Dan Heath: One of the most important days of the year for a Christmas tree farmer is the day after Thanksgiving, Opening Day.

Sheldon Corsi: Opening Day is big. You prep all year and you open for tree sales. The worst thing you can get is a bunch of rain.

Dan: That's Sheldon Corsi. He's a Christmas tree farmer and the owner of Corsi Tree Farm near Cincinnati, Ohio. At his farm, people can come and pick out their own trees, cut them down, and take them home.

Sheldon: One day, it's Opening Day, and it is pouring. I'm soaking wet, trying to run around, get last-minute stuff done. I got 8 or 10 or 12 employees here and about that many customers, when I should have had hundreds and hundreds of customers. I'm standing in the barn and I'm looking out over the field and generally feeling pretty sorry for myself.

This lady came up, and I don't know who she was, and she said, "Are you Mr. Corsi?" I said, "Yes, I am." She grabbed me and gave me a big hug. She said, "I just want to thank you for what you do because it's such a big part of our Christmas." I'll never forget that because it made me realize that that's a different aspect of this job, that not everybody-- very few people get thanked for what they do.

For 11 months a year, I am just another farmer. For a month a year, I've got a lot of people that thank me for what I do. That's what really separates this type of agriculture from a lot of other types is the fact that you have that one-on-one relationship with your customers. If they have a bad experience, I've had people basically accuse me of ruining their Christmas. [laughs] They take it pretty serious.

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Dan: I'm Dan Heath, and this is What It's Like To Be. In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession, a cattle rancher, a nurse, a professional Santa Claus. We want to know what they do all day at work. Today, we'll ask Sheldon Corsi what it's like to be a Christmas tree farmer.

We'll talk about what you have to do to make a Christmas tree look like a Christmas tree, how you fight all the pests that can keep them from growing. Bonus, he'll give you some tips on picking out a great tree for your family. Stay with us.

I have a new book coming out. It's a little weird to me that some of you may not even know I'm an author, but there it is. I've written or co-written five business books in the past including The Power of Moments and Made to Stick. I've got a sixth book coming out in January that's called Reset: How to Change What's Not Working.

It's a book intended to help you and your team get unstuck to overcome the gravity of the way things have always worked and make positive change. It's coming out January 21st, but I wanted to give you a heads-up here. If you want to learn more about the book or pre-order it, God bless you. We've set up a special link, whatitslike.com/book. You don't even need to remember the name of the book. Just remember it's a book, whatitslike.com/book. That link will take you to the Amazon page, but of course, it's available anywhere you like to buy books. Thanks and back to the show.

Sheldon's Christmas trees don't begin their lives on his farm, so don't picture him planting seeds in the soil. He buys them a couple of years old from another farmer.

Sheldon: Planting seed and raising them to a seedling or a transplant, that's a science in itself that I don't really know anything about.

Dan: It's so crazy to me to hear how much specialization there is. It's like there are people that are good at raising a tree up through daycare and then you take over and get them through to adulthood or something.

Sheldon: Yes, and the guys that raise the plants that I buy, they don't collect their own seed. For the most part, I believe they collect seed. They buy seed from companies that go out and collect seeds.

Dan: By the time the Christmas trees get to Sheldon, they've already spent a year in a field, so they've proven they can make it.

Sheldon: I plant about 5,000 a year and I like to start with trees that are in the 15 to 18-inch size.

Dan: At about $4 a pop once they're shipped, that's $20,000 a year in costs just as a starting place.

Sheldon: I have my trees shipped to me usually until the last week of March and then I have a walk-in cooler and I put the trees in the cooler.

Dan: Whoa, you can get 5,000 trees in a cooler?

Sheldon: Yes, on the size trees I'm planting, it's a squeeze. They're on pallets in crates. I double-deck them and I can put about 5,000 trees in my cooler.

Dan: He likes to plant in early April. He puts them in rows with 5 feet between each tree and 8 feet between the rows, which is wide enough to run his tractor through. All in all, he's got a hundred-acre farm, 60% of which is planted with trees, about 55,000 Christmas trees in all.

Sheldon: If you translate the number of trees or number of acres to miles of rows of trees, I've got about 50 miles of trees.

Dan: If you just laid all the trees up in a row, it'd be-- wow, 50 miles of trees. Once they're planted, it takes a typical Christmas tree about seven or eight years to get to a sellable size. That growth is not slow and steady.

Sheldon: You don't know what you're going to have for the next Christmas until they go through their growing spell, which is late April through about early June. That's when they do all their growing. Then from about mid-June, they're finished for the year. During that growing period, it's amazing how fast they grow. You'll go from, like on some trees that grow really fast, like a Norway spruce, they might grow 2 to 3 feet a year in height. They do that all within a two-month period. It's pretty amazing.

