Christmas Tree Farm Calculator

Cost per Tree represents the per-tree maintenance and shearing expense accumulated over the Rotation Period, which is the same whether that tree is one of a thousand on a small farm or one of a hundred thousand on a large one -- Farm Acreage instead scales Total Trees Planted and Annual Harvest, not the per-tree cost.

Cost per Tree adds $0.75 for every additional year in the Rotation Period on top of a $5 baseline, reflecting that a tree grown for 10 years needs more years of mowing, shearing, and pest management than one grown for 5 -- longer rotations produce larger, more mature trees but at a higher accumulated per-tree cost.

Survival Rate reduces Total Trees Planted down to the count that actually reaches harvestable size before Annual Harvest divides that surviving count by Rotation Period, so a lower survival rate (more losses to disease, weather, or deer damage) directly lowers Annual Harvest and everything calculated from it, including Annual Revenue and Net Profit per Acre.

A longer Rotation Period spreads the same total planted-and-surviving tree count across more years before each tree is ready to cut, so Annual Harvest -- the number of trees actually harvestable in a given year -- goes down as Rotation Period goes up, even though the total number of trees eventually harvested stays the same.

It doesn't factor in land acquisition or lease cost, irrigation and fertilizer expense beyond the flat per-tree maintenance figure, labor cost variation by region, replanting cost for trees lost beyond the flat Survival Rate assumption, or the real year-to-year swings in wholesale and retail Christmas tree pricing driven by regional supply.