Making maple syrup requires long, chilly days in February and March tapping trees, followed by hours of hot work devoted to boiling sap down to syrup.
The chores don’t end with spring, as sugarmakers must care for their trees, plant new ones and often supplement their income with other jobs.
Then it starts all over again.
“We had a schoolteacher out here once helping us,” said Mike Puffenbarger, of Southernmost Maple Products in Bolar, Va., a town in Highland County in the western part of the state. “She said she would never waste another drop of maple syrup again. It is quite an ordeal.”
The hardships of this cottage industry become even more severe when weather conspires to cut production. Sap flows in maple trees when the temperature rises above freezing during the day but returns to freezing or below again at night. Several warm winters and quick transitions from winter to spring during the past decade have made some sugarmakers and scientists worry about how global warming may be affecting the industry.
But there is a type of tree that could make output more productive and consistent. “Sweet trees” are sugar maple saplings bred by Cornell University to have sweeter sap. Sap in most sugar maple trees averages 2 percent sugar. The Cornell effort is attempting to identify those trees with a naturally higher sugar content in hopes of perfecting a sweeter maple for the industry.
Sugarmakers extract sap via a tap bored into the trunk. Traditionally, buckets were hung from the trees to catch the sap. Today most buckets have been replaced by lines of plastic tubing (often miles long) that carry the sap from tree to sugarhouse, where open evaporators, fueled by wood, gas or electricity, boil the sap down to syrup.
The sweeter, the better
Paul Baker, who had 7,800 sugar maples at his orchard in Canada before he retired to Waynesboro, Pa., hasn’t quite given up the sugar habit. He’s planted the improved trees at his Pennsylvania place. “Definitely, sweet trees will benefit the industry in the long run,” he says.
The program providing the trees was started by Cornell in the early 1990s, picking up where a U.S. Forest Service program left off in the 1960s. That program had tested maples, finding naturally occurring trees with a sap sugar content as high as 6 percent. The service planted offspring of these trees to see if the unusually high sugar content would be passed on. It was, but the project was abandoned before those trees matured.
Lewis J. Staats, a former Cornell maple specialist who is now retired, heard about the sweet trees at a maple education program and was familiar with a seedling plantation at the Cornell field station in Lake Placid, N.Y.
Recently, the number of sweet saplings has grown large enough for Staats to distribute them among sugarmakers, people such as Baker Harry Komrowski of Memphis, N.Y., who is creating his own super orchard.
Komrowski has practiced tree improvement techniques since his wife gave him a refractometer, which measures a liquid’s sugar content, 20 years ago. “I do my own pruning in my sugar bush and I’m cultivating ones I’ve found in the wild,” Komrowski said. “The ones that are lower sugar content I cut down and the ones that are sweeter I leave standing.”
Komrowski makes about 200 gallons of syrup every year as a hobby and has planted 52 of the improved sugar maples. He’s pledged to give Cornell data about their progress and has high expectations. Komrowski planted the sweet trees in what he believes are ideal conditions, since trees with a better growth environment produce sap with higher sugar content. For example, trees grown where their crowns are exposed to a lot of sun generally have a higher percentage of sugar.
Patience required
Komrowski and other sugarmakers who have planted the trees will probably be around to see the trees thrive but not to enjoy their syrup. It takes 20 to 30 years for a sugar maple to grow to a size that is safe to tap. “It’s something for my grandchildren probably. It’s a very long-term project,” Baker said.
“I’m 43. I’m hoping to be able to see a tap hole in them,” Puffenbarger said. “We’d like to encourage plantings of sugar maples so the next generation has something there to use.” His own children have said they will continue the family business. Puffenbarger has planted about three dozen sweet trees and “we’re going to try and obtain a lot more of them.”
He’s been in competition for the trees, he said, with sugarmakers farther north whose orchards were damaged in a 1998 ice storm. “It’s taken about all that Cornell can raise to get those replanted. We would like some place like Virginia Tech to get interested in maples and help us out here.”
Puffenbarger is a proponent of sugarmaking in Virginia. “It’s probably one of the only states in the union where we can raise extra-large Virginia peanuts on one side of the state and maple syrup on the other,” he said. “And then we coat the peanuts with maple sugar.”
He admitted, though, that this winter’s fickle weather probably will affect his yield more than that of Northern producers. “We had some record high temperatures last month, which never helps at this time of year, but the weather has since straightened out a lot.”
Mike Richter, a sugarmaker in Pickens, W.Va., describes maple-syrup production as a “roller-coaster ride. If it stays warm now at this time of year, it’s not going to be good for us,” he said. Richter hopes to get some sweet trees from Ohio State, which has a fledgling program.
Though Cornell’s supply is now limited, Staats has high hopes for the potential of improved sugar maples as the numbers increase. He sees one growth area in farmers with abandoned agricultural land. “That is the real vision for this–that there will be land that will be back into production . . . and hopefully with a high-quality species,” Staats said. “There’s nothing more beautiful than a stand of sugar maples.”
