For Francois Brunet, who farms near the Quebec border, this season was one of the best in memory.
Modern tap system boosts maple syrup profit margin
Charles Summers
Farmers Forum
It goes without saying that everything in farming depends on the weather, but few things are as touchy as enticing maple trees to run sap. Some years it’s stop and go. Some years you can’t stay on top of it all, and some seasons don’t amount to much of anything.
It’s all a matter of degrees (literally) and there’s no second chances. Yields will vary from bush to bush and regions to region. The good news is that after a winter that wasn’t, we still had a pretty darn decent season in Ontario.
Down in the banana belt of Middlesex County, Nelson McLachlan, of the Fort Rose Maple Company, reports a season on track with their five-year average. With over 14,000 taps in 10 different woodlots, they made 1.5 litres per tap with a short season that came and went early: their first boil was January 28 and ended just as abruptly after excessively warm temperatures on March 5.
“We used to go by the calendar, but now we go by the weather forecast,” McLachlan said.
Ezra Martin makes syrup the old-fashioned way in Waterloo County, with 1,500 taps on buckets outside of Wallenstein. Their season went much longer. Starting in early February, their spiles yielded until the first week of April. They had excellent sugar content in their sap and managed to make 1.2 litres of syrup per tap. Their collection pails were exceptionally sticky by the end of the harvest.
John Tomory and his brothers manage 40,000 taps between locations in Uxbridge, as well as a new site much further north in Haliburton. They got rolling in Durham around the same time as the McLachlan’s did, but did not get under way until well into February at their northern operation. The seasons ended within days of each other in early April at both locales. The northern site proved stronger this year: 1.8 litres per tap.
Francois Brunet, an L.S. Bilodeau sales rep, syrup buyer and sugarmaker, who boils for both himself and neighbours, reported that his area had one of the best seasons in quite a while. At the far eastern end of the province (the back of his farm is the Quebec border), Brunet reports that his neighbours running high vacuum (-26 inches of Mercury) made up to and over 6 lb. of syrup per tap.
Running less powerful vacuum at -22, Brunet reported a yield of 5 lb. It’s worth noting here, that the difference in measurement is an aspect of the Quebecois influence in Francois’ region: They don’t measure their yield in liquid volume. (And just so you know, a litre of maple syrup weighs 2.93 lbs).
“I remember a season just like this 35 years ago,” Brunet said. “No real winter and very little snow in the woods. It was the best year we ever had and it was just like this one. We even got the same heavy snow in April. The thing was, the next winter was horrible! Drifts up to the top of the fences.”
So, I guess we have that to look forward to.
Like farming, even with the best of conditions you might miss out on a good maple season. Breakdowns, freak storms that bring down tree branches and difficulty to maintain vacuum can all hurt yields. So can being on the wrong side of a hill. What all of these operations share in common (minus Old Order Mr. Martin), is that they are very careful about their collection systems. Sap harvest is what maple production comes down to. Every inch of Mercury applied to the tap hole will yield 5 % more sap, so a few inches of vacuum can quickly represent your profit margin. “You make your money in the woods,” indeed. Using well installed modern collection systems is going to be what pushes the Ontario maple syrup producer into the black.
