With the season starting earlier, local maple syrup producers weigh the impacts of climate change on a treasured Vermont tradition
By Tom Ayres, Senior Staff Writer
There is a maxim among maple sugarers that Mark Isselhardt cites whenever he’s asked about the status of sugaring season each year.
“There’s an old saying in sugaring: ‘If you’ve seen one sugaring season, you’ve seen one sugaring season.’ There is some real truth to that,” Isselhardt, the University of Vermont Extension maple specialist, said in an interview with the Standard late last week. “When weather events happen, we get sap flow that isn’t uniform throughout the season. Temperature plays a huge role, even in a modern sugaring operation. If we see a nice, gradual warm-up throughout a six- to eight-week period, sugar makers in general will produce a good amount of sap. If we get these weird, anomalous warm-ups that we see occasionally, that can cause tap holes to become plugged and stop producing sap.
Mark Isselhardt, University of Vermont Extension maple specialist
“It’s really hard to say with certainty how often those weather events are going to happen,” Isselhardt continued. “But there is some indication that with a changing climate, we are going to see some of these really high-temperature warm-ups. That would be a real concern — and sugar makers are reacting to it. We are seeing sugar makers tap earlier than before. At the same time, we’re seeing yields go up, which in a lot of ways is a reflection of more and more sugaring operations using modern technology. Producers are adopting new technologies to boost production and forest management practices to keep the sap flowing in our warmer, wetter weather.”
Vermont, the top maple syrup-producing state, served up more than two million gallons of the tasty stuff in 2023, just shy of half the amount produced in the United States, with New York and Maine making up the lion’s share of the difference. Here in the Upper Valley, maple sugaring is a time-honored source of a livelihood, with several large-scale sugar makers contributing to Vermont’s syrup haul each year. Two of the top producers in the region spoke to the Standard over the Presidents’ Day weekend, discussing this year’s sugaring efforts and reflecting on the potential impacts of climate change on their operations.
“We’re all tapped and we’ve made syrup already,” commented Reid Richardson of Richardson Family Farm in Woodstock, noting that the startup of syrup production was quite early this year. “I’d like to temper that by saying that the technology we use these days allows us to capture little bits of sap here and there, as we go, making syrup earlier in general, regardless of climate change,” Richardson, who serves on the boards of both the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers Association and the Windsor County Maple Producers Association, added, echoing the oft-heard assertion that no two sugaring seasons are ever alike.
Richardson acknowledges, however, that climate change has had its impacts on the maple industry. “I’m only 45, so I don’t have the 82-year history and memory of this farm and maple sugaring that my father has. But I feel like we had a lot more snow when we were kids and the sugaring season started a lot later back then,” Richardson recollected. “My kids are home this week because they’re on February vacation. That was always the start of our sugaring season because the kids were home from school and they could help. But at this point this year, we’re all tapped. We’ve already made syrup and the kids weren’t involved.”
Richardson spoke next about some of the technological innovations that he and other area sugar makers have adopted to lengthen the sugaring season, maximize sap and syrup production, achieve greater efficiency, and lower costs in their operations. “My father and uncle and grandparents always took this business seriously, but perhaps my brother and I are taking it even more seriously,” the Woodstock maple sugarer offered. “For starters, we take brand new, clean spouts with us into the woods each year because the old ones get contaminated with bacteria. And we probably do a better job of cleaning our tubing at the end of the season, so there’s less bacteria in general. And we utilize a vacuum system to draw on the tubing to keep the sap moving away from the tree and not give it a chance to flow back into the tree at the end of the day as things shut down,” Richardson continued. “We also use a reverse osmosis machine, which removes water from the sap before we boil it. That increases our boiling efficiency by reducing the amount of time we have to boil. We can turn on the evaporator for a couple of hours, clean up all the sap we have on hand, and then shut it down and put it to bed for whenever the next sap run is.”