Dan: Oh, wow. It's almost visible at that scale. day-to-day visible.

Sheldon: Yes, it is, really. The thing is that when the new growth, when it's growing that fast, it's real fragile.

Dan: So fragile that even a bird landing at the top of it can damage it. For a while, Sheldon waged a battle against blackbirds that were nesting in his trees.

Sheldon: I tried everything to get rid of them. I bought propane cannons that, they go off and they're super loud. I had five of those stationed--

Dan: They don't like the noise? Is that the idea?

Sheldon: Well, I stationed them out throughout the farm, five cannons. Once they get used to the noise, it's useless. They'll build a nest 10 feet from one and you wouldn't, you don't want to stand 50 feet from one, but they'll build a nest right next to one. They get used to that.

Dan: Aside from the birds, he's fending off insects like the pesky spruce spider mite and weeds. Oh, the weeds. He puts a good amount of mileage on his mower.

Sheldon: Each time I mow, I figure I'm mowing over 90 miles at two passes per row and probably closer to 100 miles. I do that four times a year.

Dan: Even after all the obsessing about weeds and pests, sometimes things still don't work out because he's always at the whims of the weather.

Sheldon: I used to plant a lot more trees than I do now. I was planting 25,000 trees a year, but I was putting them closer together. I know one year in particular, '88, we had a drought and I lost all the trees I planted that year.

Dan: Oh, wow. All of them.

Sheldon: Yes. Yes. What I did was doubled up the next year and planted instead of planting 25. I planted probably 40,000. I didn't completely double up.

Dan: Perhaps the most important thing that Sheldon does to nurture his trees is called shearing.

Sheldon: Shearing is where you're shaping the tree. The trees don't naturally grow to be a nice, uniform, symmetrical Christmas tree. They might maintain a fairly good shape, but they have to be trimmed every year or sheared.

Dan: Shearing means you hack away at a tree using a long, razor-sharp blade to sculpt it into the shape that you want. Really, hack isn't quite the right word because shearing requires a lot of skill to do it right and not hurt yourself.

Sheldon: I probably knife shear, oh, I would guess probably 10,000 or more trees a year.

Dan: What?

Sheldon: Yes. I do it by myself. I don't have any help.

Dan: By yourself?

Sheldon: Yes. Then the others, the smaller ones, I'm probably shearing another 10,000 or 15,000 with the hedge clippers. The younger ones, you don't really have to trim them usually until they've been in the ground for two or three years. Then you start the shaping process. My philosophy is make all your major corrections and get the shape established when they're in the 2 to 5 foot, 2 to 6 foot size. Then as they start to get closer to being a marketable tree size-wise, I lighten up on my trimming. I don't take as much off. That way the tree has a natural look, but it's got a good shape.

Dan: I think I was naive enough to think that Christmas trees just magically grew into Christmas trees, but apparently there's a lot of sculpting involved.

Sheldon: There is. Yes. Most people don't realize that, but the shearing is probably the most important. I don't know. All the jobs are important, but I'll put it this way that when somebody comes into my field and they're looking for a tree, what they see is the last shearing job that you put on it. Even when I had four or five, six boys helped me in the summertime trimming trees back when I had more trees than I do now, I always start them on the smaller trees because the tree has a chance to grow out of any mistakes they make.

When you get into the bigger stuff, unless a guy really is a good tree shearer and usually it takes three or four weeks of doing it and me on their butt constantly trying to get the best job, you want them to be able to do it pretty much like I do it. They can't be making a lot of mistakes. Swinging a shearing knife is like swinging a ball bat. You keep your eye on the ball. When you're swinging a shearing knife, you want to look directly where you want to start your cut on the tree. Then you have a certain swing you use.

I started doing that when I was 15. My dad was a tree grower, so I learned to knife-shear when I was about 15. I've probably been shearing, knife-shearing Christmas trees. Now that's a real niche thing, but I've probably been knife-shearing Christmas trees longer than anybody in the world that still does it.

Dan: I wonder if you might actually be the world's, like if there was an Olympic knife-shearing event, I wonder if you might be the gold medalist.

Sheldon: [laughs] Well, I don't know. I was a lot faster when I was younger, but I'm pretty darn good now as far as getting the-- I go out and shear, and each tree, I have to make a lot of decisions on each tree, not all of them. My objective is just to be able to stand back and look at it and go, "That's perfect. That's exactly the way I wanted to shear it." If I can't hit within a quarter inch or a half inch of where I'm aiming, then I won't get that perfection. That's how particular I am, and it's not rocket science, but it does take a certain amount of skill, because I've taught a lot of guys to knife-shear, and nobody picks it up right away.

