Peter (00:05):

The sound of rusting leaves is a sound I'm sure all of us here in the north country know well, but the trees that produce these leaves also produce an important cash crop, sugar maples, scientific name, Acer saccharum produce sap that is boiled down to make the delicious breakfast condiment maple syrup. Sugaring in New York is a multimillion dollar industry with a total production value of 27.7 million dollars in 2020. The economic value and cultural tradition of sugaring in the North Country makes sugar maples an extremely important species.

Peter (00:42):

Welcome to the Naturally Speaking podcast. I'm Peter DiNinno. And today we'll be talking to John Newman about his experience in the maple sugar industry, how he manages his wood lot, environmental factors that affect sugaring both now and potentially in the future, and he may even have some tips for you if you're looking to start tapping trees. Mr. Newman was born and raised in Canton, New York, graduated from St. Lawrence University in 1994 and later earned his Masters in 2001. And is currently the head men's cross country and track and field coach at St. Lawrence University, in addition to running his small sugaring business. Welcome coach, thanks for, agreeing to do this interview and welcome to the Naturally Speaking podcast. We're gonna be talking about management of

Peter (01:35):

sugar bushes, which are stands of maple trees for sugaring in the North Country. Could you start by giving us a little introduction to your background in sugaring, you know, how you got into it and where you learned from

John Newman (01:51):

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Thanks for having me course. Yeah, my background probably got started just as a youth in the North Country and that, you know, maple products seemed to be pretty prevalent and was always the go-to, option in my household growing up. So, never really even heard of unnatural or artificially sugared maple tasting products that you sometimes see or hear about. It turns out my grandparents were sugar makers, but before I was really old enough to know what was going on at the time. So it turned out I didn't really have that direct experience with that, but then fast forward to when my wife and I finally purchased some land on my grandparents' dairy farm to build a home, it turns out that the wooded area was some of the sugar bush of years ago when they were active, actively harvesting maple sap and make making maple syrup.

John Newman (02:55):

So there was always kind of like that tradition and history in my family, even though it wasn't like direct hands on from my perspective. So I didn't actually get into that until my oldest daughter was I think in about third grade, she had to do a science project for school, and we were trying to think what we could do to kind of like guide her into a particular project. And it just dawned on me that, "Hey, we've got these maple trees, it's the right time of year. I know that there are buckets and spiles on the family farm. Why don't we, you know, drill a couple holes in the trees and see how this actually works from start to finish and try to just go about it from stage one." So that's what we decided to do. And my daughter was all excited about it at the very beginning and, you know, the cool part was going out in the woods and, you know, tapping those first couple trees.

John Newman (03:55):

We, I think we put three buckets out, collected the sap for like a day and a half, had enough SAP to start boiling, made a wood, a makeshift fire pit in the backyard, bought a five gallon stock pot set up a little grill basically to start boiling the sap on that outside open, air fire basically. Took forever to boil the sap Finally got enough where it was like starting to get concentrated, close to what maple syrup would be. Again, this is going at it cold, no like real direct knowledge of how this is supposed to happen, just kind of winging it for all intents and purposes and had enough where we thought we had maple syrup, brought it in to finish the last little bit on the stove and tasted what I think we ended up with what would be equivalent to about two or three shot glasses of maple syrup from like basically two full days of harvesting and boiling and such.

John Newman (04:53):

And it's like, oh, this is not great. This is very smoky tasting. It's all grainy. It tastes like there's stuff in there, how do you, how do you get this filtered out? How do you prevent all this stuff from happening, so you actually have good tasting maple syrup. So from that moment, I myself was hooked on the whole idea of maple sugaring and like this whole process and how cool it was to be out in nature and just harvest your own sap from trees that we had, actually end up with a finished product. Albeit the first round was not a true finished product. It had a lot to learn at that point. Interesting enough, my daughter was pretty much done with that science project just before we finished that first batch. So she'd moved on to something else at that point, but like I said, I was hooked.

Peter (05:44):

Cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool that it started as a family thing. And I know now you sell your syrup. So you've clearly got a bigger operation going now.

John Newman (05:57):

Yeah, More than three trees <laugh>

Peter (06:00):

So about how many trees do you tap now and on what size land?

