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A sweet syrup season

The winter that wasn’t had a lot of people pining for snow and skiing, but one group of folks that benefited from the mild winter sure thought the warm weather was sweet.

Mike Farrell, who runs Cornell University’s Uihlein forest in Lake Placid, said it was a great year for maple syrup.

“We had record production here. It was a great year in the North Country,” Farrell said this week. It was the “best year in a very long time.”

Farrell said that the maple station here made about 2,500 gallons of syrup this year, even though fewer taps were used.

“We actually had fewer taps this year because we harvested a lot of severely declining trees in the fall,” Farrell said.

While Uihlein may have used fewer taps this year, the overall trend for the industry is growth. Quebec and Vermont lead the maple syrup industry, but New York is no slouch. Last year the state produced more than 600,000 gallons of syrup, and Farrell said the trend across the industry and the North Country is that tappers are growing.

“Overall, the industry is growing and new taps are being added at a good rate throughout the North Country and the entire maple industry,” Farrell said.

Stephen Childs also runs a Cornell sugarbush, but this one is outside of Ithaca at the Arnot teaching and research forest. Childs said that the year was good, but there was a lot of variation across the state.

“Early and late tappers seemed to do the best. Tapping just before the heat wave seemed to be a problem,” Childs said in an email. “(It was) probably average or a little above for much of the state but (there was a) big variation between producers depending on when they tapped and location.”

Childs added that this year was “probably in the top five” as far as production went.

The mild winter and bipolar spring created great conditions for those tappers that were ready. The maple sap typically starts to flow when days are warm and nights are below freezing. But the early onset of the sap flow caught some tappers off guard.

“The warmth allowed for early flows and got things moving much sooner than usual in the trees,” Farrell said.

Both Farrell and Childs have tapped birch trees as well this year. Birch sap and syrup are growing in popularity, but it’s been a bad year for the sap run, which usually occurs later than the maple run.

“We are collecting birch now, and it’s a poor season so far,” Farrell said. “The cold snap followed by the hot dry conditions has been terrible for birch flows, and we are getting one-third to one-half of what we would normally be collecting right now.”

Childs added that his birch taps had started to flow, then froze up again.

Now it’s running again, but not all that well,” Childs said.

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