BELLVILLE — For Kevin and Debbie Kleer, growing Christmas trees is not an environmental duty, it’s life.
Kleerview Farms, owned and operated by a husband and wife team in Bellville’s outskirts, is home to thousands of conifers, 65 head of cattle and seven reindeers. Debbie said the 230-acre farm, 18 of which are cultivated for Christmas trees, is a perfect concoction for the start of a family Christmas tradition.
The couple reads the same stories in the news every year: artificial trees withstand the sands of time. Real Christmas trees, comparatively, are better for the environment.
The stories are not wrong. According to the National Christmas Tree Association, each acre of soil that is currently cultivating a Christmas tree provides enough oxygen for 18 people. There are roughly one million acres of Christmas tree farms in the United States.
According to this video by Attn:, artificial trees are 20 times worse for the environment than real trees, primarily because of the energy expelled when producing them.
But the stories are preaching to the choir. What’s more important, Debbie said, is the experience.
“Get your kids started with the real experience. That’s Christmas,” she said. “What experience is that for a kid to watch you put together branches on an artificial tree? It doesn’t get them out to the field — they don’t get to see nature … you went to a store, you take it out of a box and you put it together and you put, you know, your decorations on it. But I’m biased.”
Her bias could be understood as advertising for the farm to attract more customers. However, this conclusion would be misplaced. The Christmas tree business is booming and on the Kleers’ farm, they can’t keep up with it.
“The trend is going to young families who are bringing their kids. And we have people … there’s an 80-year-old and he still comes and gets a live tree every year,” Debbie said.
The trend is keeping the couple busy, who beefs up a crew of over 10 bodies to keep up with the trees that sell on a daily basis during the holiday season. The farm still had a dozen trees sell during their business’s four-window on Tuesday, whilst rain poured.
Kevin said he can’t keep up with the trend; the business is expanding too fast.
“We just run out of trees every year here. And I’m always hesitant to keep expanding, I don’t want to get caught with a bunch of trees, but that’s never been the case. The business keeps growing, too fast. In a way it’s good, but to me it’s stressful because I want something for everyone when they show up to buy, and we just can’t help everybody,” Kevin said.
The business has been growing each year since they started planting conifer seedlings on the farm’s 1-acre hillside in 1981. Before that, the couple farmed cows almost exclusively and it was getting tougher to herd the cattle on the hillside. As farmers, they wanted to diversify to supplement the costs of running a farm.
They started with strawberries. But as a self-proclaimed tree-hugger, Kevin said he couldn’t stand the amount of chemicals needed to keep the delectable red berries, well … delectable. It didn’t take long for him to find the solution: Christmas trees.
“I thought, ‘let’s do it.’ I like to plant trees, I was doing it anyway off in the farm, planting trees,” Kevin remembered. During its first year, he said he and his grandfather planted seedlings on the small hillside and watered them by hand from empty coffee cans.
“It just kind of went from there, down to here, down to here, out to there, out to there, up to there — we just kept — and we’re still expanding,” he said as he pointed in various directions around the farm.
The Kleers harvested 2,500 trees in 2015. They then replanted 3,000 seedlings, tallying in at an approximate total of 20,700 trees, which includes an assortment of five different species. Sometimes they will have a couple different options, like Douglas and Concolor Firs, which are famous for emitting a citrus aroma.
The trees range in price, starting at $26 on up to $65, depending on the height.
The Kleers do not currently provide a tree recycling program.
“We did once and they would be returned with tinsel still hanging,” she said, adding that townships, villages and cities usually have a curbside program. Check out this Richland Source story from 2015 for Christmas tree recycling options.
