Grass Fire Burns Through Sand Springs Christmas Tree Farm

We know by now this is definitely wildfire season in Oklahoma. An area farmer says a grass fire took away some of his farm's Christmas spirit.

One of the many fires that burned across the state on Thursday took out 1,500 trees.

If Pleasant Valley Farms is the closest thing to Christmas in Green Country right now. That would make the wildfire that destroyed part of the farm the Grinch.

"It's devastating, of course,” Randy Owens said. “It's a lot of money. We have an arborist coming out to do an assessment on it to see what the actual damages are."

Flames took out about 1,500 of Owens’ trees. Some of them were his famous Christmas pines. But most were landscape trees, which he would sell to gardening companies for extra money.

Now that every single one of those specialized trees has burned to a crisp, Randy says that part of the business is over.

"I will not continue it, of course,” Owens said. “I'm going to just stick with the Christmas trees and pumpkins and continue what we know best."

Owens estimates each tree was worth about $100.

So he's out about $150,000.

"Any way you flip it, it's expensive. Very expensive,” he said. “It cost a lot of money there to lose these that you're counting on for your bottom line."

Luckily, Owens over-plants every season. So although several hundred of his mature Christmas trees were killed in the fire, he says there should still be plenty to choose from this season.

"We're not out of business, we're still going strong, and we will have trees for the upcoming years,” he said.

Investigators still are looking into what caused that fire.