LAKE CITY, Mich.—More than 800 Christmas tree growers recently gathered in Michigan for the annual Summer Meeting of the National Christmas Tree Association (NCTA).

Attendees took farm tours and attended educational sessions ranging from the newest trends in wreaths and flocking to the latest in H-2A regulations regarding temporary seasonal workers.

One highlight of the meeting is choosing  the Christmas tree farm that will send a Christmas tree to the White House for 2025. That honor went to Korson’s Tree Farms in Sidney, Mich.

“I have been involved with agriculture for well over 25 years,” said Rick Dungey, Executive Director of NCTA. “Christmas tree growers, as a commodity that is grown on farms, they seem, in my opinion, to be the best at being willing to share information with each other.”

“We had a huge trade show,” said Amy Start, executive director of the Michigan Christmas Tree Association, which hosted the event. said. “The biggest trade show I know that has happened in decades. It was so nice because that is where a lot of farm people have a chance to look at things, sometimes things look a lot different in person than they do in a catalog, and then make those personal connections with their suppliers.”

Dr. Bert Cregg, Professor in both the Department of Horticulture and Department of Forestry at Michigan State University, was inducted into the Michigan Christmas Tree Association Growers Hall of Fame alongside long-time Christmas tree grower and owner of Dutchman Tree Farms, Joel Hoekwater. 

Another highlight of the event is the biennial National Christmas Tree Contest. To be eligible growers must first win their state or regional competition. 

“States can have up to four farms eligible because the contest is only held every other year,” Dungey said. “So they bring a tree from their farm that they grew. There are seven different species categories that they can choose to enter.”

“There is a two-stage scoring process,” he explained. “A panel of judges, mostly previous winners, they score every tree on the same score sheet. It is a whole list of characteristics and attributes that they look at and score every tree on. The top two highest scoring species in each category are the finalists.”

Then the top two finalists in each species category are voted on by the NCTA attendees at that conference. The two trees that score the highest among those become the grand champions for the current and the following year. Reserve Champions are also selected, and those trees go to the residence of the U.S. Vice President. 

The 2025 Reserve Champion Tree came from Evergreen Acres, Auburn, Pa. The 2026 Grand Champion Tree was grown by Silent Night Evergreens, Endeavor, Wis., and the Reserve by Shepherd’s Way Farms, Laurel Springs, N.C. 

The 2025 Champion Tree will be delivered to the White House in a horse-drawn carriage. Rex and Jessica Korson will escort their tree and present it to the First Lady. It will be placed in the Blue Room. 

 “You have guidelines to follow to be able to fit into the contest,” Rex Korson said. “The trees can only be 8-feet tall from the base to the tip. I think one of the characteristics of the tree that we had entered, which was a blue spruce, is the color of the tree. The classic blue color draws people to use that tree for Christmas.”

The exact tree that will go to the White House has not yet been chosen; the Korsons have a few they are considering, not an easy task as they have over 600,000 trees of various species and in various stages of growth. But the final decision is not theirs. Rather, White House representatives will come and choose the actual tree sometime in late September or early October. 

“It will get cut and shipped that week before Thanksgiving and sent to the White House,” Korson said. “We don’t have all of the details yet, but I believe the Monday before Thanksgiving is when we present the tree to the First Lady.”

Finally, Start summarized: “The beauty of Christmas trees is that it is classic, it is nostalgic. There is not a lot of change that happens with them, but the growers have found ways to grow them better, with better needle retention, things like that. The big takeaway from the meeting was how excited everybody was to get together and have a big show like this.”