FROM THE FARM REPORT: MAPLE SYRUP PRODUCTION AT MINER INSTITUTE

William Miner’s Heart’s Delight Farm began making maple syrup from the sugar maple trees in its forests over 100 years ago. In those days the sap was collected in metal buckets, with the sap then transferred into a larger container and taken by a team of horses to the sugar house where a wood-fired evaporator was used to produce maple syrup.

Maple syrup production continued following the founding of the William H. Miner Agricultural Research Institute in 1951. A “sugar house” was built in a forested area owned by the William H. Miner Foundation which while the area is miles from the farmstead it has many sugar maple trees. The evaporator in this sugar house used fuel oil instead of wood as a fuel source. And instead of metal buckets, plastic lines collected sap from the trees and transported it to a central collection site, greatly reducing the labor requirement. Application of a slight vacuum on the plastic lines increased sap production per tree. Two employees who worked on the Miner Institute farm during the growing season managed the maple syrup operation during the early spring. The Institute produced enough maple syrup to give a quart to each employee while selling most of the remaining several hundred gallons of syrup on the wholesale market. The sugar house was also used for educational purposes, as classes of schoolchildren visited early each spring to learn about maple syrup production and to get a taste of warm, just-made syrup.

By the early 1990s both the sugar house evaporator and the workers involved in maple syrup production were showing signs of age: The evaporator pan had repeatedly been repaired and was to the point where further repairs weren’t practical, and both employees were nearing retirement. The decision was therefore made to lease the maple trees to Parker Family Maple Farms, a large producer that uses a reverse osmosis system to remove water from the maple sap prior to evaporation. This relationship continued without problems until the North American Ice Storm of 1998, when over 3 inches of freezing rain devastated the region’s sugar maples and other trees. (The storm also brought down power lines and transmission towers; Miner Institute had to rely on emergency generators for 28 days before power was restored.) As a result of the ice storm, very little maple syrup was made in 1999 anywhere in Northeastern NY. Despite this, late that spring Earl Parker appeared in the Miner Institute Farm Office, checkbook in hand, to pay for the over 2000 taps his family leased from the Institute. “But Earl, you didn’t get any sap from those trees, did you? You spent all spring repairing the damage.” To which Earl replied, “Yes, but a deal is a deal.” (We refused payment, of course.) Earl has since passed away, but Miner Institute continues to lease its maple sugar trees to the Parker family — and for obvious reasons.

— Ev Thomas