John Newman (06:07):

Yeah, so our property is about 50 acres of which I'd say maybe about a third, a quarter of which is probably wooded. Some of that is more densely maple sugar trees, but it's also very mixed forest for the most part. So there's only like a couple acres that is like mostly sugar maple. There is a neighboring property that we have access to that extends out a little bit, but our wooded area is probably less than 10, 12 acres of what we actually harvest maple sap from at this point. We're usually around 250 to 300 taps, hopefully closer to that 300 mark this year.

Peter (06:52):

For reference one healthy tree produces about 10 to 20 gallons of sap per year. And about 40 gallons of sap is needed to make a gallon of syrup.

John Newman (07:02):

We started out using mostly buckets, all buckets. And then as I started learning more about the process, I got excited about checking out the tubing options and how that would play into our small operation, whether it was cost effective, all that. And it turns out it had to be cost effective because time wise, with my schedule, I only usually had a few hours at night to, you know, collect the sap and then try to boil it before <laugh>, before getting up for school and work the next day for us. So quickly transitioned to tubing in those couple years just trying to manage it myself for the most part.

Peter (07:44):

Yeah. I've heard about like high, high suction tubing too. Do you use any like newer technologies like that?

John Newman (07:53):

Okay, so yeah, you're talking about like high vacuum tubing systems. Ours is not high vacuum. Um, we usually run about 16, 17, maybe 18 inches of vacuum. So it's jus a scale like one atmosphere I think is just under 30 inches of mercury. So we're about half an atmosphere if you want to think about it in terms of just that.

Peter (08:19):

If you were a little confused about these pressure measurements, don't worry, basically an inch of mercury and an atmosphere are two units of pressure. An atmosphere is equal to the mean atmospheric pressure at sea level, which is equivalent to just under 30 inches of mercury.

John Newman (08:35):

We use our vacuum pump, was designed, i's an old pump. It's probably like 60 years old, maybe older than that. It was a dairy pump. So they're, they're made to handle milk machines and be safe for <laugh> for, dairy cows. So the suction can, has to be limited to some degree. So, we have vacuum, it's not high vacuum, but it definitely helps. And it keeps more steady sap flow when conditions aren't normally optimal for sap flow naturally.

Peter (09:08):

Oh, cool. And with your kind of mixed woods, how meticulously do you manage your property? Do you manage the areas that you're not sugaring or...

John Newman (09:24):

Yeah, that's a good question. It's something I've, you know, it's always on my mind, like how I could better manage our wood lot. I'm not a professional in that area at all, no specialized training and such however, my grandfather and my dad and uncles, they were all good stewards of the land being dairy farmers and involved in that part. And we grew up cutting firewood for the family houses on the property as a kid. So that was always one aspect that I was pretty familiar with and we only ever cut down dead wood basically for firewood. We never cut live trees usually. So it was always kind of like thinking ahead from that perspective a little bit. So now in our sugar woods, like I said, it's a pretty mixed bag of what we have.

John Newman (10:18):

I mean, we have some cedar stands that are kind of mixed in with some of our maple. So as I got into the sugaring operation, I found out pretty quickly that all these small cedar trees that are surrounding the maple trees that I want to tap, first of all, they're kind of in the way to be able to get a bucket on the tree a lot of times, or be able to get to it. So it is some selective thinning around that part and just to make some access trails and such. I don't do a ton of like additional forest management, I guess I try to keep it as low impact as possible. First couple years when we were still using buckets and collecting with basically a wagon behind my tractor I had a path that went through the woods and then I realized, well, that's probably not great for compaction and what that's doing to the soil and potentially the root system.

John Newman (11:15):

I had a, a forester come in and do a land management plan for us just to have that more formal guide to approach the whole idea. Comes out, walks the woods, does like a tree inventory analysis and soil analysis. You get a whole book with all kinds of information, it's free. It was through the conservation office. It was a really great option. To actually select which trees you're gonna maybe cut to make your maplewood more productive, I never followed through with getting the exact plan on that. So kind of just doing that from trees around a primary tree, that's a good producer for us, try to selectively remove ones that are maybe gonna impede that. For the most part, I kind of let things go as natural as possible and try to work around it, which is a little easier now with the tubing, as long as I have paths to get the tubing from tree to tree, I don't really worry about trying to thin things out otherwise too much.

