Where is your Christmas tree from? 

For many, the image that comes to mind is a small family farm, one that maybe lets people come out cut down their own, or where they harvest trees from a small plot of land and sell it to families in town.

These days, that is often more myth than truth.  

The Christmas tree industry, like many agriculture industries in the U.S., has industrialize and expanded into huge businesses, planting, maintaining, cutting, and selling thousands of trees every year. To run an operation of this scale you need two key things, land and labor.

Virginia is now the 6^th largest producer of Christmas trees in the United States, behind Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Oregon, and Washington.

In 2022, Virginia cut down 578,777 Christmas trees for sale across the east coast and beyond (up from 474,902 in 2017)*usda data.

In 2022, Virginia farms sold more than $25 million dollars in cut Christmas trees.source  

Almost all those trees come from Grayson County in the far southwest corner of Virginia. And almost all these trees were produced through the labor of migrant pine workers.

Grayson County Virginia is beautiful.  

As you drive through this part of the state, you pass old farmhouses, wide rivers, small cattle farms, and abandoned barns; all surrounding Virginia’s highest peak, Mt Rogers, located in Grayson Highlands state park.  

But these days, around almost every bend, you also see patches of cleared land dotted with rows of pine trees.  

Through a combination of land purchases and lot leases throughout Grayson County and beyond, massive swaths of land are now cleared and planted replaced with hundreds of acres of pines by these industrial Christmas tree farms. 

Growing and harvesting pine trees for the holidays is a labor-intensive project, especially at this scale, and Grayson and its neighboring counties do not have the workforce to do it (not that many locals would take up this arduous and low-paying job anyhow).

From clearing land and planting, to spraying the trees with pesticides, to the final act of cutting down and packing them on trucks—as well as making wreaths and other pine tree decorations—these farms need people to do this tough work. Most of these workers are immigrant laborers here from Mexico and Central and South America who are either undocumented or here working via an H2A visa. 

One of the largest growers boasts on their website that they have, “100 full time workers from the office to the fields, as the largest employer in the county…During the height of the Evergreen Season we will add over 800 workers to produce the greenery needed for Christmas.”*

Working with and for the Pine Workers

Our team of legal aid lawyers and community organizers have been travelling to Grayson County for years to meet migrant workers and learn about the issues encountered while doing this dangerous and exhausting work.

Making connections with a very mobile workforce, some who come to Southwest Virginia every year and some who never return after a season, some who liver full time in the U.S. and travel from state to state to work in farms as their seasons peak, is not a quick process. While the work can be dangerous and employers can be unscrupulous, these are often the best jobs available for this workforce and they can be wary of anything that could jeopardize their employment.

LAJC organizer and attorney wait outside a gas station that workers frequent to cash their check

For those travelling from another country to work the pine tree farms the season begins early, often through connecting with a recruiter in their home county hired by the Virginia farm.  From there, they make the long trip up to Virginia, often by bus, to their temporary home for the harvest season.

Housing

H2-A workers are housed by their employers. Unlike on the big produce farms in the Eastern Shore where many larger employers have built housing (however substandard) for their workers, in Southwest Virginia workers are often put up scattered trailer parks, old houses, and decrepit former hotels in the small towns that dot the hills of Grayson County.  

Workers are often packed into these dwellings, with 8+ adults living in one single-wide mobile home a regular occurrence. Some houses don’t have indoor toilets, just an outhouse sitting in the driveway. The laws regulating housing for migrant workers is limited, and our team hear about illegal, unsafe, and unsanitary conditions all the time.

Life

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LAJC’s full time Southwest VA resident and Community Organizer, Jose-Miguel Tejero, speaks with workers in their mobile home after a work day

Advocacy

LAJC continues to build relationships and trust with pine workers in Southwest Virginia.  In the past few years we have helped a worker who suffered cancer likely due to pesticide use take on an agricultural production giant, and win.  We have filed wage theft claims(??) and secured thousands for workers (<-just making stuff up here, help me out?)

How you can help

While it can be difficult to figure out where you Christmas tree originated when buying it at a store or lot, looking for smaller farms who produce organic trees can be a good start.

Sign up for emails from the Legal Aid Justice Center to keep up to date on what is happening in this work along with all our work fighting for social, economic, and racial justice across Virginia and follow our social media. As we continue this work, we will be putting out the call for you to reach out to those in power and demand change.