Locally grown, pesticide-free food is gaining sway these days because it is fresh, healthy and supports area farmers. But how many of us give the same kind of thought to the Christmas trees we bring home? Can you decorate your Fraser fir without getting pesticide residue in your lungs and on your skin?
Sure, if the tree is certified organic by the Department of Agriculture. Or if it is a Certified Naturally Grown tree, which meets the same basic requirements: it was raised without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers, using sustainable methods like composting and erosion control.
Certified Naturally Grown, a national organization with 500 members from 47 states, was founded in 2002 (the same year as the Agriculture Department’s organic certification program) by small farmers looking for an alternative that didn’t require a licensing fee and complicated record-keeping. State groups like the Farmer’s Pledge, sponsored by the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, can also provide assurances that a tree has been grown sustainably.
Or if you buy your tree from a local grower, like Mike Ludgate, who manages Ludgate Farms, a natural foods and farm store on the outskirts of Ithaca, N.Y., you can simply ask how the trees were raised.
“We buy and resell our trees from one of my neighbors, who doesn’t spray,” said Mr. Ludgate, who also sells greens for wreaths and swags from trees he has grown himself for 20 years without chemicals.
But many Christmas trees — which, after all, are sold for their beauty — are sprayed with pesticides, especially those grown on the large tree plantations in Oregon, North Carolina, Michigan and Canada. How much residue is left once the trees are cut down is a matter of some dispute, as is any risk that might be associated with it.
“Many of the pesticides, particularly the organophosphates and pyrethroids, will break down in rain and UV light,” said Dr. Thomas Arcury, a professor and research director for the Department of Family and Community Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, in Winston-Salem, N.C., who is studying the effects of these chemicals on farm workers. “Some residues would probably remain, just as they remain on the food we eat. How much that is — how dangerous that is — nobody knows.”
Christmas trees are big business: more than 31 million were sold in the United States last year, for $1.3 billion, according to the National Christmas Tree Association.
Oregon, the country’s No. 1 producer, ships mostly Noble and Douglas firs; North Carolina, the second largest, specializes in the Fraser fir. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Washington State, New York and Virginia are also big producers; depending on soil and climate, they grow Scotch pine, Douglas fir, Noble fir, Fraser fir, Virginia pine, Balsam fir, white pine and blue spruce.
In each of these states there are small growers who do not spray their trees. Cut-your-own tree farms are usually less likely to use pesticides, and farmers’ markets often sell trees that have been sprayed minimally, or not at all.
Getting a tree at a city lot, a large garden center or a big box store, though, generally means buying blind. These trees are most likely shipped in from plantations where they are grown in vast monocultures subject to insects and disease.
When buying a tree at a big box store, said John Kepner, the project director at Beyond Pesticides, a nonprofit group in Washington, you “have no idea where it’s coming from, so you have to worry a little bit. A lot of stuff growers are using can’t be used in the home anymore. And you can’t wash a tree off like a tomato.”
Large growers like Cline Church, in Fleetwood, N.C., who ships about 60,000 Fraser firs a year up and down the East Coast and into the Midwest, dismiss the idea that there could be enough leftover pesticide on trees to pose a significant health risk. “As far as residue on these trees,” Mr. Church said, “there’s nothing that’s been found, to my knowledge.”
He added: “We use them according to the label, and what the E.P.A. tells us. What else have we got to go on?”
Whatever the risk, the good news is that pesticide use has been cut in half over the last 10 years, said Jill Pennington, a plant pathologist and forestry specialist at North Carolina State University, who surveyed 336 growers in western North Carolina in 2001 and 352 in 2007, and compared those figures with a 1995 survey of 294 growers in the same region by Steve Toth, a pesticide specialist at the university.
Integrated pest management, a technique increasingly used to monitor pests and to limit spraying, has reduced the use of pesticides, Dr. Pennington said, as has the cost of petroleum-based pesticides, fuel and labor, and an increased awareness of health and environmental risks.
In New York, tree farms may be smaller, but spraying is still viewed as a necessity.
Gary Couch, an integrated pest management specialist at Cornell University, surveyed 150 New York State Christmas tree growers last year. Because of needle-cast disease, “a fungus that affects new growth early in the spring,” he said, most growers still feel compelled to spray with chlorothalonil, “the only fungicide registered against that disease in New York State.” (According to Extoxnet, a pesticide information service run by five universities, including Cornell, chlorothalonil is toxic to fish.) But Mr. Couch noted that small farmers are increasingly aware of the health and environmental risks.
Thirteen years ago, Curtis Buchanan, who runs Glen Ayre Tree Farm, in Mitchell County, N.C., stopped using pesticides because he was concerned about the runoff. Mr. Buchanan, 55, now grows organic Christmas trees with his father, John, 85, on about five acres, between fallow strips of native weeds and wildflowers, where natural predators keep the pests down. This year he expects to sell about 190 trees.
After he made the change, Mr. Buchanan said, he noticed people coming back for health reasons. “Customers would say, ‘Yours is the only tree my kids can have in the house, because they’re allergic to chemicals.’ ”
Some large producers are making similar changes and marketing those efforts.
Joe Sharp, the owner of Yule Tree Farms in Aurora, Ore., which ships 600,000 trees a year, teamed up last year with Holiday Tree Farms, which ships more than a million trees a year out of Corvallis, Ore., to form the Coalition of Environmentally Conscious Growers.
The trees grown in this program must follow specific sustainable practices: planting buffer zones near wetlands and streams; keeping records of pests, diseases and pesticide application; analyzing soil and nutrient needs before fertilizing, and recording methods of weed control. The group now has four member farms and expects to sell more than two million trees this year.
So those of us looking for that perfect tree have a lot of options. And not surprisingly, despite disagreements about the use of pesticides, most growers can agree on one thing: fresh trees are preferable to fake ones. Artificial trees are “made of oil-based products, they often contain lead and they’re not recyclable,” Mr. Sharp said.
Real trees hold the soil, purify the air and can be used after Christmas, to mulch your roses.
And another thing: they are beautiful.
Organic Roots
If you are looking for a Christmas tree that has been certified as organic or chemical-free, there are several Web sites that can help you.
- Local Harvest, a national network of local products, in Santa Cruz, Calif., lists sources for Christmas trees and wreaths, both organic and conventionally grown; localharvest.org, (831) 475-8150.
- Toxic Free North Carolina, in Raleigh, N.C., lists sources for sustainably grown trees in the state, and has information about pesticides commonly used on Christmas trees; toxicfreenc.org, (919) 833-5333.
- Beyond Pesticides, a nonprofit group in Washington, provides sources for organic and naturally grown trees, as well as up-to-date information on pesticides; beyondpesticides.org, (202) 543-5450.
- Green Promise, a group in Pingree Grove, Ill., that distributes information about sustainable products, lists sources for organic trees around the country on its Web site, greenpromise.com.
- Agricultural extension offices often keep lists of local growers; consult the Department of Agriculture’s Web site, csrees.usda.gov/Extension.
- The Council on the Environment of New York City keeps a list of farmers’ markets, many of which sell Christmas trees; cenyc.org/greenmarket, (212) 788-7476.
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