It's 6 a.m. on a Saturday in December and the beginning of a stressful day for Meinolf Mütherich. He won't be home before 11 p.m., the same as every weekend day this month. Mütherich has little time to enjoy this holiday season because he owns a Christmas tree farm and this is the biggest month of the year for him.

Christmas trees are big business in Germany. Germans spend some 450 million euros ($593 million) a year on Christmas trees and 80 percent of the trees they buy are grown domestically. Mütherich has planted about 800,000 trees on 100 hectares (247 acres), in the Rhineland and the Sauerland regions of North Rhine-Westphalia.

A farm that size is nothing to sniff at, but he only sells a fraction of the trees every year. It takes 12 years for the popular Nordmann fir to grow to Christmas tree height of about 2 meters (6.6 feet), Mütherich said. As a businessman, he has to think in decades. Today he has to know how many trees he'll want to have in 2023. Planning is everything - as much for the quantities as for the types of trees.

"If I had known 10 years ago that the Nordmann would be such a hit, then I might have planted fewer blue spruce or firs," he said.

A family tradition

Heading out to the countryside and picking out the Christmas tree has become an annual event for many German families.

"It's a fun thing to be able to cut your own tree down," said Frank Zehrer, who came to Mütherich's farm with his wife and children for the third year in a row. "Now that my son is 8 years old, he can help me. And we can make a nice day of it here at the farm."

At this time of year the park begins to resemble an amusement fair. Behind the parking lot is a festive white tent and inside there are picnic tables and a long bar where you can get something tasty to eat and drink.

Behind the tent, a long trail leads up into the forest. Every 10 meters or so there's a small wooden hut selling Christmas treats and decorations - a traditional German Christmas market in the middle of the woods. Meinholf Mütherich doesn't just make money from the trees, but also the Christmas trinkets and spiked hot chocolate sold en route.

Poison and profits

The commercialization of Christmas is, of course, not a new thing. There's another problem with the Christmas tree cultivation that has some activists in the Sauerland region concerned.

"Sauerland is the main area for growing Christmas trees in Germany. One third of the 28 million trees sold in Germany are produced here," said Matthias Scheidt, from the citizen's group Poison-free Sauerland. "But along with the industry comes the intensive use of pesticides, which means health hazards."

Of the 430 Christmas tree businesses in the Sauerland region, 420 use pesticides, according to the group, which suspects some of them are carcinogenic or even toxic to reproduction.

Ahead of Christmas, the 11 active members in the group are carrying out a signature campaign against the use of pesticides. So far they have 1,000 signatures. They want Christmas tree farm owners to cut down the weeds themselves, by hand or by machine, or bring in non-local Shropshire sheep, which, unlike native sheep, eat the weeds and leave the trees alone.

Meinolf Mütherich is familiar with the complaints of this group. He says customers expect a perfect Christmas tree. If he were to do nothing against the weeds, then the bottom of the trees would be dry and brown and no one would be willing to buy such a tree, he said.

A few years ago he also brought in 150 Shropshire sheep from Denmark. "It was a huge success, I have to say. But at some point their eating habits changed," he explained.

The next generation of sheep all of a sudden began to eat the trees. According to Mütherich, the sheep were also vulnerable to diseases and were often sick.

Ecology and economy

How expensive an organic Christmas tree should be is still up for debate. Poison-free Sauerland's Matthias Scheidt thinks they shouldn't have to cost any more than trees that are sprayed with pesticides, while Meinolf Mütherich is convinced they would be double the normal price.

In the end, it's the customer who determines how much he or she is willing to pay for a Christmas tree. Scheidt and the other members of his group all buy organically grown trees. If everyone did that, then the farmers would react to that, said Mütherich: "If the customer comes to me and says, 'I'd like to buy an organic tree' and is willing to pay twice as much, then I would change my business."

Author: Marco Müller / hf
Editor: Kate Bowen