Courtesy River Bend Christmas Tree Farm
By Paul Post
A family-run Warren County firm has parlayed robust Christmas tree sales into a booming maple products business.
River Bend Christmas Tree Farm in Lake Luzerne provides fresh-cut trees to nearly 1,000 customers each year.
But starting in late winter, 78-year-old Bruce Carpenter and his wife, Rosann, spend several weeks producing maple syrup on land they own in Minerva.
Their son, Jim, 43, puts his RPI business degree to good use by marketing trees and maple with a variety of social media platforms.
“Trees are a higher ticket item, but maple because it’s consumable can be sold year round,” Jim said. “During COVID we had a lot of syrup and not a lot of places to sell it so we trademarked the name, Saratoga Maple, and built a mail-order business where we ship gifts all over the country.”
In addition to traditional syrup flavors, the Carpenters age maple in a bourbon barrel to make bourbon maple syrup and a bourbon maple cream. They also make a maple walnut topping, maple jelly, hard and soft candy and a gourmet pancake mix that comes in a breakfast gift basket with bags of mix and Adirondack maple syrup.
Recent holiday sales were up 30 percent year over year.
“We set another record,” Jim said. “On Christmas Day there were still people ordering maple gift baskets and products. This holiday we shipped to Germany, Great Britain, Hawaii, Alaska and hit most of the other states. It was really an exceptional year.”
“The response to that business is humungous,” he said. “It just keeps growing. We’ve had calls from everywhere.”
New doors have recently opened at independently-owned ShopRite supermarkets in and around Philadelphia.
“They were looking for a maple walnut product, came across ours and want to carry it,” Jim said. “It’s wet walnuts and syrup used as a sundae topping. Now they want to add other products and create a maple section. The person I dealt with talked to other independent store owners in the Philadelphia area and they’re interested in getting in on it, too. So we expect to be in a number of ShopRites this year.”
The maple season keeps getting under way earlier and earlier, in large part due to global warming trends.
“We used to go the first of March,” Bruce said. “Now you want to be ready by the first of February.”
With increased technology, the Carpenters hope to get more yield from the trees they tap. A vacuum system, for example, draws out more sap.
“Plus we might add more taps and lines and use an internet monitoring system so we know when sap is flowing,” Jim said. “One of the challenges is that our sugarbush, in Minerva, is so far from the farm here in Luzerne.”
River Bend is just one of many Christmas tree farms in the surrounding area.
Saratoga County alone is home to Buell’s Trees (Gansevoort), Candy Cane Farm (Moreau), Bob’s Trees (Galway), Fogg Hollow Farm (Charlton) the Patricia Lawrence farm (Rexford) and Ellms Family Farm in Ballston Spa.
“We had a good season,” co-owner Garth Ellms said. “We set records the first weekend after Thanksgiving. It came out of the gates swinging.”
Tree sales account for about 40 percent of the farm’s diverse revenue stream. Ellms is one of the region’s most popular autumn “agri-tainment” destinations with everything from pumpkin sales to a variety of children’s games and attractions such as mechanical singing chickens and a moo-moo train.
Tree farms and apple orchards provide a good outlet for many types of locally-produced food products.
“During the fall we sell local honey and maple syrup,” Ellms said. “People just want to take a piece of the local community home with them. The honey we sell is from a man who handles hives on our property. Maple comes from Hop City Maple, about a mile down the road.”
In response to growing Christmas tree demand, the Ellms recently purchased a nearby 72-acre field. Part of it will be used to plant seedlings, which they purchase from suppliers in Pennsylvania and Michigan. The rest will be leased to a local farmer, ensuring that the land stays in agricultural production.
“We usually plant between 2000 and 5000 trees per year,” Ellms said. “Now we’re planting 14,000.”
During COVID, many farms harvested more Christmas trees than normal, in part because there was a large influx of new customers seeking any kind of outdoor, family activity they could find. In addition, COVID impacted farms financially so they made up for it by selling more trees, which reduced supplies in subsequent years.
“We were always open four weeks before COVID,” Ellms said. “It’s been three weeks the past few years because we didn’t have enough trees. But we’re coming back from that. What we have in the fields now is good.”
Seedlings are 12-18 inches tall when planted and trees grow approximately one foot per year, so it takes about eight years before trees are ready to harvest.
Fields will be prepped for planting in spring, but tending to trees is an ongoing process that involves mowing to keep weeds down, and trimming to make sure each tree is well shaped.
“It’s non-stop I guess,” Ellms said.
Mary Jean Packer and partner Dave Campbell operate Mapleland Farms in Salem, Washington County.
“Everybody says you must be so busy in March and April. That’s when guys who work in the woods are tapping and gathering sap, boiling and bottling syrup,” she said. “But autumn and Christmas are extremely busy. It started in September with apple orchards, corn mazes and garden centers all doing fall ‘agri-tainment’ events. They all want maple products in their gift shops. Then we barely catch our breath and we’re shipping maple candies shaped like Santa Claus.”
“The direct-to-consumer aspect of Christmas trees, sheep farms selling yarns or maple syrup farms selling maple syrup is not to be underestimated when it comes to the economic impact of agriculture in our region,” Packer