History and tradition sweeten the maple harvest at Groundhog Road Farms

By Kayte Young

Published February 21, 2025 at 2:00 PM EST

A few members of the Maple Syrup Division Crew of Groundhog Road Farms pose in front of the maple syrup evaporator in February of 2024. From left to right: Sam Miller, Jim Diehl, Mark Miller, Ed Miller and Ben Ooley

This week on the show we head out to Groundhog Road Maple Farm to learn all about the family business that dates back to the eighteen eighties. Ed Miller and his friends and family have modernized the operation in recent years. We’ll learn how the syrup gets from the maple tree in the forest to the pancakes on your plate.

Maple season at Groundhog Road Farms is a time for family and friends to get together, and bottling day is a flurry of activity.

The Miller Family moved to their farm in Bedford Indiana in 1880. Ed Miller says that from the beginning, his family harvested maple sap from their trees every year, and processed it into syrup,

“Everybody made syrup back then...anything you could do to make some income, that's what they did," Ed told me, especially during the depression.

Once they got into farming cattle, hogs and row crops, they didn’t have much time for maple syrup. Around the time when Ed was leaving home, they let it go.

When Ed and his siblings got older and had families of their own, they decided to revive the sugar camp as a wintertime activity for the kids, and to bring the family together.

The Millers like to stay about 2 years ahead on wood needed to run the wood-fired maple syrup evaporator. The fluctuating temperatures that result from using wood fuel cause a particular kind of caramelization that improves the flavor of the syrup. — The Millers like to stay about 2 years ahead on wood needed to run the wood-fired maple syrup evaporator. The fluxuating temperatures that result from using wood fuel cause a particular kind of caramelization that improves the flavor of the syrup.

Mark Miller loads wood into the evaporator oven at Groundhog Road Farms in Bedford, Indiana.

Now Ed and his brothers and sisters are the elders in the family. They’re still running the sugar camp. They’ve upgraded the building and equipment, and they even get inspected by the health department, so they can sell their syrup commercially.

The sap is pulled from the maple trees with a vacuum pump and travels through this complex web of tubing in the woods.

The sap gathering has shifted from buckets hanging on tree trunks to a complex web of plastic tubing running on tensile wires throughout the forest and a vacuum pump that pulls the sap faster than gravity would.

Sometimes those lines get holes in them–usually from squirrels.

“Our younger generation, and mainly the girls, have got hearing, and they can hear that high frequency squeals that that vacuum puts off, and man, they can just go in the woods and start finding ‘em and you just cut that out put a connector in, put another one in and they can just run through the woods fixin’ holes. Older guys that can’t hear, you’re a strugglin’ trying to find ‘em,” Ed laughs.

I really love that image of girls traipsing through the woods finding the leaks and tagging them, or perhaps repairing the lines themselves. It really speaks to the-all-hands-on deck nature of the syrup season out at the Miller family farm, and the joy that the maple harvest brings to everyone involved.

You can hear all about it in this week’s episode.