READ & WATCH: Interview: Climate change impacting Christmas trees, Dec 17- These evergreens lived 385 million years, but irregular weather and heat-driven disease will mean shortages in the holiday tree market in coming years, transcript follows-[NewsChannel 9 WSYR Syracuse]
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story held over to not spoil the holiday
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TRANSCRIPT
You probably won't notice it this holiday season, but climate change is seriously impacting Christmas trees and some of the top national producers of these familiar firs. Cornell professor Trent Pressler has just written a book on the history, but also the future of these trees. And Trent joins us now. Good to see you. Thanks for being here, Trent. >> Hey, thanks for having me. >> Let's put it into perspective to just how resilient evergreens have been over the course of, I don't know, let's say millions and millions of years. >>
Oh, sure, they’re some of the most resilient organisms on Earth, and the ancestors of our modern Christmas trees were these top heavy Christmas trees called archaeopteris. They lived about 385 million years ago. They dominated the Earth's surface during the time of the dinosaurs, and they evolved to survive volcanic winters and ice ages and glaciers and infernos. They're incredibly resilient. They can grow in extreme hot, extreme cold climates on the side of a rock cliff face. >>
And fast forward. Yeah, fast forward to today. Now we're seeing climate change starting to have an impact on these evergreens, which seem to have been resilient to just about everything over the history of the planet. >>
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We are we're seeing really dramatic changes, especially at the farm gate level. So with small Christmas tree growers, both in the Pacific Northwest and here in New York State, as well, there were a couple of heat domes and long extended periods of drought, especially in the Pacific Northwest that killed millions of seedlings. >> So it may not necessarily be obvious, obviously noticeable now, I guess. When could we really start to see the impact of climate change on the evergreens? And really, you know, the Christmas trees. >> So the remarkable thing about it is that these trees are grown on farms, and they take 8 to 10 years to mature. So the heat dome that happened a couple of years ago, we won't really see that impact in the marketplace until maybe another six years, when those trees that died would have been old enough to cut down to to sell as a real Christmas tree.
But a lot of these changes are happening on a time scale that the trees can't really adapt to. And so we're having extended periods of heat and drought in the summer. We're also having milder winters. And so a lot of the disease organisms that would normally maybe be kept in check over a really cold winter, organisms like a pine bark beetle or a fungus. In a mild winter, they survive in greater numbers. And then they emerge in the spring more able to attack the Christmas trees. And their defenses are not as able to withstand. >>
All right, I gotcha. So are we starting to see an impact, then, on prices already, or will we see that when the supply gets really impacted by a lack of these Firs in the market? >>
So that's an interesting question because no, we haven't seen a spike in prices. And for the most part, Christmas tree farmers are price takers, which means that they don't really have that much control over their price. The price for real Christmas trees is determined largely by the major big box retailers. Places like Home Depot and Lowe's that sell the most amount of Christmas trees, and these farmers, because they're not able to capture more revenue. And they have a restricted supply because more of their trees died when they were young. They're seeing a shrinking revenue base as well. >> Is there anything that growers can do at this point to try to keep up? Do you try to plant a different kind of fir? That's a little, I'm going to say, more resilient, but how much more resilient can they be? But what do you do if you're a grower. >>
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So I recently spoke to a grower just north of Ithaca who had been growing Douglas fir trees for 40 years. In fact, he named his son Douglas and and their last name is Fernandez. So his son, Douglas Fernandez. >> Okay, there you go. >> But so for 40 years, he could grow the Douglas firs. But they have become weakened by this fungal pathogen called needle cast disease. And now, basically, he can't grow firs anymore. So you can switch to different varieties. You know, you could spray, you could irrigate. But most of these trees are grown in farms that don't necessarily have irrigation. And the farms are already stretched so tight with their profit margins that they can't really afford to to use a lot more import, sort of pesticides or fertilizers or irrigation. >> Interesting. Well, I appreciate you sharing. It's even if there's a perfect solution right now, I think it's, you know, worthy of all of us kind of knowing and learning that this is this happening. They're kind of on the front lines there. So I appreciate you joining us. I think we'll have to check back in with you again,
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