Thanksgiving is over, which means it’s time for millions of us to go buy massive holiday decorations that force us to vacuum way more than usual Christmas trees. And while your particular area might grow pine trees just fine, as it turns out, two states dominate Christmas tree production in the US: Oregon and North Carolina.
Metric Maps
Nearly two out of three cut Christmas trees (62 percent) in 2012 were harvested in those two states, according to USDA data. Reddit user metricmapsore recently posted this map showing that the places that grow those trees are concentrated in two tiny regions of the US (click the map to see a larger version).
Source: Metric Maps
According to the USDA's Census of Agriculture, 6.4 million trees came from Oregon in 2012, followed by nearly 4.3 million in North Carolina. Those two are far and away beyond the rest of the states — Michigan comes in at 1.7 million.
So if you’re not going out to a farm or the local woods, your tree may have had quite a long journey to get to you. If you are invested in buying local for your Christmas tree, it is (somewhat) possible in many parts of the US — there are farms listed in 49 of the 50 states (Wyoming is the odd state out here) — but in some places you’ll have to look much harder to find a farm. At the lower end of the spectrum, North Dakota’s 10 farms only harvested 735 trees and Alaska’s three farms had 24, the lowest number recorded. And in New Mexico and Nevada, which only had five farms between them, the data was withheld to keep from disclosing information about individual farming operations.
Of course, what this map does not reflect is that Canada is also a big supplier of US Christmas trees. In 2013, our neighbor to the north exported 1.5 million trees to the US.
