Vermont maple season cut short, sap yields low sugar
April 22, 2021 GMT
BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) Seventy-degree Fahrenheit weather and low sugar content in tree sap have caused one of the shortest maple seasons in over a decade for producers in Vermont, the country’s top maple syrup producing state.
Allison Hope, executive director of the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers’ Association, said that most maple syrup producers made anywhere from 40% to 70% of an average crop of maple syrup this season.
The ideal weather is warm sunny days combined with cold evenings, the Burlington Free Press reported.
Early warm weather put an end to the flowing sap, Hope said.
Vermont maple season cut short, sap yields low sugar
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Vermont maple season cut short, sap yields low sugar
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And of course, now it s gone again. Wouldn t it be great if we got sugaring weather again, but the season s already done, Hope said.
Not so sweet sap
Adding to sugar maker s woes, sugar content in the sap that did flow was lower than usual this year. Mother Nature sometimes works and sometimes doesn t, Hope said. What I m hearing is the average sugar content in sap is 2%. People were running much lower than that for a portion of the time.
That meant it took more than the usual 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. You re still doing all the work you re just not getting the barrels you normally get, Hope said. People also said they made some golden and more dark syrup than usual this year. I m a huge fan of dark so that s OK with me, but it s not following the normal pattern.
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Last March, as sugarhouses started ramping up their sweet production, maple syrup ended up being the last thing on all our minds. We kind of got lost in the news cycle, said Carla Turner of last season s syrup production that was â like everything else â interrupted by COVID-19. Sugarhouse tours stopped and the normally busy spring season where visitors trek to their favorite farms to smell the sweet steam coming off the boilers was silent. But, the syrup kept coming.
Turner â along with her husband, Paul Turner â runs a sugaring operation on Paul s family s dairy farm in South Egremont. The couple has been sugaring at Turner Farms Maple Syrup for 37 years now. The farm, she said, aims to produce 1,000 gallons of syrup a year, some years are better than others. The last two years, they made considerably more, but were worried what they were going to do with it.