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Family farm continues memories
Jason Maloney For Agri-View
Dec 3, 2024
BUTTERNUT, Wis. – Those of us who grew up outdoors in fields and forests take for granted our closeness with nature. But for most people, such closeness is now foreign. What has become more common is becoming lost in an electronic world. Social media and online connections were intended to link together people everywhere. But life online for many brings loneliness – and for some despair. People long for a connection with the real world outdoors, and to family and friends. It’s especially so during the Yuletide.
Standing on the edge of Agenda Road during the last day of November, one notices a steady stream of vehicles. The rural road just outside of Butternut travels through farm fields and mixed forests. It doesn’t usually have a large volume of traffic. But this time of year a chance for connection brings folks from near and far. Most of the vehicles are filled with families.
Almost every vehicle turns into one driveway. Follow them to see an old farm building surrounded by and filled with Christmas trees. A festive wooden figure holding a sign greets visitors. The sing reads, “Welcome. Treml Tree Farm.”
It was a busy Saturday when Jason, Jamie and Chase Treml stopped to visit with a stranger about their family Christmas-tree farm.
Jason Treml said, “This farm has been in our family for 102 years; the Christmas-tree farm started in 1962. My grandpa had dairy cows. A tornado came and took most of the buildings – the barn and everything – away. Then he planted Christmas trees and my family has had them ever since. “We have a lot of people coming here this time of the year; a lot of families come here. Children love cutting their own trees. The children get out in the snow, play around and spend time with their family. I do (Christmas-tree farming) because my dad said, ‘Where else are people going to get their Christmas trees if we don’t keep our farm going?’”
Jamie Treml said, “I like seeing all the people who come here every year.”
Chase Treml said, “I like seeing all the people too; it’s a good way to be around family.”
The Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection has counted more than 800 active Christmas-tree farms in Wisconsin. Sales from those farms are believed to be more than $50 million annually.
Trees tend to limit erosion while sequestering carbon and giving off oxygen. Few would argue that such farms are important to Wisconsin’s economy. But the sales figures and positive environmental aspects of trees are not what is most important about Christmas-tree farms –especially farms like the one the Treml family runs.
Walking through rows of Christmas trees in a field along Agenda Road, the snow crunches underfoot. Crows, woodpeckers and bluejays speak loudly of important business they have in adjoining forests. A doe stands unafraid along a fencerow. Sunlight sparkles in the frost on the trees. The strong spicy scent of pitch, needles and cones sharpens the fresh air. The excited voices of children helping to pick out and cut Christmas trees, some for the first time, tells of connections being made along with indelible memories.
It’s easy to find artificial trees made in faraway lands. We can use them year after year. But each year we do, many drift further from our connections to the land and the people around us.
A fifth generation of the Treml family is now working on their farm. When Jason Treml’s dad asked where else people would go to get Christmas trees if his family doesn’t grow them, he knew the answer. What the Treml family also knows is they are providing way more than Christmas trees and beautiful holiday wreaths. At the Treml Christmas Tree Farm visitors are finding a connection to nature, family and friends. It’s a connection that makes life rich in meaning at the Yuletide as well as through the rest of the year.
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