By Owen Boss
Staff Writer
The unseasonably warm weather that brought scenes of spring this month spelled disaster for area maple sugar producers, some of whom are yielding 20 percent as much syrup as expected.
The sap run for maple sugaring usually lasts from February to April, depending on local weather conditions. This year's unusually warm weather, particularly at night, is devastating syrup production across New England, as well as in New York, Pennsylvania and Canada.
"I've heard from people in almost every maple-producing state and they are all having an off year," said Winton Pitcoff, coordinator of the Massachusetts Maple Producers Association. "It all depends on how long you've been doing it, but I've heard from some of the old-timers that this is as bad as it's ever been."
Maple syrup production relies on the temperature fluctuating above and below the freezing point. The thawing and freezing causes water uptake from the soil, which, along with gravity, causes sap to flow out of tap holes and other wounds in a tree's stems or branches.
At South Face Farm in Ashfield, owner Tom McCrumm is almost ready to call it a season, as tap holes drilled into some 2,000 maple trees on his Watson Spruce Corner Road property continue to slowly pump out sap.
"The sap flow mechanism is triggered when the temperature alternates back and forth across the freezing point," McCrumm said. "Without that flip-flop, the sap just doesn't run like it should."
McCrumm, former longtime coordinator of the maple association, said despite enjoying lower overnight temperatures than Valley farmers at lower altitudes, this is one of the worst seasons he has seen in 25 years.
"It just got too warm way too early and it stayed warm," McCrumm said. "The weather we expect to get in early April we had in early March."
One Valley farmer struggling to find sap this season is Paul Zononi of Paul's Sugar House in Williamsburg, where warm weather will cause him to come up 60 percent short on his expected syrup production.
"I've been doing sugar now for 40 years, and this year is as bad as I've ever seen it," Zononi said this week, adding, "We've got to make 1,000 gallons of syrup just to cover our sales, and we haven't made half of that yet."
Steven Holt, owner of Steve's Sugar Shack on North Road in Westhampton, said the tap holes on most of his 1,000 maples have already begun to heal over.
"Right now we've produced 20 percent of what we made last year, and it doesn't look good. My sap hasn't run for nine days and the trees have started to heal themselves and are starting to put out buds. Once they move on to the next step, they're done."
Although it doesn't look good for the overall harvest, meteorologist Brian Lapis of Channel 22 said record high temperatures during the beginning and middle of March, some of which were 20 degrees above the average high, may not carry through into April.
Vacuums to the rescue
Some local farmers, like Jeff Mason of the Red Bucket Sugar Shack in Worthington, are trying to survive the off year with the help of a more modern harvesting method that enlists the support of plastic tubing with a partial vacuum.
The term "vacuum harvesting" may sound like the sap is being pulled out of the maple trees, but that's not quite the case. The use of a vacuum lowers atmospheric pressure at the tap hole site, which forces sap to run despite the lack of colder overnight temperatures. The resulting pressure difference inside the tree forces sap out.
"Using vacuums means you will always get some sap every year, but it is not going to guarantee you a good season when the weather is like it is," McCrumm said. "It will guarantee your crop won't be a complete failure, which is what we are seeing a lot of this year."
Of the 9,000 trees tapped on his Kinnebrook Road property, Mason said about half are harvested using this vacuum technology.
Sap collected this way will produce most of his syrup this season.
"What it does is it fools the tree into thinking that it is on a low-pressure system, and we basically vacuum the sap right out of the tree," Mason said. "We have that set up so we can still get syrup during a bad year just like this one."
Owen Boss can be reached at oboss@gazettenet.com
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