Growing Christmas tree farm is bucking the trend

Sandhill Tree Farm in the Town of Grafton is bucking a steady, statewide decline in Christmas tree farms, owners Jaclyn and Dave Ness said this week.

Rising labor, fertilizer and fuel costs have priced many growers out of the industry, while expanding suburbs have gobbled up the large swaths of land required for tree farms, pushing them farther from major cities. Wisconsin now has only 370 growers, according to industry sources.

But Sandhill, the largest of the two tree farms in the county, is expanding.

Since taking over Sandhill five years ago, Jaclyn and Dave said they’ve planted 12,000 trees to eventually increase their annual harvest from 300 to 400 trees to 1,000. Including pre-cut trees brought from central Wisconsin, they currently sell about 1,500 to 1,800 a year.

“You don’t hear of people starting in the industry. We are kind of an anomaly,” Jaclyn said, adding that since they started their business two other area growers have shut down.

Sandhill’s growth, they said, is supported by a wide customer base.

Families come for an authentic Christmas experience. Younger people come because of nostalgia and environmental concerns about artificial trees.

Sandhill draws plenty of people from the surrounding community, but its location also means it gets plenty of traffic from the Milwaukee area.

“Being close to the city, people can come here and do it in one day. They don’t have to drive up north,” Dave said.

Jaclyn said she thinks Christmas trees are making a resurgence nationally, driven by a focus on having experiences and a cultural memory derived partially from media of childhood days hauling the family Christmas tree through the snow.

“As a kid, I don’t remember a year we didn’t have snow at Christmas,” Dave said.

Jaclyn said they try to create memories by providing more than just acres of trees.

“What we offer is the holistic family experience. There is plenty of space to have the kids run around; we have photo opportunities,” Dave said. “We always love to see the families come back with sawdust on their faces.”

After families bring their tree back to the barn, it is netted and loaded by staff members, Dave said, while customers can warm up in their renovated event barn and gift shop.

“While you are enjoying a cocoa and walking around, your tree will get ready to go,” he said.

Maintaining the farm is labor intensive. The trees need to be sheared and fertilized and the lawn frequently mowed. The biggest battle is pulling and killing weeds that can stunt tree growth.

“There’s a lot that goes into it that would surprise people,” Jaclyn said.

They have seasonal employees for both the planting and harvesting season and get lots of help from family and friends. Many employees are local college kids and students at Grafton High School.

Dave said the job is so unique, outdoorsy and rewarding that by purely by word of mouth they have gotten plenty of employees.

“We actually have to turn people away,” he said.

Tree farms require sandy loam soil — which is what Sandhill is named after, not the crane, since it runs along the Milwaukee River — instead of the clay soil present across much of the area. Only a few hundred yards from the river, Dave said, the soil has too much clay for fir tree farming.

But the real tough part, Dave said, is owning enough land in the first place. Thirty-five of the 76-acre Sandhill property is dedicated to growing trees.

It becomes tough to justify operating the small business of a Christmas tree farm in the face of the big money of residential development, Dave said.

If they hadn’t purchased Sandhill, which is wedged between the growing villages of Grafton and Saukville, the land would have likely been developed, he said.

The couple said they are happy to preserve the natural beauty of the property.

“We have a love-hate relationship with the deer,” Jaclyn said. They are nice to look at but often rub against trees until they are bare. They said they’ve learned to leave the mangled trees up, as the deer will come back to them instead of others.

“But they were here before us,” Jaclyn said. “We like to coexist with the nature here. We have coyotes, foxes — lots of sandhill cranes.”

Sandhill plants its trees as saplings at three or four years old. They then require four or five more years to hit the ideal height of seven to nine feet. The saplings come from central Wisconsin farms.

It’s a symbiotic relationship, Dave said. The farms in the middle of the state have the acreage to grow the trees but not the customer base to sell them to.

“There’s no way they could ever sell that many trees,” he said.

While the couple is expanding the number of trees planted at Sandhill, they also receive a good number of pre-cut trees from other farms as well.

They have to predict the number of trees that will be purchased each year. By the middle of their last day of sales on Sunday, they were almost out.

Farms in Mequon and Cedarburg use the leftover pre-cut trees for cattle food.

“They never go to waste,” Jaclyn said.

The couple has worked to have all trees grown on the property. Their first year, they planted 4,500 trees and they plan to plant 1,500 to 2,000 a year going forward.

“We are getting close to filling up the fields,” Dave said.

The busiest tree-buying weekend is by far the weekend after Thanksgiving, Dave said, with many sales the following weekend as well.

Sandhill is open only on the weekends, which Dave said tends to work for customers.

“That is when families can find time to come out together,” he said. The early mornings see a rush of customers as young families come before nap time.

Sandhill opens the week before Thanksgiving — that weekend is primarily for training new employees — and closes the week before Christmas.

Taller trees have become more popular as homes have gotten larger and open-concept plans offer more living room space, Jaclyn said. Sometimes send some of their employees to help raise the trees at the houses since they are so big.

“We try to make sure we have trees for everyone,” she said, including small trees for people in apartments and older people in smaller homes.

They interplant the trees — planting a new tree in the space of a recently chopped down one — which helps create diversity in size and character.

The couple purchased Sandhill in November of 2020. During that holiday season, lots of people told them they should renovate the barn, which was in poor condition and filled with hay, for use as an event space.

“We said, maybe,” Dave said.

Since then, they have completely renovated the building. They installed new wood beams in the basement, as well as bathrooms and an elevator. In the barn itself, they installed a fire safety system, refurbished the wood and framing and installed a concrete patio overlooking the tree fields.

Their event-hosting business complements the tree business, turning Sandhill into a near year-round operation. This last summer, they had a wedding every weekend.

“We did slow, purposeful growth,” Jaclyn said. “I don’t know if we quite knew where it would go. We loved the property and we wanted it to stay as a farm.”

Jaclyn and Dave have three children and both have full-time jobs. The goal, Jaclyn said, is to eventually have a full-time employee to organize the event schedule and farm operations.

Jaclyn said the best part of running a Christmas tree farm in the winter and a wedding and event space in spring and summer is that everyone they see is happy to be there.

“There’s enough emotional toil in the world. If people can come out here and forget about it for a little that is great,” she said.

Sandhill donates the annual Grafton Chamber of Commerce Christmas tree and the Milwaukee County tree.