The first boil of the maple season

By BECKY NELSON
Bramblings
We fired up the maple arch for the first boil of the season this week. It was actually our best first boil ever. We have added about 1,000 taps over the last three years but we were tickled to make as much syrup as we did on our first day. About four calendar days later than we started making syrup last year, it is still about a week earlier than the year before and almost two weeks earlier than four years ago. A logging project, extremely cold weather in January and a host of other reasons had us starting our repair work in the woods a little later than we hoped, which made our tapping of trees a little later than we hoped. We probably missed the first couple of sap runs, which would have made our first boil last week sometime, but we are approaching the season with a lot of hope and some early satisfaction.

A lot can happen in just a day on the weather front but we are hoping for about six weeks of syrup making. The warm days of early spring that used to come in the first or second week of March have been arriving sometime in February of late, making us adapt our usual maple syrup work schedule to make sure to make syrup when the sap runs. It takes warm days in the 40s and cold nights below freezing to prompt the sweet sap to travel from the tree roots to the limbs and start the process of boiling in motion at the farm. Too cold and sap does not run. Too warm and sap does not run. We were hoping to be ready to harvest some sap last week but we were not quite prepared for the run that occurred.

Instead, last week I made a visit to my daughter’s home in Amherst on the freaky “hot” day on Wednesday. We spent a couple of hours at a park with the baby …there was no snow. We sat on a blanket near the playground and all of us were in T-shirts with the weather topping out at 75 degrees, according to the thermometer in the car. I am used to a “January Thaw” most years but the weather lately has been downright strange for these parts. A snowstorm followed by a summer-like day in February may be our new normal but it may take me quite a spell to adjust to this new normal. Researchers are predicting that climate change is closer than we ever might have thought, that these changes will have a detrimental effect on maple trees and syrup production, and this need for sugarmakers to tap earlier may very well be the first stages of major changes on the horizon, which may include the extinction of maples in many current syrup producing regions.

We farmers are a resilient bunch, for the most part, though. When disaster strikes or conditions require an adaptation, we change. In the maple syrup production end of our farm, we have changed dramatically from our first years to now. The current sugarhouse is a very different production center than it was just 30 years ago. Though we still stoke the fires with wood, we have added vacuum tubing to our collection methods instead of gravity feed, which results in more sap making it to the sugarhouse. We added reverse osmosis to remove some water and concentrate the sugar content of the sap to save ourselves a lot of time and fuel more than a decade ago, and we have introduced some forest management to free the maples to build bigger tree crowns and become healthier trees. We now tap the trees with smaller tap-holes to improve forest health as well.

Just as dairy farms changed dramatically in the 1940s and 1950s to adapt to new demands, new techniques and new regulations on the industry, so most of our production and marketing methods grow, change and adapt. We are always at a cusp of something new and like all survivors, we must adapt. I am reminded of my readings of Darwin’s studies of species when I think of business adaptation. “Survival of the fittest” as Darwin explained was the adaptation of a species or an organism to best live in its environment while other species failed to thrive or became extinct if they did not adapt in his theory of natural selection.

Perhaps we sugarmakers are approaching the point of survival of the fittest. Perhaps the trees will decide our fate as they may fail to adapt to warmer and drier growing seasons and warmer and shorter winters. Perhaps we will find a way to reverse the affects and effects of climate change and remain sugarmakers. Perhaps the tastebuds of generations next and next and next and next will change and find maple syrup an unpalatable historic relic and the industry will wane due to market pressure. We just don’t know.

So for today, and tomorrow and next week and next year so long as folks continue to love maple syrup, we will work to keep our forests healthy, work to harvest sap when it is running and work to make that sticky, lovely, yummy liquid gold as we look toward spring and summer and then fall when the maples again show their glory in a burst of autumn color. Gotta love those maples.