Ken Dambaugh of Pine Hill Farms carries a Christmas tree to a car Thursday. Butler Eagle File Photo

This Christmas, finding a tree could be more difficult than usual, due to damage caused by deer, according to the owners of Pine Hill Farms in Evans City.

Pine Hill, owned by the Dambaugh family, suffered a major setback this spring when deer chewed away at roughly 900 out of 1,000 newly planted trees, said Ken Dambaugh, one of the owners of Pine Hill, in a Friday interview.

“They go around to the seedlings that are 8- to 10-inches tall, and they eat all the buds off,” Dambaugh said. “And so that tree is then basically destroyed.”

Tree growers across Western Pennsylvania have had to contend with invasions from the state’s ever-growing population of deer, which have cut into the supply of trees to sell, he said.

For the last few years, Pine Hill Farms, located on Upper Harmony Road in Evans City, has been putting a cap on how many trees it sells each season, just to make sure it has an ample supply of trees to sell in the future. This year, the quota is set between 300 and 350 Fraser fir trees. The farm opened for the season on Friday, Nov. 24.

“It takes 12 to 15 years for a tree to be fully grown. So it's a long cycle, and you have to plan ahead,” Dambaugh said. “I've been planting 1,000 hoping that I get to harvest 500 in 12 to 15 years. But obviously last year I planted 1000, and they ate 900 of them, so that sets me back in future years. It’s like compounding interest.”

Dambaugh says his farm is not the only one which has experienced difficulty with deer in recent years.

“Everybody has the deer damage problem,” Dambaugh said.

While Pine Hill sells other types of trees, it is the Fraser fir which deer are most partial to.

“They eat the needles and branches off the big ones on the sides of the field by the woods,” Dambaugh said. “They eat the sides off the big ones, and they eat the buds off the little seedlings.”

Recently, the Dambaughs have begun using deer repellent spray on their farm to prevent this sort of incident from happening again.

“I've got to start spraying. If I don't start spraying, I'm going to lose my plants every year,” Dambaugh said. “The biggest problem with growing trees is deer. It isn’t bugs or anything else.”