“You work 52 weeks a year for three weekends,” Mr. Wyckoff said, referring to the short season when people are visiting his farm to get a Christmas tree. “When you take a hit on one of those weekends, your expendable income for the next year is somewhat limited.”

Cline Church, president of the National Christmas Tree Association and a Christmas tree farmer in North Carolina, said that the average price a consumer paid last year for a Christmas tree was about $40. A typical tree farmer spent $8 to $10 on each seven-foot tree while it was growing on his farm, and the average price for that tree sold to retailers was $20 to $25. Shipping costs added another $2 to $5 to a tree. Call it $30 in overall costs to harvest a Christmas tree.

In that situation, the tree grower made about a 9.6 percent compounded annual return, and the retailer selling the tree for the average price made 33 percent in a month, not counting the retailer’s other expenses.

Mr. Botek said he had a customer in Washington who gets well over $100 for his trees — a price familiar to many tree buyers in Manhattan. Mr. Church said the supply and the demand for real Christmas trees had been in equilibrium for years, at 30 million to 35 million trees a season, so the guy on the corner, like Mr. Botek’s retailer, was the one profiting mightily, though he did have to stand in the cold for about a month. While there is definitely a profit for the retailer, the industry is made up of mostly family farms, Mr. Church said, which means there is not a lot of need for outside investors.

Timber, however, is open to a certain kind of investor. Since the shape of a tree doesn’t factor into the price of timber, the carrying costs are relatively low, about $5 an acre, which covers insurance, taxes and a forester to clean the property and watch for disease.

The barrier to entry, however, is high. Brian C. Duke, director of agricultural services at Northern Trust, said a 10,000-acre forest could range in cost from $10 million around the Great Lakes to $40 million in the Pacific Northwest. Returns on timberland have historically been around 9 to 10 percent a year, which explains why most of the industry remains dominated by institutional investors and larger timber companies.