in the specialist. And yes, they help us tremendously. And we're always running experiments like Dr. Pickens has got his herbicide experiment over here with all the tags all over the ground. And it was valuable to see the difference between the different herbicides and which ones were more effective than other. And those are the kinds of things that are a great deal of benefit to us.