By Tina Barton
Introduction
I, your humble webmaster, attended the Southern Syrup Research Symposium last weekend. Despite being new to the sugaring world, I would like to give my summary. I certainly learned a lot! And I believe it was a huge success!
I started out with a low note because, though leaving in plenty of time to get there for the registration and welcome, I came up on some flooding in Gilmer County. I live primarily in Maryland, but my vacation home is in Tanner, where I stayed Thursday night. To get to Summersville, I had to pass through Sand Fork to get to the interstate. I saw that the road was flooded out ahead, and not knowing an alternate route, I decided to go back to Glenville for internet world. Still not finding any information of use, I decided to go back to Tanner and regroup. I had a lot to do there anyway. I am embarking on a mission to try to deter Asian ladybugs from entering my house! Anyway after pondering whether to leave again, and giving up on trying to find a website that had roads that were flooded out on that particular day, I called the Sheriff’s Office. The lady that answered was very kind and she said, “Oh you can get there that way. You just have to go around the church.” Being only a sometime-resident, I haven’t learned all the ins and outs of flood routes.
Promoting Sustainability Through Cluster Development
I got to the Symposium just in time for the second round of talks. So I was disappointed that I missed the talk on sanitation, because being so new to the process, I was afraid that my equipment would not be safely sanitized. The first talk I attended was the talk by Dr. Dee and our own Cindy Martel on promoting sustainability through cluster development. Despite not being in the business for profit, I learned about agritourism, and how it is growing in West Virginia and how the department of Agriculture is trying to facilitate that growth. They talked about getting other businesses tied together with our Maple businesses so that people coming to West Virginia could come to our farm as part of a larger tour of the area. Hence the concept of a cluster of businesses. Maple days are a good example of this. People will come to tour a maple farm and perhaps go to a park for some leisure activities, and then have a nice dinner at a partnering restaurant. So while this talk was not immediately useful for me, it was very interesting, and it is just possible that I could participate through someone else’s Maple Farm sometime. Also I think that agritourism could be tied into the West Virginia State Folk Festival in Gilmer County. So it did get some Wheels spinning in my head.
Lunch
My next session was lunch! And let me take this time to really thank the organizers of this conference. Mike Rechlin and Cindy Martel, the Department of Agriculture, Future Generations, West Virginia University, our corporate sponsors, and all our participating speakers from West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, and of course Vermont, pulled together an amazing opportunity for experienced Maple producers as well as newbies like me. For only $40, this was an investment that can’t be beat. As for lunch, it was very good and filling. We had a cheese and potato soup and some sandwiches and wraps. Oh and some devil’s food cake with white icing. Yummy!
Keys to High-Yield Sap Production
My next session was with Tim Perkins from the Proctor Maple Research Center in Vermont. He had given the talk on sanitation earlier, so I was glad I got to attend this one because he also touched on sanitation. The title of the talk was keys to high-yield sap production. Again, I’m not in this for profit. I’m only trying to collect sap and make syrup for my friends and family, but there’s no harm in trying to increase my yield so that we get as much yummy liquid gold as possible! However I don’t use any fancy equipment like vacuum pumps or even an elaborate tubing system. I use short tubes into buckets. Actually I use soda bottles with holes drilled in the lids, but I do know that’s not the best practice and so I will change it up in the next couple years. In this talk, we learned about the factors that would increase our yield while also increasing net profit and sustainability. If you can imagine a Venn diagram with those three things in it, we’re looking to increase the intersection of the three. The factors that go into this are the trees, tapping practices, sanitation, and vacuum. I learned about the importance of trees size, but not only that, the importance of their canopy. Also critical is the tapping history. You cannot tap in a staining area, where the tree was tapped previously. If you hit staining you will drastically decrease the amount of sap. I did know this. But we learned some techniques on how to avoid staining, and how big stains really are. The tapping practices that I jotted down were that we should be using the 5/16 sprouts, longer drop lines, careful spacing of tap holes, utilizing the full tapping band, and finding a balance between wounding the tree and the yield for sustainability. They talked about tapping below the lateral line which works just fine if you have vacuum. I don’t have vacuum or a lateral line. Oh well. They even talked about spout color and how sometimes it can make a difference depending on whether the climate is cooler or warmer that particular year. As for sanitation, I learned that if I want to start using vacuum, sap can be pulled back into the tree so sanitation is extremely important for the spout in the drop line. The drop line can be replaced every 3 years, but the spiles should be replaced every year. There was a lot of data on net profit for all these techniques, and my head got full really quickly.
