Christmas Tree Farm Economics: Planting Cohorts, Survival & Grade Mix, Years to Harvest, Cost per Tree, Choose-and-Cut vs Wholesale Pricing, the December Rush and the Cash-Flow J-Curve

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn a field into a planted area, count the trees per hectare from the spacing, split the field into yearly planting cohorts for a rolling harvest and find the main harvest year of every block.
• Follow a cohort through eight years of fictional survival rates, find the cumulative survival, split the trees alive at harvest into premium, standard and cull grades, and work out how many saleable trees each seedling yields.
• Measure a sample of trees at ages 6, 7 and 8, count the share at saleable height with COUNTIFS, turn the shares into a harvest schedule for the whole block and check the growth rate.
• Cost the establishment of one hectare, price eight years of care passes as hours and money, roll the costs forward with a carrying cost and divide by the saleable trees to get the full growing cost per tree.
• Look up a tree's price from a height-band list, weight the price list by this year's harvest mix for each sales channel, add the netting extra and subtract channel and growing costs to compare the margin per tree.
• Mark the weekend days of a choose-and-cut season with WEEKDAY, measure how much of the season falls on weekends and size the staff and parking for the busiest hour of the busiest day.
• Build ten years of farm cash flows, follow the cumulative cash down into the J-curve and back up, value the plan with NPV and IRR and draw the curve to read the payback year.
• Run the farm in its steady rotation: count the trees sold each year, build the yearly profit from the channel mix and fixed costs, find the break-even average price per tree and test lower survival and lower prices.