Fifth-generation maple sugarer Richardson, working together with his brother Scott and father Gordon, takes great pains to tend to the family’s sprawling sugarbush – another means of countering the potential deleterious effects of climate change and warming winters. “In the last 15 years or so, we have paid more attention to having more diversity in the sugarbush,” he explained. “We have parts of our sugarbush that are kind of a monoculture, that are exclusively maple. That is not a climate resilient practice, because if you have a pest come along that wants that maple species, they are going to decimate everything. So we are paying attention to having a diversity of hardwood trees in the sugarbush. We actually just achieved bird-friendly habitat status from Audubon Vermont. That has to do with having a diversity of species in your woods, with dead standing trees, snags, and wood on the ground after harvesting.”
The Richardson family inserted the last of the nearly 12,000 taps in their sugarbush on Feb. 8 and made this season’s first run of syrup on Feb. 10-11. Asked if he could estimate how much syrup he expected to produce this year, Richardson responded lightheartedly. “Everybody always asks that — and I tell them the same thing: it will be an average season,” he quipped. “As has been said, when you’ve seen one season, you’ve seen one season.” The family-run sugaring operation typically produces about 5,800 gallons of maple syrup a year, Reid Richardson told the Standard in a 2023 interview.
Bourdon Maple Farm is also located in Woodstock, a couple of miles west of the Richardson Family Farm. Owner/operator Don Bourdon started the operation as a hobby when he and his brother were boys, collecting sap from 200 old-fashioned buckets each spring. Now Bourdon has 30 years of experience as a commercial syrup producer, having expanded the sugaring operation after he graduated from college, eventually growing it into the 10,000-tap operation that it is today. Meg Emmons joined the Bourdon Maple Farm team full-time eight years ago after graduating from the University of Vermont. Emmons, now the head of operations, sales, and marketing at Bourdon, spoke by phone last Sunday from her customary seasonal perch in the sugarhouse.
“Our season has barely started,” Emmons noted. “We boiled for the first time this month on the 11th, which is the earliest we have ever boiled, beating our record of Valentine’s Day from last year. We’ve noticed that the season is starting earlier every year. Normally you think of March as sugaring season and maybe going a little over into April. But lately, we’ve noticed January sap runs. And some people in the area even tapped out in December and made syrup then, just because we had milder weather and freezing nights, which makes the sap run. It’s hard to say what’s going to happen this year — Don and I always say that we’ll tell you in June how the season turned out.
“We boiled for the first time this month on the 11th, which is the earliest we have ever boiled, beating our record of Valentine’s Day from last year. We’ve noticed that the season is starting earlier every year.” — Meg Emmons, Bourdon Maple Farm
“As an El Nino year, this year feels very different from the rest. But we have noticed a lot more extremes in the weather lately, which is associated with climate change,” Emmons continued. “We had a drought two summers ago and then all this rain this last summer, which stresses the trees so much. So our focus is and always has been on forest health to promote long-term resilience and help mitigate some of the disease and pest pressure. I studied ecological agriculture at UVM and it’s always been top of mind for me about how we manage forests. The more diverse your forest the healthier it will be. And we’re certified organic, which also brings a focus on forest health and also food production. We do some selective thinning here and there, cutting out some of the smaller, thicker trees that really don’t have much potential. By doing that, we are opening up space and resources for the healthier trees that we leave. The more actively they can grow, the better they’ll be able to withstand some of the impacts of climate change.”
Bourdon Maple Farm also makes use of the advanced technologies that have increasingly come to the fore in sugarmaking. “I think most sugar makers who are pretty serious about production are using vacuum pumps and a reverse osmosis system,” Emmons said. “It’s sort of the way sugaring has progressed over the last several years. That’s partly because there is so much competition in this industry — the bigger equipment dealers have really been focusing on better equipment and bring more efficiencies into production.”
Every sugaring season is “completely new,” Emmons commented, echoing anew the remarks of both the UVM Extension Service’s Isselhardt and her fellow maple sugarer Richardson. “There’s always a new set of problems, a new combination of weather events. We rely on the UVM Proctor Maple Research Center, where Mark (Isselhardt) works, to keep us abreast of some of the challenges they’re seeing to help us increase our efficiencies and better withstand some of the effects of climate change.
“We’re all trying to find a way through it,” Emmons concluded. “Nothing is certain. The seasons are starting earlier every year and they are getting shorter by about 10%. All you can do is try to be as prepared as you can before the season starts, just looking at the weather minute by minute to make sure we capitalize on any sap run we can get.”