Maple syrup farms have additional costs ahead after losing trees to severe storms.
Deirdre Schirmer, co-owner of Treehugger Maple Syrup in Franklin County, said she has lost about 10 percent of the maple syrup-producing trees on her property from severe storms this summer. She plans to find other owners to lease trees from to make maple syrup; with that comes added travel and production costs short term.
“We can't just replace something, like a manufacturing business; if a piece of equipment goes out, you can buy a new one. If your farm is a seasonal crop that gets replanted every year, the next year, you can replant and recoup that,” she said. “With maple trees, that's an infrastructure that once that's destroyed or damaged, it's going to be decades to recover it.”
Schirmer and her husband will also have to reroute lines that carry sap from tree to tree to account for the missing damaged trees.
“If you've got a line of 30 trees in there, and you lose some in key places, that can really affect the way you're going to have to reroute that whole line,” she said. “You're going to have to run a new line, because can't just leave a hole in it, right? It's like trying to suck through a straw that somebody poked a hole in.”
Kevin Hart, president of Maplewood Farms in Union County, said about half a dozen trees have either been uprooted from the wind or have oversaturated soil from heavy rains. Four of those trees produced syrup. He said he’ll lose at most two gallons of syrup, which comes out to be around $125. He thinks this loss is “insignificant,” especially since he expands the system every year.
He has about 2,500 taps total among approximately 1,000 maple trees, which make up about half of the forest. He lost four taps from storms.
“We'll probably pick up 100, 200 more taps this year by expanding,” he said. “So, those four trees will easily pick up with new lines.”
Maple syrup production season starts at the end of February.