Dan: How do you keep people from-- how do you keep yourself, for that matter, from self-mutilating? Just slinging a long knife around thousands of times seems dangerous.

Sheldon: Funny you should ask that, because that has always been a problem, is knife cuts. If you're right-handed, you've got to keep your left hand out of the way, you wear gloves. The biggest danger is cutting your leg.

Dan: On the way down.

Sheldon: I always wear long pants, but I went 53 years without cutting myself until this summer.

Dan: You cut yourself for the first time this summer?

Sheldon: For the first time, yes.

Dan: Oh, man.

Sheldon: It's something that was big enough, it needed stitches. I had long pants on, but I hit myself in the knee, and I cut right through my pants and cut my knee. I don't know, being my father's son, I didn't have time to go get it sewed up. I didn't want to go to the emergency room. I called my doctor--

Dan: I've got to keep chopping these trees.

Sheldon: Yes. I called my doctor, and I said, I asked his receptionist, I said, does he have time to sew me up? She said, "If you can wait a couple of hours." I'm like, "Well, I don't know." I ended up, while I'm bleeding down the bottom part of my leg, I drove up to the drug store and got some, I think they call them steri-strips now, we always called them butterflies. I butterflied it shut and was back in the field within an hour and a half or whatever, and it healed up beautifully.

Dan: Most people who shear Christmas trees injure themselves a lot sooner than that. Sheldon's dad started the Christmas tree farm business in the 1950s, and he equipped new shearing recruits with specialized gear.

Sheldon: He made everybody wear knee guards, or basically it's a catcher's leg guards.

Dan: Oh, wow. Everybody had to wear them. It was a pain to wear them, because you're out there in June, it's hot, and this and that. The first week, you hear clicks all over the place, guys whacking those knee guards with their knives. Then as you get to where you notice that certain guys were no longer hitting their knee guard, you say, "Okay, you can do without it now, just be careful."

Dan: What are the finishing touches, like as you approach the time when a tree will finally be ready to sell in November, December, what's happening in the six months before that?

Sheldon: Well, the fact that the size trees I plant, they take six, seven, eight years to grow. Over that period of time, they probably had some frost damage at some point. They maybe been rubbed by a deer. They maybe have had spruce spider mites or a fungus or this or that. Most of the trees will grow out of that stuff. Really, what really matters is how they look that marketable year. When they get over about 6 or 7 feet, you just put a real nice shearing job on them. At this point in my career, since I don't have any help shearing, every tree that gets sold that's been sheared, I'm the guy that sheared it.

Dan: What's the perfect shape for a Christmas tree? When you step back, what are you looking for?

Sheldon: Ideally, what they always said was a 66% or a two-thirds taper. A 6-foot tree should be roughly 4 feet wide on the bottom. A 9-foot tree should be 6 feet wide on the bottom. I tend to think that's a little on the wide side. I tend to try to trim trees in a little bit more of a tall, slender way. Trees are like people. You have some people or some trees that are short and wide. You have some trees that are tall and skinny, and that's their natural growing habit. You really don't want to try to fight that too much. Go with it.

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As I mentioned, Sheldon's dad started the Christmas tree farm business. He had a different business model than Sheldon's cut your own. He sold trees wholesale. For a time, he supplied most of the Christmas trees at the Kroger grocery stores in the area.

Sheldon: Dad had about 500 acres in trees and it was a tough game. I never wanted to be a wholesaler because it's brutal. You're trying to load tractor trailers and you start in probably late October. By Thanksgiving, all the trees have to be harvested and shipped.

Dan: Wait, if you're in the wholesale model, you're already cutting down Christmas trees around Halloween.

Sheldon: Oh, yes. Before Halloween. So are the growers that do it today because one of your best weekends is the weekend following Thanksgiving. If you're processing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of trees, you can't do that the week before Thanksgiving. You have to start really, really early. You try to grow trees that have really good needle retention so they can handle that long period of being cut and last until Christmas.

Dan: Because with that logic, some of the trees that we're buying, if we buy them at retail, they might be two months old by Christmas Day. Huh?

Sheldon: Yes. Very possible.

Dan: Two months dead is what I meant to say.

Sheldon: Yes. Yes. Two months. Yes. Two months. All of them probably have been cut for at least a month, maybe three weeks. That's assuming they're on the lot by Thanksgiving, and then they've got another four weeks to go. What commercial growers do is they grow pine trees and fir trees because they have really good needle retention. Most of the trees that you see sold at the big package stores, big box stores like Home Depot and Lowe's, they've been cut and hauled several hundred miles. When they're hauled, they're hauled on an open truck, an open tractor trailer usually.