Peter (12:24):

That's really good to know that that resource is available. Um, you said that was a Forester through conservation.

John Newman (12:31):

Yeah, the New York state conservation office, there's one right here in Canton and I just stopped in one day. I said, this is what I'm thinking. I've heard that you can get a forest management plan and they said yep, it's free and came out, and I walked around for a little bit, let the person check out the woods. Within a couple weeks I had a full booklet with all kinds of data and analysis and basically just informational resource to use going forward.

Peter (13:04):

If you are interested in this service, the New York DEC page on private forest management is linked on the podcast homepage.

Peter (13:10):

Keeping your thinning fairly minimal. Do you do any work with thinning the sugar maples out to manipulate age structure of the stand?

Peter (13:22):

Just a quick note, the general idea with thinning is to maximize sunlight that your target trees have access to, or to manage the age structure of the stand, meaning how many trees of distinct ages you have.

John Newman (13:33):

To some extent, seems like, for each season I'm always kind of backed into the corner, having enough time to make this work every year. So I'm not as proactive as I should be, but there are options or opportunities where I've, you know, thinned out a couple trees that are next to a primary tree that we want to basically let thrive more. So that, that happens to some extent. And then obviously if something decides to, to die, <laugh> we kind of remove that and use that for sugar wood for the, we have a wood fire evaporator, to process the sap. So we're trying to do that with just the, the natural products from the property.

Peter (14:20):

Yeah. And with placing your taps, you said like kind of working around things, but is there a strategy for placing the taps on specific spots in the tree to minimize damage to the tree?

John Newman (14:32):

Yeah. I mean, I guess the tapping process is probably another big, initiative in terms of like, just trying to manage your forest too. And that, if a tree looks like it's obviously not healthy or dying, I mean, you have a choice, right. You can say, "Hey, let's not tap it and see if it kind of does better on its, you know, without that extra little bit of stress of the tap hole" or "Hey, this isn't gonna make, it's gonna die anyway, let's go ahead and put a couple taps on it and then it's gonna get cut in a couple years." So I kind of go through that methodology in my head, whether it's worth tapping or not, and whether it's gonna be a tree that's gonna survive. But, yeah, definitely. There's a tapping strategy that you use.

John Newman (15:21):

You try not to tap in the same tap hole, obviously, because you end up with a channel of wood in the tree that becomes inactive. So basically it's just inactive and it won't produce sap if you tap it in the next year or two. So the idea is you work your way around a tree each year. You know, you go over about three or four inches and then up or down from your last tap hole, maybe six to eight inches even, so you kind of make a zigzag w pattern around the tree each year. And theoretically, if you start, if you don't tap trees that are too small to begin with, by the time you've worked around the tree, the new wood is grown out and then you're not tapping into wood that's inactive anymore

Peter (16:11):

For pests, insects, deer. If you consider them pests for browsing, beaver, how do you deal with those problems?

John Newman (16:22):

Yeah, the beaver was a tough one because definitely like to let things go as nature intended, but as the beaver dam kept getting higher and higher and kind of flooding the woods and some of our equipment a couple years ago kind of had to be a little bit proactive, got a nuisance permit to manage the beaver dam and let some water release. I could have had them trapped, but we didn't really want to go that route. It's not really my vibe, but would've considered that if it had gotten any more aggressive, honestly, just because it was starting to be a bigger problem for a lot of things. But yeah, the deer really, I don't think affect the maplewood too much. You know, one of the questions I get a lot is with your tubing lines in the woods what happens when a deer runs into it? And I'm like, well, how many times have you seen a deer run into like a fence or anything else in the woods, like a down tree, they know how to maneuver and go around things.

John Newman (17:30):

So it's not really deer, they aren't really a big issue from that perspective. Some of the bigger concerns are more like, I'd say like squirrels, it's one that we hear a lot about and I assume it's doing all the chewing on the maple tubing system. And that's just a function of a particular line not draining completely. What happens is if there's a little bit of sap left in the lines at the end of the season, that actually will turn to more of a vinegar over time because of the sugars. I'm not sure of the chemistry, but anyhow, it turns to more of a vinegar type product, which has a salty flavor, which attracts like squirrels and chipmunks and things like that.

