It takes Ramaz Chelishvili just a few seconds to reach the top. Soon, a fir cone falls to the ground. Then another. One by one, cones keep dropping, until none are left in the tree. Chelishvili, as fast as he climbed up, gets back down.

“I try to not think of anything up there, just focus. The problem is, if you lose concentration, then you might fall,” he says.

He lights a cigarette and sits down to rest against the tree. It is a climb he has done countless times before. Each year, at the same time, just before autumn turns into winter.

This is when the Ambrolauri forest, high in Georgia’s northern mountains, gets filled with people, all in search of the same thing: fir cones – or more specifically, the seeds hidden inside.

An open fir cone and its seeds in Tlughi forest, in Georgia’s Ratcha region. Photograph: Julien Pebrel/M.Y.O.P.

These seeds, once shipped and planted in European soil, will produce Europe’s favourite Christmas tree, the tall and gracious Nordmann fir.

“It is thick and green with a beautiful shape. And most importantly, it doesn’t drop its needles,” says Marianne Bols, a Danish tree grower.

She is among a number of importers who come to the forest every year, to bring seeds back to Europe. The industry is big. About 150m Christmas trees are sold annually on the continent. A third of them, perhaps more, hail from Ambrolauri.

But the Georgian cone pickers, who come from small towns and villages near the forest and risk their lives gathering the cones, see little of the final earnings.

“I was practically born in the forest, and have been climbing since I was a kid,” says Lasha Sopromadze, from the village of Tlugi at the forest’s edge.

Each season, says Sopromadze – who wears a T-shirt despite the cold wind – he earns between 1,000 and 2,000 lari (£262 and £524). The price per kilo varies from year to year, from one to two lari – a fraction of the price for a full-grown tree in Europe.

Roughly 50m of the Christmas trees sold in Europe each year hail from Ambrolauri. Photograph: Julien Pebrel/M.Y.O.P.

“The foreign companies earn most from this. We just have the cones, no factories or plantations,” says Violeta Katsitadze, also from Tlugi.

She sits at the kitchen table in her house, next to her 77-year-old mother, Lamara Katsitadze-Jikhvashvili. Beans and peppers have been laid out to dry near the window. It is the end of harvest, and the entire village is preparing for winter.

Katsitadze has never climbed for cones, but her mother once did.

Lamara Katsitadze-Jikhvashvili, a former cone picker, recalls a time when a good working season yielded enough money to buy an apartment in Tbilisi. Photograph: Julien Pebrel/M.Y.O.P.

“Everyone would do it. The entire village went into the woods in autumn. We would cook together in the evenings, and the food tasted like the sap on our fingers,” says Katsitadze-Jikhvashvili.

“Climbing is not difficult. We just grabbed the branches one by one. Once up, we would swing and jump from tree to tree.”

Going up like that, without safety gear, is less common today. Companies bring ropes and hooks to the forest, and say they don’t allow people to climb without.

“No one is supposed to swing from tree to tree. And if they did, the ropes would stop them from falling,” says Borge Klemmensen, the now retired head of Levinsen & Abies, the largest Danish company.

Still, many cones are picked without equipment. Sopromadze, who sold his yield to Levinsen & Abies’ Georgian partner Jadvari this year, does not use it.

“It’s much faster to climb without, you can finish a tree in 20 minutes. Otherwise you need an hour,” he says, standing in a small grove surrounded trees, deep inside the forest.

He holds a knife in one hand, a long cone in the other. “This one is no good, I can see it,” he says. “It should have at least 70 seeds inside.”

Sopromadze cuts the cone in half, finding only a handful of seeds. It has been a bad year in Ambrolauri, with hardly any seeds or cones.

“It happens once in a while, but we never know why. A late frost night or unexpected rain, then the whole harvest can be gone,” Sopromadze says.

The forest around him is quiet, uncommon at this time of the year. Normally, someone from every household would be out climbing.

“It is an important income for us, because there aren’t any other jobs here,” says Melania Darakhvelidze, one of the teachers in Tlugi’s school.

A view of Tlughi village, in Georgia’s Ratcha region. Photograph: Julien Pebrel/M.Y.O.P.

The school currently has only six children (and eight teachers). Most families have moved to Tbilisi or other cities, leaving empty houses behind.

Climbing comes with risks. Several people have died, most recently in 2001 and 2011. The 1990s brought two tragic deaths: a 16-year-old boy and 26-year-old Gaga Namgaladze, whose brother later became the mayor of Ambrolauri.

“He fell 150 feet, to his death when a branch broke. He had no chance,” Rati Namgaladze says.

Bags of fir cones are left at the foot of the trees by pickers and then collected by employees of the company that operates this area of the forest. Photograph: Julien Pebrel/M.Y.O.P.

Companies say that they enforce strong safety measures now. Bols’ company, Fair Trees, holds annual safety trainings with their climbers; Levinsen & Abies brought new ropes and harnesses this year. Fair Trees also runs several social projects, including a free dental clinic and breast cancer check-ups. They pay their climbers significantly more than others, too: five lari per kilo of cones.

But the industry’s wealth has yet to transform into real improvement for people in Ambrolauri. The municipality taxes every kilo of cones at an equivalent of 15p. But no one controls how much is harvested.

“We need better traceability tools, and the tax should also be raised,” says Maia Chkhobadze of the ministry of environmental protection and agriculture, in Tbilisi.

Lasha Sopromadze climbs a small tree in Tlughi forest to check the quality of the fir cones. Photograph: Julien Pebrel/M.Y.O.P.

Sopromadze has grabbed a pair of binoculars, to scan the treetops for cones. He says he will be fine, despite the bleak harvest this year: “We do need the income from the cones, but it is not like our lives depend on it. We have our animals, our corn, beans and vegetables.”

Around him, on the branches of the tall Nordmann trees, tiny buds can already be seen. It looks like next year may be better.

• This article was amended on 24 December 2019 because an earlier version referred to Nordmann fir cones as pine cones. This has been corrected.