The trees that are down inside and not exposed to that 8 or 10 hours of 60-mile-an-hour wind are usually they withstand the trip pretty well. They're the fresh ones. If you go through a tree lot and they've got a bunch of trees and they were probably all cut the same time, but some of them are real dry, it's very possible that tree was on the outside of the load being on the side or up on top and got exposed to that wind.

Dan: Let me tell you something. Those are the trees that I always end up picking out because my family always seems to pick a tree about December 9th or something. There's like a couple of scraggly-looking trees left on the lot. Probably the very top tree on the load from what you're saying.

Sheldon: Yes, it's very possible. Yes, that's why.

Dan: Tthe Christmas tree business has changed a lot since Sheldon's dad first started in the '50s. For one thing, the number of people who want Christmas trees has dwindled.

Sheldon: When I was a kid back in the early to mid-'60s and you're going to your buddy's houses and that, in every house had a Christmas tree in it and every tree was a real tree. There were no artificial trees back then. When they did come up with artificial trees, they were pretty ugly. Nowadays it's probably way less than 50% of the households actually put a Christmas tree in their house. A lot of people just don't do it anymore.

The majority of the ones that do get put up, a lot of them are artificial trees. I get that as far as the convenience and the cleanliness and all that stuff. Basically the tree farms like mine, you're trying to get a bigger slice of a lot smaller pie. That has made it a real challenge is trying to sell the number of trees that you're producing, that you need to sell.

Dan: Sheldon charges $90 for his trees. When a tree doesn't sell, it means he's borne all the costs of raising it over seven or eight years with no offsetting income and he has to take care of it for another year.

Sheldon: I wish I could, but I won't sell the number that I have that are ready to be harvested. That can be a problem. They're going to be bigger and nicer next year, but I got to take care of them for another year. I have to trim them for another year. I have to try and keep them healthy for another year.

Trees are like-- and I know livestock and stuff's the same way. It reaches a point where it's most marketable. From there it goes downhill. That's the way trees are. When they get in the 6 to 9-foot size and they look really nice, that's when you want to sell them.

Dan: Sheldon, we always end our episodes with a quick lightning round of questions. Here we go. What is a word or phrase that only someone from your profession would be likely to know? What does it mean?

Sheldon: We already covered that. I'd say shearing trees. Most other parts, like planting or this or that is stuff that anybody in agriculture would know. When you start talking about shearing Christmas trees is something that only a Christmas tree farmer has ever done, nobody else has probably ever done it. They might prune up a tree in their yard a little bit, but we call it shearing.

Dan: What's the most insulting thing you could say about a Christmas tree farmer's work?

Sheldon: I know people don't say it to be insulting, but it'll be like this time of year and they say, "Wow, you're getting ready to get busy. Aren't you?" I'm busy all year.

Dan: [chuckles] Oh, I see what you mean.

Sheldon: Actually, when I open for tree sales, I've got probably a dozen employees that are taking care of everything for me so that I can stand around and talk to people. When I open for tree sales, yes, I'm busy, but I'm busy all year and people just, they don't realize it.

Dan: What's a tool specific to your profession that you really like using?

Sheldon: Well, as far as tools that are specific to this profession, whether or not I like using them or not, but one is a tree baler. Six or seven years ago, I bought a real nice, it's called a Howey tree baler. It's the state-of-the-art in tree balers.

Dan: That's the thing that like wraps up your tree so it's more compact?

Sheldon: Yes, it's got a funnel, it's got a gas motor on it. You stick the trunk of the tree in the funnel and then you grab it with a pair of jaws and it pulls it through. While it pulls it through, it wraps twine around it. Every tree that gets shipped any distance has been baled.

Dan: What's a sound specific to your profession that you're likely to hear?

Sheldon: Well, it's a pretty quiet profession in general, besides like tractors running and stuff, which I don't-- I would say the tree baler, each time a tree's baled, you hear it cycle. That's a unique sound. Other than that, nothing really.

Dan: What does it sound like? I don't know if you have a tree baler impression or not.

Sheldon: [laughs] No, you're not going to bait me into that one. No.

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Dan: I got to go try.

Sheldon: You can hear it's got a spool that spins with a ball of twine on it. Then as it pulls the tree through the funnel, that spinning reel, that spinning hoop with the ball of twine hooked to it, just, it makes a specific noise. It's got rollers on it and you can hear them. Of course, the funnel it pulls the tree through acts like a microphone so it's loud.

