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Dispatch from the Sugarwoods 2015 Part 4

We boiled for the last time this season last Saturday – a raw, cold day. It froze hard that night, but Sunday rose up into the 60s. It felt like the end of sugaring season and the first day of Spring, Spring. We had a good run that day on account of the freeze, and a decent run on Monday at the Hall bush, where the ground was still frozen and largely snow covered. After selling sap both days we called it a season. As I write this three days later, the buds have broken on the red maple outside my window and the branches are festooned with flowers; ivory-white filaments and rose-pink anthers; a thousand little boutonnieres.

In all it was a very good year for us. We never got an exact tap count, but an educated guess had us at around 3,000. We ended up collecting around 43,000 gallons of sap from these trees, and though we sold almost half of it, if you add up the syrup we made and covert the sap we sold into syrup, we ended up with around .36 gallons of syrup per tap. The old standard of a “crop” used to be .25 gal/tap, so by that metric we did great. And while the state-of-the-art producers with high vacuum shoot for totals around .4, we still consider anything over .25 a “crop.” Especially years where you start tapping in thigh deep snow and the sap doesn’t start really running until early April. Especially in an operation being run by two guys with day jobs and a gaggle of family and friends with a warped sense of a good time.

In my previous blog posts I talked about the big stories going on in sugaring these days – the way the industry is expanding, and how technology is changing everything. Looking at our season through this lens several things pop out. The first is how much sap we sold. I can be as bad as anyone in worrying about overproduction and a resulting syrup bubble, but here’s an example of how a growing industry has created a new opportunity for us. The operation we sell sap to makes syrup full time – it’s their livelihood. Their new-this-year RO can process 3,000 gallons of sap an hour and they’re boiling on a fuel-oil-powered rig. They have a month to make a year’s worth of product so they want to make syrup -- the more sap the better. Our own operation is limited by the time we can commit and our wood pile, which makes an outlet for our sap a pressure relief valve.  

The growth of the industry has also led to a better support network. A friend recently opened up a maple supply warehouse in North Bennington, so instead of driving an hour to Rutland to buy supplies, we can drive 5 minutes up the road. When we got our first RO around 10 or 15 years ago, we had to muddle our way through any maintenance issues ourselves while squinting our eyes at a manual that was written entirely in French. There was no tech support. This year, when the high pressure pump in our machine started acting funny, we called a service technician from CDL who said he could be there in a couple hours if we needed him.

I turn 40 this year, and it’s astounding, really, how fast things have changed in the sugaring world in just my short lifetime. Twenty years ago we were one of the bigger operations in our area, running a line that included around 500 buckets in addition to our gravity-powered tubing. Three hundred gallons of syrup in a year was cause to drink Champagne, even though that often translated into around .1-something gallons per tap. We’d boil for hours before we had an RO – often doing shifts during heavy runs so we could boil through the night. I don’t know where we got the energy, except to say that everything was much slower paced, so we had a bigger energy account to pull from. Plus we were younger.

Today we’re all tubing, no buckets, and both our bushes have moderately high vacuum. We spend much less time in the sugarhouse than we used to. Our longest boil this year was 12 hours. Most of the time was spent either in the woods walking lines and fixing vacuum leaks, or in the truck hauling sap. Lots of time spent in the truck, drinking coffee and eating donuts and hauling sap. And while we’re 300 or 400 percent bigger than we used to be production-wise, we’re tiny compared to many of the big operations that have sprung up in our area. The guys we sell sap to make 300 gallons of syrup in a morning.

I spent an evening boiling sap this last week with my friend Mike, who runs 50 taps or so at his home in South Washington. He has a little post and beam sugar shack, and a little maybe 2 x 4 pan. Three of us gossiped and drank beer by the light of a sputtering lantern, enjoying the company and steam. It brought back faint childhood memories of my grandfather’s farm, long ago days when my own family’s operation was more hobby than business.

I suspect there are a lot of sugarmakers like me out there who have grown considerably and don’t know quite what to make of this position we find ourselves in. You love this sugaring thing, so you do it more and more intently. You get bigger and bigger – it’s the American way. You take pride in doing something on a scale that’s substantial. You break an all-time production record like we did this year and you feel really good about it. But at the same time you realize you’ve gotten very far removed from a lantern and a steamy shack and a star-splattered spring sky. And you can’t go back – maybe because you’ve taken on enough debt that you can’t afford to, or maybe simply because making so much syrup has changed your disposition and you can’t sit around for 10 hours anymore to make 10 gallons of syrup and feel like it was time well spent. But whatever the case things are different, and you don’t know what to do with that.

My crystal ball tells me that in another 20 years people are going to be sugaring on a scale that will blow your mind. These sugar factories are going to use electric, steam-powered evaporators – you won’t even see the steam rising from the roof. In another 50 years Big Sugaring in the Northeast could look like Big Ag in the Midwest, where the industry is dominated by combines you have to crane your neck to look up at and corn fields that stretch on forever. This would be a boon to the working landscape but it would come with social costs that would be hard to calculate and even harder to express.

Read Dispatch from the Sugarwoods Part 3

Discussion *

Apr 20, 2015

In theory, Dylan, someone is going to eventually come up with a way to harness all the steam energy that boiling sap creates. Word out of Canada has it that there are electric evaporator protoypes that recycle the steam and be operated for around.15 cents per gallon of syrup produced. If this proves true, it seems like many large producers would opt for this approach.

As for your question on demand, Carolyn, you’ve touched on the million dollar question. While the packers talk about single digit growth, anecdotally anyway, it seems like the industry is growing a lot faster than that. Will demand keep up with supply? I have no idea, but do know that the maple marketers had better get busy.

Dave
Apr 19, 2015

What accounts for such a rising demand for maple sugar/syrup in this era when so many people are cutting back on eating sugar and carbohydrates?

Carolyn
Apr 17, 2015

Nice article, think your crystal ball might be a bit cloudy. Take away cheap oil and big maple gets a lot smaller. RO especially is a high embodied energy product that has a complex production stream behind it. What’s the alternative? Buckets and lines, more employment. Win win.

Dylan
Apr 17, 2015

Some of the best syrup comes from tiny sugar shacks worked by old guys eating Cheddar cheese that numbs the lips. Not as much product, but really, really good.

Sure, Big Ag runs not one, but a fleet of monster, self-driving combines chopping corn. How often do you hear, “Man, that corn from the lower 40,000 was outstanding this year.”  You don’t. ‘Cause bigger isn’t always better. Or even as good.

Daryle Thomas

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