Sustainable Tapping Guidelines
I stayed in the room to hear from Abby Van Den Berg who also works with the Proctor Maple Research Center in Vermont. She gave us some more sustainable tapping guidelines. I guess because my brain was already full, I didn’t take very many notes on that talk. She did a very good job though. She had some graphs that she said were the most boring graphs in the world, showing growth rates from trees of various sizes, and as expected, the rate increased linearly as the tree size goes up. The experiments done on tree growth rates were with a control group of trees where no tapping or thinning was done, a group where thinning was done with tapping, and a group of trees that wasn’t thinned but was tapped. Her results echoed the importance of tree canopy again and about trying to make sure that your tapping tree is the dominant or codominant species in the stand, so thinning is important.
West Virginia Temperature Regimes
The next talk that I went to was about West Virginia temperature regions. Because there were concurrent talks, sometimes it was difficult to decide which one to attend. There was also a talk on experiments with sap flow in 3/16 tubing which I wanted to attend. Anyway the temperature regions talk was very good because it talked about the microcosms of climate that exist in West Virginia. There were some graphs of data showing when freeze/thaw cycles occurred during tapping season for each region, as well as extended periods of warmer days. The speaker, Jeff Debellis, said that they noticed when there were 200 “growing degree days,” which are days with temperatures in a range which allows microbes to grow, the tap holes tend to dry up. This can’t really mean “days” because there aren’t 200 days in winter. Upon further research (aka google “growing degree days”) growing degree days are actually units calculated mathematically as the integral of warmth above a base temperature. Now, I have a masters in math but I never ever had to use integrals in my career. Huh. But I do remember that an integral is an area under a curve. An example that Wikipedia so graciously gives is that a day with a high of 23 °C and a low of 12 °C (and a base of 10 °C) would contribute 7.5 Growing Degree Days. Way to choose terminology, folks!
The way I would choose to look at it is that we are giving the tapping season a “score”, which is an accumulation of scores for each day. If the base temperature is 40 °F and the average temperature of the day is below that, the score is 0 as we wouldn’t expect anything to grow in refrigeration temperatures. Otherwise, the number of microbes that grow is proportional to the difference between the base and the average temperature of the day. This is an approximation of the integral described above. The average, according to Wikipedia, is calculated as the high temperature plus the low temperature, divided by two. So you calculate the average, subtract the base and voila, you have a score for the day. Add up the scores in your tapping season thus far, and when it exceeds your threshold of 200, you are probably done, according to Jeff’s empirical evidence.
Anyway, they noticed that in Charleston, where it’s lower elevation and a little farther south than the other areas they studied, the 200 “days” was met in mid-February when there was an unusually warm spell of 7 days in 2018. Jeffrey remarked that there should be at least 12 freeze-thaw Cycles for a profitable season. Charleston had a mean of 12.2 of them over the last few years. So they are barely profitable down there. Other areas in higher elevations and farther north, tend to have more like 18 to 25 Cycles. Our friends from Kentucky noted that they start tapping on December 15th. That’s because their season ends sooner than ours and they have to take advantage of any freeze thaw cycles that might happen in December, even though there are more warm days in December too. Three days of 70° in a row as a killer for the season. Some producers drilled deeper when their taps dried up because there was a good forecast of freeze-thaw coming up. I learned later that re-drilling a little deeper is controversial.
I mentioned being at a similar elevation to Charleston but a bit farther north, and I didn’t even tap until February 27, after the warm spell. I’m lucky to have sugar maples because the red maples were already budding. I had a good week except the day the nor’easter came through and if I stayed two more weeks I would have continued to get good sap flow. So my findings lined up with the data, but many people already had dry taps by then. So they took advantage of the early weeks of winter, whereas I used the latter end. My problem is that I’m traveling from Maryland. I have limited time so I can’t afford to go when things are frozen up, or take a chance on getting in a blizzard in the high mountains of Maryland on my travels, or getting stuck on Croagh Patrick (my hill) in ice and snow. I have to hope to push my season as close to March as possible. But that’s me, and I’m not in it for profit.
Tapping Saplings (I think)
I have lost my notes on the last talk of the day. It’s not on the schedule because it was added later. Maybe it will come to me later. I know that I was ready for a nap when it was all over!
There was a discussion on tapping saplings. I don’t remember which talk this was part of. You tap them, then cut them back, and let them regrow, each year. I think I was zoning out. In fact, I think this was exactly the last talk: Tapping smaller trees. You can find a YouTube video about it here:
Dinner Break and Reception Fun
After all this, we had a chance then to go out to eat or do whatever we wanted for a couple of hours, and then we regrouped for the reception in the evening. The reception was a lot of fun! We had square dancing and bluegrass music and lots of enthusiasm! Especially from Mike Rechlin!
The Deputy Commissioner for WV Dept of Ag
The next morning we had a welcome session from the Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Agriculture for West Virginia. He explained to us how the commissioner is an elected position unlike most States. He talked about how West Virginia has fewer regulations on agriculture than most States, and how even without the regulations, we perform as good or better in protecting the Chesapeake Bay. He talked about farm-to-table events which go hand-in-hand with the cluster of businesses used in Agritourism that we learned about the day before. He emphasized that West Virginia has a large number of sugar maples and a very small number of producers, and so we should really be taking advantage of this important opportunity.
