BAINBRIDGE – Reed Baker has plenty of descriptives to refer to this year’s lackluster maple season; none of them, however, are fit to print.
“It was less than half a crop,” said Baker, owner and operator of Baker’s Maple, the largest of Chenango County’s roughly 40 maple producers.
This year, he processed 38,235 gallons of sap at his Bainbridge location, he said, and yielded less than 900 gallons of syrup.
“Ordinarily we ought to be able to make closer to 2,000,” he reported.
Last year, for example, he and his staff produced more than twice as much syrup as they did this year from the 83,000 gallons of sap they collected. Those numbers were higher still in 2008, when they boiled down 95,395 gallons of sap to produce 2,400 gallons of maple syrup.
It was without a doubt, “one of the poorer years for production,” said Baker, who has been in the business since 1982.
The problem? Unseasonably warm weather and dryer than average soils, according to the local maple expert.
“It looked good there the first week of March,” he reported, explaining that the season started out “normal,” with sap beginning to run toward the end of that first week of the month. Daytime temperatures weren’t climbing high enough for optimal production through the end of that week, he said, but that changed by week two. At that point, conditions were prime, according to Baker, with nighttime temperatures dropping below freezing and then heating up during the day. That pattern of freezing and thawing creates a kind of vacuum which keeps the sap flowing.
Even at that point, they were noticing lower amounts of sap, which Baker attributes to low ground moisture. The best producing trees, he said, were ones located near streams.
Then in the third week, things went from bad to worse as temperatures rose.
It was as if someone “turned off the faucet,” according to Neil Mead of Mead’s Maple. The 77-year old McDonough resident has been “sugaring” since 1960, he said, and has never seen a season as bad as this. He places the blame firmly with winds which brought warm air up from the south.
This year, the 1,100 taps from which he and his son Tim collect yielded enough sap for only about 60 gallons of syrup, he said. They typically produce between 150 and 200 gallons, which they sell as syrup, maple sugar candy and maple cream.
Their largest customer is the annual Central New York Maple Festival in Marathon, Mead explained. This year’s event is scheduled for this coming weekend and they expect to be “a little short” on even filling that order, he said.
The timing couldn’t have been worse for the Meads, who just this year invested in a new airtight evaporator. The new piece of equipment is only the third of its kind produced by its manufacturer, he said. “They haven’t even got it in their sales catalog.”
While they are happy with the piece of equipment so far, he added, they haven’t had a chance to really put it through its paces.
While local producers will likely suffer as a result of the truncated season, the effect on the overall maple industry have yet to be determined.
“I don’t know how widespread this condition is,” said Baker, who is active in the New York Maple Producer’s Association. He said he has heard rumblings from other regions that there numbers are down as well, but the overall supply and price will be determined by Canadian production, which largely dominates the market.
New York, which produced 363,000 gallons of syrup last year, generating $13.9 million in sales, ranking the state third in the US in terms of production, behind Vermont and Maine, and second in terms of revenue.
Baker said that any local shortfall will be made up by buying bulk syrup from other producers.
“We’ll have syrup here all year no matter what,” he said. He offers everything from syrup, maple cream and maple jelly, to granulated maple sugar, maple coated nuts and maple sugar candy year round at his Bainbridge store and through their website, www.bakersmaple.com.