Peter (18:17):

This is particularly problematic because sap lines stay up year round, which allows these pests to get into them.

John Newman (18:23):

So somehow they can smell through the plastic tubing lines and they'll often just chew enough to get a taste of whatever's in there. So it's usually not that big a deal, but with our, I think we have a little over a mile of tubing in our woods and over that course of a whole mile of tubing, you know, there's probably maybe half a dozen to a dozen little spots each year that need a little repair job, but it's usually pretty insignificant compared to what it could be.

Peter (18:51):

Huh. That's kinda weird, I hadn't thought about squirrels.

John Newman (18:56):

<laugh> yeah. They're probably the biggest nuisance when it comes to the tubing systems, at least. Now what other things are other animals doing to trees, that I'm not too sure. Porcupines I'm sure. Get pretty aggressive on some of the trees, things like that, woodpeckers I guess, I don't know exactly all the birds, but I think there's a particular one that does like maple trees and they'll do some damage to the outer surfaces of the trees and over time can make that tree become pretty unhealthy.

Peter (19:28):

So other environmental factors, like weather, drought, ice storms, is there anything you can do to prepare your wood lot for those or have you had to deal with those problems at all?

John Newman (19:43):

Yeah. To some extent ice and wind seems to be pretty rough on trees, especially our older trees. So we'll end up with branches down, trunks that get split, things like that, in particular wind or ice conditions, almost every season before we put the taps out, we've gotta look at trees that have fallen across the lines and things like that, which that's pretty easy fix. You just cut them and remove them. Maybe that's your firewood for that season or the next season kind of thing. But yeah, you can't do much to stop the wind, ice, and rain and that sort of thing, but I guess there's probably some things you could do to the tree. I'm not sure what they are, but like maybe trimming some branches that are already weak or whatever, but at the end of the day, they're gonna come down, whether you do that or not. And it's really not gonna end up end up being too big a deal, from a production standpoint or the tree itself.

Peter (20:46):

What's the sugaring community like around here, do you guys share information or ideas a lot? Do you talk about management techniques?

John Newman (20:55):

Yeah. That's actually one of the coolest things about this. What started out as just a very simple hobby for me, it's become kind of like just a little small business, but the community is actually one of the reasons why I probably stayed involved with it so much is because everybody's been a tremendous resource. As I said, I never really had much firsthand knowledge or direct training on the whole process. I knew about it. I've seen it. I've ,collected sap for other sugar makers before things like that, but I've never really done the whole process from start to finish until I got started, I think about 12 years ago. But I immediately started trying to research and figure out what opportunities there are to learn how to do this. The Cornell Cooperative Extension was doing some `informational opportunities.

John Newman (21:45):

So that was one of the first things I went it to, got connected with a few people there, found out that there's actually associations for this stuff between the county has its own maple association, New York State, members of both of those, and have attended conferences and such. Everybody I've come across in the maple industry has been super helpful. Any question you have, they're gonna share their own personal ideas of course. But everybody's got great information to share and it's a very two way, very open, community. Nobody's trying to say, "Hey, I've got this secret way of doing something. I'm not gonna tell you." It's not like that at all. Whatever's good for one person they wanna share and make sure everybody has access to it. So there's honestly tremendous amount of research at a lot of these state schools, UVM in particular Cornell, UNH, a lot of the state schools have their own maple research programs and forests that they manage and collect data from and, and come up with new techniques and ideas. Usually pretty good at just falling along on what's coming down the pike there.

Peter (23:01):

Yeah, it's great that there's such a strong community and you mentioned someone will share, you know, their own idea with you. Are there any really prevalent philosophies or contentious philosophies among the sugaring community in the North Country?

