Anisa Khalifa: Like tens of millions of Americans, Broadside editor Jerad Walker gets a fresh cut Christmas tree every year. He always buys his on the day after Thanksgiving.
Jerad Walker: I — I like this one. Yeah, I think this is the one. How much do we owe you?
Unidentified Man: It’s gonna be $90.
Jerad Walker: Do you take cards?
Unidentified Man: Yes, we do.
Jerad Walker: Ok. Wonderful.
Anisa Khalifa:: But this holiday season, something is threatening to put a damper on all that cheer — and the $100 million dollar industry associated with it.
I’m Anisa Khalifa. This is The Broadside, where we tell stories from our home in North Carolina at the crossroads of the South. This week, the disease that could wipe out America’s favorite Christmas tree and the science that’s trying to save it.
Unidentified Man: So you’re in radio? Where at?
Jerad Walker: North Carolina Public Radio.
Unidentified Man: NPR. I used to have a paper route years and years ago and I would listen to NPR all the time.
Jerad Walker: Thank y’all. Merry Christmas!
Anisa Khalifa: Hi, thanks so much for joining me.
Steve Riley: I'm glad to be here. Thank you.
Anisa Khalifa: Please introduce yourself, who you are and what you do.
Steve Riley: Well, I'm Steve Riley and I'm retired, but for 41 years I was a journalist in Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas.
Anisa Khalifa: Steve now lives near Black Mountain in western North Carolina. And he still occasionally works as a freelancer whenever he finds a story that interests him — like one he recently wrote for the Assembly about a subject that’s close to his heart.
What do you love about Christmas trees?
Steve Riley: Well, what's not to love? They smell great. They fill up your room with aroma and lights and, you know, the time of the year that everybody seems to love regardless of their background and belief. And I'm always in an argument with my wife about getting a bigger and bigger tree. I want the bigger tree. She wants the smaller tree and, and, but we always are in agreement. We want a live tree and being from, you know, 35 years. We've come to favor the Fraser fir.
Anisa Khalifa: Tell me about a North Carolina Christmas tree. What is special about the trees, the Christmas trees that we grow in North Carolina?
Steve Riley: So the Fraser fir is native to North Carolina. It only grows naturally above 5, 000 feet. The Fraser fir is by far America's favorite tree. And the growers here ship them all over the country. And they sell, the numbers say, more than three million of them a year, at least two million of those get shipped out of the state. And of course they're grown on these wonderful family owned farms, small, medium, and large, all over the northwest corridor of North Carolina along the borders with Virginia and Tennessee.
Anisa Khalifa: How does North Carolina's Christmas tree industry compare to that in other states?
Steve Riley: Well, it's really interesting. Um, In all factors, we rank second behind Oregon in both numbers of trees cut, amount of money from trees brought in. There's a lot of leakage, shall we say, in the numbers. Most folks think that the industry here is at least as big as Oregon's. Although you can't, there's no way to prove that.
Anisa Khalifa: North Carolina trees also have another claim to fame, right? What is that?
Steve Riley: They do. They end up in the White House quite often. Every year, the National Christmas Tree Association sponsors a contest to see whose farm is going to be picked to provide the White House Christmas tree for the Blue Room. And they've been doing this for 30, 40 years, and North Carolina Fraser firs have been picked 16 times.
Anisa Khalifa: Wow.
Steve Riley: Including the last two years. And this year, the tree is coming from Cartner Farms in Avery County, and it's a, it's a point of pride. And if you, if you go as I did to the summer meeting of the North Carolina Christmas Tree Association, that's where they start the process of the contest. So in the middle of August, there were ten trees lined up in a hall there, and that's where they were picking North Carolina's representative for that contest for the next two years.
Anisa Khalifa: It's like a, like a beauty pageant for trees.
Steve Riley: That's right. And so they'll get a couple of winners from that and they'll advance to the next round and then they'll compete against growers from other states and eventually some farm gets picked and then, and we can get into as much detail about this as you want, but at some point once the farm is picked, the White House head groundskeeper, a North Carolina native named Dale Haney.
Anisa Khalifa: Amazing. The White House head groundskeeper is from North Carolina.
Steve Riley: Yeah. And he, he will come down and he will actually pick the tree they're looking for. And it has to be 19 to 20 feet. It has to be no more than 12 feet around, wide, so it fits in the Blue Room. But they're looking for a bit of a unicorn because not many trees get left to grow that big. Most of them get cut and sold when they're six, seven, eight, nine feet tall, right, depending on consumer wishes. But some growers let a few grow big, I think in hopes that, well, both they can supply places like picture Biltmore House, for example, places that need big trees, and in hopes of getting picked to send the tree to the White House.
Anisa Khalifa: In hopes of winning the Christmas tree beauty pageant.
Steve Riley: That's right.
Unidentified Anchor: …The Cartner Christmas Tree Farm, the brothers up there providing the White House Christmas tree this year.
