I’d love to be able to afford maple syrup. As it stands I won’t eat the cheap Jemima stuff and can’t/won’t afford the maple stuff, so we just go without syrup (except the occasional kids’ birthday special treat).
One of the perks of living in Ottawa when I was in grad school was the relatively cheap and delicious cans of maple syrup that were available. I used to put it in my coffee.
That would be like selling stoners grow-kits instead of weed.
Absolutely. Yet, however rationally the argument can be put, you still know, if Dr Evil made maple syrup, this is how he’d do it, right?
While doing security patrols thru the machine-shop areas where I work, I’ve noticed containers labeled “Tramp Oil”. Usually we just tell homeless people trying to sleep in the bushes outside to move elsewhere.
Surely a market will remain for maple syrup made from “Genuine Non-Mutilated Maples!”?
I’d like to clear up some misconceptions, since I used to produce maple syrup in Vermont. Maple sap is low in sugar, around 1 to 3%, depending on the hillside and a lot of factors.
So, any increase in the sugar concentration cuts down the amount of energy needed to turn the sap into syrup.
Maple saplings grow slowly. The tree shown in the article with the bag on its head is more than 1 or 2 years old. That tree is at least 5 years old, and more likely closer to 10.
Maple tree trunks are not always round. In order to get a vacuum-sealed bag to stay on it, you have to use a compression ring. The compression ring compresses the cambium below the wound, and so it will be a delicate balancing act to get the pressure perfectly correct, to let the sap out but keep up a good vacuum seal. I wonder what trees will do after years of this. I also wonder about the pre-selection and breeding needed to make sure you grow round trees.
They say in the article that the maples will regrow that year. I believe it - maples are hardy trees and after the sap runs, they are ready to leaf out and go. How will it withstand having its head coppiced every year? I don’t know, and I bet that needs more research.
It will be a serious challenge to grow these trees and keep them healthy. The maple industry has been working very hard in the last 20 years to develop taps with one-way valves that do not let pathogens creep back up into the tree. So, to cut a tree’s head off, then expect it to remain healthy is a stretch. It will take some clever horticulture to make that a reality.
Maple sap is concentrated into sugar primarily by reverse osmosis. In the old days, it was all done through evaporation. Big producers spend thousands of dollars on huge RO machines to push the water out of the sap. Then, and this is the fascinating part of syrup production: maple sap has to be boiled in order to become syrup. You can’t just concentrate it down to syrup. It has to be boiled. That’s because of the Maillard reaction, which is another word for caramelization. Actually it is a high-temp interaction of amino acids and sugars, causing a brownish color. Without this reaction, concentrated maple sap would taste sweet, but not like “maple.” So it’s gotta be boiled.
I have seen evaporators in old abandoned sugar houses that are 50 feet long. With crews of dozens of guys, they would diligently collect all this stuff from tin buckets on the trees, to huge wood-staved tanks on horse-driven sleighs, to weeks-long boils at the sugarhouse. I have seen inverted stacks of buckets 10 feet high filling a 12x12 foot storage shed. Almost nobody does this anymore. It’s all done with surgical tubing, bailing wire, vacuum taps and vacuum pumps directly into tanks at the sugarhouse. And Canada has the USA beat by a long mile.
Check this out. This is how most medium-small operations do it these days. Small is anything under a few hundred taps.
Not for everyone. My wife can’t abide the taste of maple syrup; I think it might be one of those genetic things, like cilantro-tolerance. I don’t mind it occasionally, but would find it overpowering as a regular sweetener; I do better with molasses, even though it’s generally thought of as a “stronger” flavor than maple.
But they would also be cutting off all of the leaf buds.
OK, it will be a wonderful boost to syrup production. What else?
It will result in large tracts of land where NOTHING is grown except 6-foot-high maple saplings. They won’t allow any other plants in there because they would interfere with the producers getting at the saplings. Full grown maple trees will become rare. Since less land is needed to produce sap, there will no longer be as much economic incentive to protect forests from real estate developers who want to put up McMansions, so there will be an explosive growth of the suburbs in former sap-producing areas. With sap production up, prices for maple syrup will go down and so sap farmers and syrup producers will actually wind up no better off economically. Since young trees grow faster than old trees, they suck up more nutrients from the soil. Rapid turnover of saplings in these intensively farmed areas will hasten soil depletion, and eventually sap production will fall off again, leaving us with a reduced syrup supply created by poor sap farmers who have nothing but scrawny saplings in tiny little plots which are straightjacketed between McMansion farms.
It can’t possibly be as labor-intensive as the current method.
I think it has significant technical and horticultural challenges to become the new maple reality. I don’t foresee the ma-pocalyptic vision you do.
bwah-hah-hah! I started a reply to SpaceDoggity along the lines of Mesopotamian agriculture killing artisinal wheat-growers, but cancelled, thinking it too far-fetched.
It takes the heating & evaporation of between 40 to 60 gallons of sap (depending on sugar content) to produce 1 gallon of maple syrup. The energy involved in the evaporation is a big part of the cost. Add to that you only get 10 to 14 gallons of sap per tree. Etc.
If they are able to get more sap from fewer trees, it doesn’t look like their water consumption would be less. It might actually be more. It might add profitability for the producers but it might not lower the cost for the consumer.
My old neighbors in WI used to do it the old fashioned way. It was just for their own use and to give to friends and family - we would usually receive a small bottle every holiday season. Yum!
Pisch! We specialise in forming opinions on the basis of no facts whatsoever!
He wrote any other kind?
Who is this “they” that so many people assume are on the verge of banning trees and making irrational macroeconomic decisions?
Can’t you buy those cheap cans on the webs?
I love olive oil, beyond love, and different flavours of it too, but the prices they charge in the shops are ridiculous. After a while of hunting, I found a specialist UK distributor who runs a retail outlet on the side.
And now enjoy my wee array of olive oils at about 30% store prices. Hahaha!
