Maple syrup could have less sugar this year: producer

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STILESVILLE • Last summer’s cloudy and rainy weather could mean this year’s maple sap will have a lower sugar content and take longer to boil down to syrup, says Darrell Trites, a third-generation maple producer who has spent a lifetime caring for and tapping the huge trees on the family farm outside Moncton.

“Last summer, through June and July, we didn’t have any sun. We had weeks without sunshine,” Trites said while sitting next to the hot wood-burning stove at the Trites Maples camp in Stilesville, off the Gorge Road north of Moncton. “We had overcast skies day after day, so the trees didn’t get the sun they need to make sugar, so we may have sap this year that is a little below normal sugar content. It’s the sun that makes everything work, and if we don’t get the sunshine.”

Normally, the raw sap that comes from trees is two to three per cent sugar, but an early draft of sap this year showed only one per cent. If the sap is more watery, it will take longer to process it and the overall production could be lower.

Trites said it’s just another example of how unpredictable the maple syrup business can be, and how producers face many uncontrollable factors in the process of tapping trees.

The sap begins flowing as trees come out of their dormant winter period, suck water from the ground and send the sugar up into the limbs to renew the process of growing. New Brunswick is one of the few places on Earth where the maple trees create sap during a brief time in March when the environmental conditions are just right. The sap will start flowing when temperatures rise up to about six degrees Celsius during the day and drops to -8 or -9 Celsius overnight. The sap normally starts running in mid-March, but it could start earlier.

The sap run lasts only a few days, so producers have to be ready for it. The Trites Maples camp has approximately 7,000 trees that are tapped and connected to blue plastic tubing that stretches through the forest like a spider’s web. The blue pipes feed into larger black pipe, which carries the sap to the production facility.

The big part of the job in winter is trudging through the snow to make sure the blue pipes are in good shape.

“They get knocked down, branches knock it down, ice storms knock it down, raccoons want to chew on it, squirrels want to chew on it, bears want to chew on it. It’s a constant battle to keep that maintained,” he said.

In the past, Trites would go through many cords of wood to heat the boilers, but now the camp uses reverse osmosis technology to filter water out of the raw sap to produce the thick and tasty natural syrup.

Trites said his grandfather took over the operation around 1900, but it was in operation long before that. One of the trees on the property has been tested to be more than 500 years old.

“Trees are trees. They get old and die just like we do, but some of them live longer, like that one that has done quite well,” he said.

One of the conversation pieces at the camp is a slice of maple tree believed to be more than 150 years old when it was cut down a few seasons ago. The rings on the tree, which each represent a season’s growth, are less than a millimetre apart in some places, indicating the tree grew to maturity and then a tiny bit more each year. There are also places where the rings grew around the drill marks and healed itself.

Pancake breakfasts and maple education

Trites Maples, located behind St. Joseph’s Church at 1270 Gorge Road, will resume its annual tradition of pancake breakfasts from March 9 to April 14. The restaurant will be open each Saturday from 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Meals are $18 for adults and $9 for kids under 12, cash only, no cards. The camp is also open Sundays for educational sessions only, beginning at 10 a.m. Trites said the restaurant isn’t open Sundays because they can’t find enough staff. He said prices also went up this year, thanks to the increase in the price of the materials they need to make breakfasts for customers.

Maple industry growing in N.B.: report

Louise Poitras, executive director of the New Brunswick Maple Syrup Association, said the industry continues to grow in this province as producers are always at the mercy of weather.

“As every year, I can’t tell you the forecast for the maple harvest this year,” Poitras said. “We can’t tell you either if it’s going to be a good or a bad harvest.”

According to a report released on the association’s website Feb. 2, New Brunswick’s maple syrup industry has grown rapidly since 2010. The report said the number of taps increased by 86 per cent to 3.5 million, syrup production increased by 162 per cent to 811,000 gallons in 2022, and the value of production increased by 77 per cent to $33 million. In New Brunswick producers had 6.5 per cent of taps in the country, up from 4.3 per cent in 2011.

The reports said the industry continues to shift to larger-scale producers. In 2011, 74.3 per cent of producers had fewer than 10,000 taps and accounted for 9.4 per cent of the province’s taps. In 2021,
these small-scale producers accounted for 60.6 per cent of industry stakeholders and operated only 5.8% of taps. At the other end of the spectrum, very large companies, those with more than 50,000 taps, saw their number increase from 15 to 22 and their share of the province’s taps increased from 52.6 per cent to 54.4 per cent.