Cartner Brother: I wanted to represent the people of western North Carolina that have just endured the worst natural disaster in our history, and we wanted to represent the outpouring of love and generosity from people all over the United States. I think it's a symbol of what's good in humanity.
Anisa Khalifa: So you actually visited Cartner Farms.
Steve Riley: I did. I did.
Anisa Khalifa: What was that experience like?
Steve Riley: So the Cartner family has been growing trees in Avery County in Newland since 1959. And they now operate on six separate plots of land, six separate farms that total about 350 acres.
This farm's been operating since, is it 1959, is that right?
Sam Cartner: Yeah. Dad was a strong proponent of small family farms.
Steve Riley: You know, it's as picturesque as you might envision it. Uh, they're at, say, 4, 000 feet, and the main farm that we visited, which is where they pull most of their wholesale trees from, and where they will cut the White House tree, is at about 4,500 feet, I believe. And when you go out there, you know, it's just this stunning scenery everywhere. And as you look down and all around you, there are these just rows and rows and rows of Frasier firs.
Sam Cartner: Well the most common size we sell is the sevens to eights. The next most common…
Steve Riley: Just seeing the different stages of trees, seeing the different equipment that they use to to maintain the trees, to to trim them to. It's a constant. It's a 10 year job. I mean, from, from having a seed and growing a seedling for a couple of years, putting it in the ground. And then if you want an eight year, an eight foot tree, another eight years for it to grow. That 20 foot tree that's going to the White House, Sam Cartner tells me, is 25 years old.
Anisa Khalifa: Wow.
Steve Riley: So it's a very long process. They had workers there when we were there in September, trimming the trees. Checking on the new growth, grimacing when they saw damage from deer or insects, um, or of course Phytophthora. Um, you'd see rows and rows of perfect green trees and then there would be two or three or four that would just turn to orange, deep orange.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah, so these famous, highly prized, beautiful firs that you saw are in danger. What did Sam Cartner tell you about that?
Steve Riley: Sam Cartner would say that for six years, they'll have trees growing beautifully, everything looks great, and then bam, almost overnight, one will turn orange. There's a root rot called Phytophthora. It literally, in Latin, means plant destroyer, and it doesn't just affect Fraser firs. It affects all types of trees and other plants, but it is particularly hard on Fraser firs. So Phytophthora has made its way to North Carolina.
Anisa Khalifa: And is that increase in Phytophthora because of climate change?
Steve Riley: It thrives more in warmer climates. Dryer and then extremely wet circumstances people listen to that sentence and go, wait a minute. It can't be dry and wet. Well, it can. It can be dry for months and then it can rain like crazy. Just take this fall for example with the hurricane. Those are ideal growing conditions for phytophthora
Anisa Khalifa: So what's sort of the potential fallout for the Christmas tree industry? What's sort of the worst case scenario?
Steve Riley: That in, mm five, six, seven years, many more trees are dying, fewer trees are getting to market, that they haven't solved the Phytophthora problem, and it's a lot harder to find a Fraser fir. And it takes 10 years from seed to an eight foot tree. It's not like a potato or tomato.
You have a bad year, you, you dust off and go back to work. If you miss it in a given year, you're not going to have those eight foot trees in eight years from now. You might have seven foot trees, you might have nine foot trees, but if that happens over and over, suddenly you're in trouble.
Anisa Khalifa: Make no mistake. This is a serious problem. But some very smart people are working on a solution. Coming up after a break, Steve introduces us to the man who is trying to save the Christmas tree. It’s not Santa Claus.
When Steve Riley started to research the fungus-like root rot threatening the Fraser fir, he knew exactly where to start…
Steve Riley: I did what, All great reporters do. I just went to Google and said Christmas tree expert, North Carolina.
Anisa Khalifa: Don't give away our secrets now, Steve.
Steve Riley: And, and Justin Whitehill's name popped up.
Anisa Khalifa: Justin Whitehill works at North Carolina State University, which has one of the top forestry programs in the country. Steve had a lot of questions about tree science for Justin and his colleagues…
Steve Riley: It's, it's really scary, by the way, if you do a story and you talk to more than three PhDs, which I have done on this story, and it's, it's intimidating and it's nerve wracking to try to make sure that you're putting it back in print in English that people can understand without messing up the science, right?
Anisa Khalifa: Lucky for Steve, NC State’s research teams have a special focus on the Fraser fir.
Steve Riley: I mean, you can find an expert, and I have, on about every aspect of growing Christmas trees, on the ways to fight insects, on the ways to grow them more quickly, on the ways to make them retain their needles better. They even have a small grant, they call it a proof of concept grant, to work on producing a bioluminescent Fraser fir. Uh, yes. And you, that's what you think it is. It's a tree that glows on its own.
Anisa Khalifa: So you don't need Christmas lights?
Steve Riley: No. They already have petunias like that, you know. So is it a long shot? Is it a long way off? Is it a shot in the dark? All the answers to all that are yes, of course. But they are tinkering in a lot of different ways to try to help this important industry to the section of the state. not only survive but thrive.
