Barbara Johnson lives near the crossroads town of Bellfountain, "in the middle of Christmas tree land."

While that might sound like paradise, it gets a little bit smoky sometimes after the holidays. From January through April, farms cut and burn diseased or "Charlie Brown" trees that can't be sold. This method of disposing of trees is legal, but it finds little favor with some rural residents.

Johnson said she thinks the burns harm the environment. Reusing the organic material would be a sustainable alternative, she said: "(Burning) just doesn't seem right to me."

The times are changing, said Rick Fletcher, a forester for the Oregon State University Extension Service. Christmas tree farms increasingly are chipping and mulching their scrap trees.

"It's still a small number that are getting chipped compared to the number that are burned," he said. But it's becoming more common, and growers who wouldn't have even considered the practice two years ago are now buying chippers.

Greg Rondeau, sales manager for Holiday Tree Farms, said his operation now is grinding and mulching most of its 10,000 or so cull trees. If there are no disease problems, the chipped remains are put back into the soil for stability, or used as groundcover in distribution yards.

But a few thousand noble and Douglas fir still are burned because they're in areas where it's illogical to bring a chipper in, or where there aren't many trees.

"It's not like we burn every day; every couple of weeks," Rondeau said.

Holiday Tree Farms harvests about 1 million trees a year, and is the largest grower in the world, Rondeau said.

Dan Fox, a natural resource specialist with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, said his office sometimes gets complaints of Christmas tree burns, but it's a protected agricultural activity under Oregon laws that allow noisy, dusty or smelly tasks considered vital to agricultural production on land zoned for exclusive farm use.

"They do have to be careful about what they burn and when they burn. They are restricted to certain days," Fletcher said.

Kyle Odegard can be contacted at kyle.odegard

@lee.net or 758-9523.