Panel on Agroforestry
Next I attended a panel discussion on agroforestry and this was my absolute favorite talk! Agroforestry, according to a speaker from Virginia Tech (my alma mater!) is the holistic management of a forest that optimizes benefits of biological interactions. For example, you might have sheep grazing under a well-managed sugar bush, or interleave rows of wheat with rows of trees, or incorporate a shiitake mushroom operation or wild-simulated ginseng in the sugar bush. There are all kinds of different things, such as vineyards within a fruit orchard etc. There is a documentary they recommended called “Sustainable” that touches on this idea. To get more information you can contact the Appalachian Beginning Forest Farmers Coalition, and the Association for Temperate Agroforestry. We went around the room and talked about our unique situations and if we were interested in agroforestry. A lot of us were, and some were already doing it.
Producer Experiences and Learning
After this was a session on Producer experiences and learning. One person from the mountains of Virginia talked about what a desert his area is, and about experiments with redrilling after the taps dried, and how his syrup didn’t taste right but he was able to mix it with good syrup and it was fine. One producer talked about experiments in Virginia Beach! They tried sweet gum to no avail but had luck with black walnut. Our own Brandon Daniels talked about his experiences with designing innovative equipment for other producers. I think the fourth person was from the high altitudes in West Virginia. The mediator was from Ohio and he said he is totally against redrilling after taps go dry, because he is worried it could cause microbes to get out of hand and have overall bad effects.
Lunch, Day 2
Next we had another delicious lunch, this time of lasagne and salad, with spice cake. Mike Rechlin, Cindy Martel and some others spoke during lunch about ACER grants and stuff like that.
Climate Change
After lunch was a plenary session on climate change and what we can expect for sugar production. I was very interested in this talk going in, but it was after lunch, and the slides looked familiar, like I think I read an article or paper on the topic, perhaps by the same person. I dozed off. My take on it was that the maple tree will survive moderately well in global warming. But whether we’ll get enough freeze-thaw events to make sugaring worthwhile remains to be seen. Basically West Virginia is the canary in the sugar bush. What we do in upcoming years will give the northerners some insights on what to expect when our climate reaches them.
Panel on Technological Innovations
Then I went to a panel discussion on technological innovations. I probably should have gone home then because I was not really interested in using high tech equipment right now. If I were using a web of tubing I could get a small vacuum pump and increase my yield. There are these small diaphragm vacuum pumps such as ones by Shurflo that are $60-80. They are not tolerant of leaks. You should not get one designed for chemical sprayer or marine use. You should use 3/16 tubing for the main line for maximum capacity. If I have a 50 foot drop I could use 3/16 tubing and get vacuum without a pump. They kindly clarified for me that though the tubing is 3/16 the spout is still 5/16 and the tube end is 3/16. Lightbulb moment. I was wondering why Tim Perkins said to use 5/16 spiles if 3/16 increases yield. So now I get it. Tim was talking spouts, these guys are talking tubing. I don’t think I have the gravity for vacuum, but pumps require monitoring and batteries etc. Something so simple as pulling sap from a tree and boiling it has become high tech and complicated. The innovations save work and increase yield no doubt, but they are an expensive investment and not right for me at this point. A reverse osmosis device would be nice and they said I could get a small under the sink model for $300 or so, which is still more than I want to spend as a hobbyist. So we have gone from a labor intensive process of hauling sap and cooking it, to a rather less labor intensive process involving monitoring pumps and leaks in tubes, and keeping everything running at max efficiency. It takes fewer hands, but the equipment is expensive. Even the monitoring devices are expensive, but they are probably cost effective in the long run. Since most farms are not in cell phone or internet range, it’s hard to come up with a remote monitoring system. Even a little cheap camera pointed at a gauge would be helpful if we could figure out how to get it transmitted to the comfort of the house. Satellite internet is used by some big operations. I’m about to find out how many taps I can manage the old fashioned way by tripling my number of taps. I’m not totally old fashioned. I hook my cooker to natural gas!
Conclusion
That’s it for me. I skipped the wrap up session. I was tired, and my brain was full. I learned a lot but my biggest take home was to make sure that my tree canopies are full. So I went through all my trees and decided to eliminate a few who have smaller canopies. I will keep 3/16 tubing in mind, and will go get better food grade buckets at least! I’m also going to explore agroforestry. My neighbor is interested in roots like ginseng so that would be a good thing to investigate. Also my brother in law grows shiitake mushrooms, or used to at least. He lives in Gloucester Virginia so if they can produce syrup in Virginia Beach, surely he can in Gloucester.
Thank you for your kind attention. Please send me your own takeaways from the symposium to webmaster@wvmspa.org .