Anisa Khalifa: And right now, solving the root rot problem is at the forefront of that mission. That’s where Justin Whitehill’s expertise comes in.
Steve Riley: He's 41 years old, uh, a geneticist and a plant pathologist, and he's now found himself in charge of saving the Christmas tree industry.
Justin Whitehill: Yeah, times have changed, I would say. I mean, even in the last, I don't know, 10, 15 years. I mean, Phytophthora has always been around, but, um, it's become a bigger problem as has climate change as have insect pests.
So the shift of the program now is to really introduce genetic management tools to the growers, uh, so they don't have to spend money on labor, on pesticide use or things that, you know, consumers don't want pesticides. So if we can just give them a tree that's naturally resilient to these problems, it's a much better solution for them and cheaper.
Anisa Khalifa: And so what are they doing specifically to fight the spread of root rot?
Steve Riley: In the lab, they are using DNA from other fir trees that have more resilience against phytophthora to tinker with the seeds. What they want to build is a tree that has the resistance from other firs, but maintains the appearance and the needle retention and the smell of the Fraser fir. It would be this superhuman — that's the wrong way to refer to a tree, but this super tree, um, that would look like a Fraser fir, but down below it would be much stronger and more resilient and would be able to withstand phytophthora much better.
Anisa Khalifa: And how much money is being invested in this research?
Steve Riley: Well, the state lab has been, of course, working for decades. Justin Whitehill's team recently got a seven and a half million dollar grant from the U. S. Department of Agriculture. And that grant, over four years, is going to be all about the processes that I just described. His lab is on the Centennial Campus at NC State, and he is now staffing up because of that grant. Uh, now 20 people in that lab working on the genetics of the seeds that they think they can engineer to, to make the tree more resilient.
Anisa Khalifa: Are they seeing positive results yet?
Steve Riley: It's hit or miss, and it's years away.
Anisa Khalifa: But is it going to be in time? Because you were talking about how, you know, you need 10 years to grow a tree, roughly.
Steve Riley: Well, you know, these guys are optimists, both the growers and the scientists. And they say they're gonna help, that it's going to help, that in 10 years there'll be more Fraser firs than there are today.
But if you do that, from that moment, how long is it before we see those trees at market?
Justin Whitehill: Your grandchildren will enjoy them. I'm sure when they're adults. Um, no, I, I, if we were to say today, put a tree out, and it would take two to three years in the greenhouse, and then another five to ten years. Eight years in the field. So, um, 10 to 12 years before it would be in someone's living room I would say, what do you think?
Unidentified Scientist: that's probably accurate.
Justin Whitehill: That's on a good day too.
Steve Riley: But that depends on getting the right mix of seed, it depends on getting them out to growers at the right times, it depends on a lot of other factors that, uh, nobody can see now. I mean, it's a tough business.
Anisa Khalifa: What does the future of the Fraser fir look like?
Steve Riley: I mean, I think most people who work in the industry, as I said, are optimists, they're can do people. They think they're going to find ways to get this done. I do think that there are going to be some difficulties ahead, particularly for growers at lower altitudes. The ones who are growing at 3,000 feet are going to have more and more trouble more quickly because of climate change and phytophthora. The growers at higher levels are going to do a little better for a little longer. But there really is a big reliance on the science, the work that's going on now in those labs.
You know, a grower in Ashe County, Joe Freeman, who's very tied in to Justin Whitehill's team's research. I asked him in August, I said, you know, how important is this research? And he said, look, on a scale of one to 10, it's 11. He said, there are places on my farm now that I cannot replant Fraser firs, and it's four or five times as hard in the other places to get them to grow. And we need a more resilient version of Fraser fir.
Anisa Khalifa: All right, last question, Steve. When are you going to get your Christmas tree this year?
Steve Riley: You know, we usually go the Saturday after Thanksgiving. That's a really busy time. So being retired, we can go almost any time. Maybe a few days after that, we'll go back to Avery County, I think — it's been hit so hard, particularly by the floods — and try to support growers there.
Anisa Khalifa: Mm hmm.
Steve Riley: And my wife and I will continue to argue about the size of the tree, but I'm going to win this year.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah, report back to us and let us know how tall your tree ends up being. Thank you so much, Steve. This was really delightful.
Steve Riley: I enjoyed it. Thank you.
Anisa Khalifa: And we’ve got an update — Steve Riley is the proud new owner of a TEN FOOT TALL Fraser fir. He’s also the author of a recent article in The Assembly about the Christmas tree industry’s fight against root rot. If you want to check it out, we’ve linked to the story in this week’s show notes.
This episode of The Broadside was produced by me, Anisa Khalifa, and our editor Jerad Walker. Wilson Sayre is our executive producer. Special thanks this week goes out to Kate Sheppard from The Assembly. The Broadside is a production of WUNC–North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR network. You can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend! Thanks for listening y'all. We'll be back next week.