John Newman (23:18):

Trying to think what would be really all that contentious? The one thing that did come to mind was something I kind of came across in the earlier years of getting into this too is that if you were a small business doing this, you could get certified as certified organic, which is obviously a big selling point. People like to see that on their products that, you know, this is an organic product, but you know, all maple syrup should be organic, otherwise it's not maple syrup. So I guess the contentious part is why spend the money to basically get certified when the product in and of itself is organic to begin with. There's some stringent guidelines to fall into that category. But if you're doing best practices for your business and in that operation, then you should be doing those anyway. I think that becomes a little contentious with some folks like, "Hey, I'm not gonna pay to get this certification when you know, I'm not gonna say I'm certified organic of course, but you certainly have an organic product at the end of the day." So I have heard some people say that's, that's something they're not into is going through that process and basically paying for the certification because the extra cost that goes into it,

Peter (24:48):

It's known that one of the biggest factors for sap yield is temperature and that freeze-thaw cycles with freezing temperatures a night long during the day throughout the late winter and early spring are crucial for sap production. Is there a concern within the sugaring community that climate change could threaten those cycles and the sap production? Is it something that you've thought about or have some ideas on?

John Newman (25:12):

Yeah, I don't have a ton of ideas because we're kind of locked into our location. And kind of one of the prevailing thoughts is that the maple, I don't know if you wanna call it the maple corridor or whatever, but like the Northeast is basically the only place in, North America that you can actually make maple syrup. It's where the sugar maples are, which is the best tree for getting high concentration of sugar from the sap, which is the most effective. But also where you actually have those freeze-thaw cycles. So basically you go as far as like Michigan, Wisconsin, um, I guess corner of Iowa, maybe <laugh> Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania. And then there's like a few little sections of some of those bordering states that you can actually make maple syrup, but it's pretty limited in those areas.

John Newman (26:12):

But then as you move New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Quebec, Maine, even Ontario, those are the bigger producing states and have the best conditions for it. But they keep saying that the, basically the maple line of where that transition is for production to not being able to produce maple syrup has been moving further north, over the course of the last decade or so. And the prevailing thought is a lot of that is due to climate change and just those temperature variations being less what they used to be. So yeah, it's definitely a concern. At what point does where we are in Northern New York, how long before that happens. And it'd be a shame to see such a historical operation, not my operation, but like maple sugaring in general, being phased out due to climate change. It was one of the first ways to make sugar basically in this area years ago. So you wanna hopefully keep those maple traditions alive and well. So anything we can do to reduce climate change is a good thing.

Peter (27:31):

Yeah. And it is a very strong tradition in the North Country that I hope can continue for many years. Along those same lines, I also read a paper that indicated that warming winter temperatures will result in a shorter sap . flow period, if traditional tapping schedules are maintained. Are concerns like that something you take into account when planning you're tapping schedule, is it something you might look to modify in the future?

John Newman (28:04):

Yeah. I mean, I guess we'd have to roll with the changes obviously. It seems like several times in the last few years, the weather's been pretty conducive earlier in the spring than it has been. So like the big operations, the ones with the multi-thousand tap operations they definitely have to do a lot more planning and have to be prepared earlier because they want to capitalize on that. My operation's small enough that I'm gonna still kind of plan around the best window of maybe trying to get three to four to five weeks out of a season, which is probably about as good as we can expect right now. So, I'm small enough, I can put all of my taps out in about a day by myself, maybe two days at most.

John Newman (28:54):

So, you know, once I see the weather starting to get close to the time, usually around the start of March, the very end of February, it looks like we're gonna have those freeze-thaw cycles for a bit, that's when I'm jumping out there and trying to get those taps in and ready to go for the season. But like I say, some of the bigger operations they're starting their tapping in January, just so that they're ready for maybe a January thaw late in the season so that they can get things going so early and extend their season.

Peter (29:21):

Thanks for joining us. And I hope our listeners find it educational. I know I learned a thing or two.

John Newman (29:30):

My pleasure.

Peter (29:30):

If you enjoyed learning about sugaring from a north country native, you might love New York maple weekend. Maple weekend is an opportunity at the end of every March for people to visit their local maple farms to learn and enjoy tasty maple treats for more information, check out the link on the podcast homepage.

Peter (29:47):

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Naturally Speaking and thank you to Mr. Newman again for taking the time out of his day to share some of his knowledge of forest systems management and sugaring. Check out our other podcasts and social media at Nature Up North on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Get up and get outdoors with Nature Up North!