Dan: For those of us who aren't lucky enough to visit the Corsi Farm and pick out our own tree, if we're stuck going to Home Depot or the neighborhood lot, what is some advice you would offer us for picking out a great Christmas tree?

Sheldon: As far as the shape of the tree or the color, most people are-- they're pretty much in tune with that. They know what a tree's supposed to look like and what color it's supposed to be. If you feel the needles, if you just grab a branch and just with moderate pressure, just pull your hand along the branch with the flow of the needles. If none of them are falling off, it's pretty fresh. It's not fresh cut, obviously, we talked about that, but it's still got plenty of moisture in it.

Beyond that, take it home and put a fresh cut on the bottom because it's been cut for a while and the sap tends to seal it up. When you put it in the house, if you've got vents for your HVAC system, you want to turn any of those off that are around the tree so they're not blowing warm air on it. Just make sure and don't let it run out of water because if it runs out of water in the sand, then the bottom of the tree where it actually absorbs the water will seal over again and then it'll quit absorbing water.

Dan: What appeals to you about this work?

Sheldon: Oh, it's funny. When I started, I was 25 when I decided to come back and be the-- and the reason I did it, I was living out of state and my dad was wanting to retire. He was up in his late 50s and I knew he was going to sell this farm. If you saw this farm, you could understand why a person would fall in love with it. It's a beautiful farm. I didn't want to see the farm get away and I guess I missed it. That's when I decided to come back and do it.

Anyway, at 25 years old, it's not a very exciting business. You're not traveling, you're working the same piece of ground every day, but it's a business that I, the older I got, the more it appealed to me. All the things that probably seemed boring or not real appealing, in the beginning, are exactly what most guys my age, if you're going to still work, that's what you want. You don't want to deal with bosses, employees. You don't want to deal with drama. You just want to go out and do your job every day.

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Sheldon: Every now and then, I just, I'll be working out there and I'll be a certain vantage point where I can see a large portion of the farm. There's nowhere you can see the whole farm. I look out across these rolling fields of trees, it's not a view that a lot of people get on a daily basis. Most days I got my head down and I'm working and I'm not really enjoying the view. When I do see it, even after all these years, sometimes I'm just like, I do see it even after all these years, sometimes I just, I'm like, "Man, I got it made."

Dan: He knows he can't do the job forever. He's making plans to wind things down.

Sheldon: I decided this is my last year planting trees. The trees that I planted this spring, I'm going to be in my mid-70s by the time they're ready to sell. I figure, I won't be able to do it any longer. There's no need in planting trees that I won't be able to take care of.

Dan: There are mature stands of evergreen trees that Sheldon planted 30 or 40 years ago that he's never harvested. If or when he sells the farm, they'll still be there.

Sheldon: It takes a lifetime to grow a tree. I've spent a lifetime growing a lot of the trees that I've left on the farm. It's beautiful. This is my home. I literally live on the farm now. The farm's been in the family since I was 13 or 14 years old. I can't remember how old I was when dad first bought this place. You spend 40-some years of your life on 100 acres. I know this, I know every inch of this ground. I've got this 100 acres memorized. I could go out there in the dark and I could walk this farm and never stumble.

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Dan: Sheldon Corsi owns a Christmas tree farm near Cincinnati, Ohio. We'll put a link to Corsi Tree Farm in the show notes. The moment that hit me the hardest was when Sheldon said he had planted the last trees he'll ever plant. The moment he made that decision, he was in the middle of a drought. When he made that decision, the clock for the tree farm started ticking. It has seven or eight years left until those trees grow up and get ready to sell.

At first, I have to admit, I felt a little depressed about that ending. Later it occurred to me, no, what a blessing. What a blessing that Sheldon gets to end his work in a fashion and on a timeline of his choosing. Farming is a hard career regardless of what you're growing. Sheldon built a life where he's able to do things his way. He's not beholden to the numbers game of wholesaling. He honed the farm to a scale where he could manage the place almost single-handedly.

It's big enough that he has to do a hard day's work every day to keep it going. It's small enough that he can shear every single tree into its most beautiful form. Shearing trees, fighting the weeds and pests and blackbirds, planting and fertilizing and praying for good weather, and ultimately seeing thousands of happy families show up to pick out the tree that will light up their holidays. Folks, that's what it's like to be a Christmas tree farmer.

We've had a flurry of recent reviews on Apple Podcasts. Thank you for that. Shout outs to YGlenn, MJackD, and ypsimamabear, Sillyperson3, ReikiDallas, DMMABC11, boredombananas, and Geek7. Love you all. This episode was produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Dan Heath. See you next time.