KNOX — An ever-reliable source of holiday good cheer — and of some fine-looking Christmas trees, mainly spruce —  will be sadly missed this Christmas of 2016.

Beset by freakish weather and continuing drought,  the Van Etten Christmas tree farm on the Berne-Altamont Road has had the worst year in its long and mostly happy existence.

In 50 years of growing trees and 40 years of selling them to Hilltowners, and to city and suburban  folks as well, this family-owned seasonal business  has never experienced a year  as dispiriting as this one.

Susan Mason’s father, George Van Etten, and her mother, Jan Van Etten, started planting the trees 50 years ago and eventually increased the farm’s Christmas tree operation to 50 acres with upwards of 7,000 trees.  George Van Etten died in 2009 and Jan Van Etten is now in a wheelchair.  Since 2005, Mason has done the year-round work — the mowing, the shearing, the seedling planting and care —  required to give area families a choice selection  of trees to cut and take home with them.

Mason does all this while also operating Ponies For Hire — the other major source of income for the farm — and tending flocks of sheep and goats, with the help of Gunner, her Australian sheepdog.  She also takes care of  her mother, who worked side-by-side with her husband for many years among  their thousands of Christmas trees. His obituary in this newspaper said he liked to call her “my branch manager.” He always said, “You never plant more trees than your wife can shear.”

Though other Christmas-tree farms in the area suffered some loss of trees no  other farm lost so many, says Lily Calderwood, commercial horticulture educator at Albany County Cornell Cooperative Extension.

“We were probably affected close to the hardest,” Mason explains, “because spruce trees are more vulnerable to temperature extremes. Tree farms with mostly balsam fir or Douglas fir may have had some loss but nothing like what we had.”

Calderwood says the Van Etten farm hit an unlucky trifecta of adversity.

One was the weather. But the culprit wasn’t bad weather. It was good weather. The freakishly balmy temperatures of March —  on March 3 the day’s high recorded at Albany International Airport, was 81 F, and daily  highs for the rest of the month remained in the 50s and 60s — coaxed the thousands of trees on the farm to start growing for another year, says Mason. But then  came the biting cold of  April 3 through April 5 when night-time temperatures fell as low at 16 F at the airport and probably even lower at the higher elevation of the farm. It wasn’t just a killing frost; it was killer cold.

And this came on top of an extended period of dry conditions plaguing eastern New York State.

“For the Van Etten farm,” says Calderwood, “it was a perfect storm.” She says that the farm’s soil is typical of the Hilltowns; a thin layer of dirt over bedrock doesn’t provide good water retention and makes extended drought more stressful.

She says drought conditions began to develop two years ago but their  full impact hit this year.

Completing the perfect storm  for the Van Etten trees, says Calderwood, was the farm’s location: higher, colder, and windier than tree farms at lower altitudes.

Calderwood visited the Van Etten farm in the spring to assess the damage. The visit came not long after Mason had exulted in the warmth that was allowing early plantings for hundreds of seedlings— a yearly chore and “investment in the future,” as Calderwood describes it. “Who-hoo,” Mason remembers thinking, “I’m going to get a lot done in this weather.”

Vulnerable already

Here’s the scenario Calderwood reconstructs. “The Van Etten trees came out of their dormant state in March and then used what little water that was available to them to photosynthesize. And then the cold came and scorched them.”

‘The trees were already stressed,”  Mason points out,  “because of the open winter we had.” The almost snowless winter last year lay down no kindly blanket of snow around the trees nor did it provide any needed drought-relief.  Three-inch seedlings, even majestic 50-foot-high mature trees,  and everything in between took hard the dry winter and the roller-coaster March-April weather.

Many trees ready for sale this year—it takes 15 years, Mason says, for the trees to reach marketable height and fullness — are  still living, but the late winter conditions snapped their  “internal” needles, the ones near the trunk, giving them a subpar appearance. She says she will not know until next spring how many trees will be able to recover and how many of the 300 seedlings she planted this year will survive.

The farm’s apple trees that had begun  to blossom in the late winter warmth took a hit too. “They produced not a single apple,” Mason says.

A long holiday tradition

“We have some customers who have been coming here for their trees for 27 years,” says Mason.

And they came not just for their trees. They came to catch the spirit, too. The Van Ettens holiday spirit— “We had it 100 percent,” Masons says, “110 percent” — was joyous. Hot chocolate and cookies at the snack bar. Hay rides through the fields and woods. Pony rides for the kids. A pre-mall kind of Christmas.

In a letter to this paper’s editor, Jan Van Etten gave the bad news  to the farm’s loyal customers that “our tree farm suffered the loss of all our trees. Sadly, the Van Etten Tree Farm will no longer be selling Christmas trees.”

Mason holds out some hope that a few years out — maybe as many as five — the Van Etten Christmas tree farm will be back in business.

Asked if this year’s losses may cost the family their farm, Mason said, “I think we’ll be all right between our pony rentals and events, hay sales, and some horses we board.” The New York State agricultural tax exemption requires a farm to generate at least $10,000 in annual income.

Mason says a United States Department of Agriculture program may compensate a small portion of the tree-farm losses.

But  Mary Jeanne Packer, executive director of the Christmas Tree Farmers Association of New York, says farmers have to be located  in a federally declared disaster area to quality for such assistance.

She said Christmas tree growers in 24 western New York counties do qualify for such assistance because of the severe summer drought in that part of the state was declared a disaster. “We estimate that half of the trees planted in April and May were lost due to the drought in that part of the state” she says. “Or about 100,000 of 200,0000 trees planted.”

She said the extreme weather fluctuation in March and April was a “more local phenomenon, within a 100-mile radius of Albany” and had detrimental effects not only on tree farms but on maple syrup producers as well.

“Statewide,” she said, “farmers need customers to buy real trees this year more than ever. There is no shortage of beautiful, healthy  trees.”

Mason says this year’s crop would have been only the second that she would have seen mature from seedlings she herself planted.

Calderwood says the effects of climate change —temperature extremes and changing precipitation patterns — may be the ultimate reason the Van Etten Farm will not be making Christmas merrier this year, or for some years to come.