A Sticky Situation: Searching for Sustainability in Vermont’s Maple Syrup Industry
By Sam Blair
September 5, 2020
It is a bright September day as more than a dozen foresters and I walk into the woods beneath the orange-and red-hued flanks of Mount Mansfield in Underhill, Vermont. They have come together, and I have come along, to discuss the newest developments in their profession, compare notes, and eat donuts. But this is no ordinary conference—foresters do things a little differently when it comes to professional development. Instead of meeting in a hotel ballroom, we are out in the woods, walking from stand to stand and examining the silvicultural treatments that have been applied to each area of the forest.
The first stop of the day is a sugarbush leased and tapped by Eric Sorkin, co-owner and CEO of Runamok Maple. ‘Sugarbush,’ ‘stand,’ ‘silvicultural treatment’: these are just three terms in a whole lexicon of forestry jargon on hand today. For the uninitiated,‘sugarbush’ is a commonly-used name for a stand dominated by sugar maples that are tapped to produce maple sap. ‘Stand’ refers to the unit at which foresters manage the woods—a finite area within which conditions are similar enough to warrant packaging up as a single, bounded entity. ‘Silviculture’ connotes the art and science of growing trees. Another term in the air today: sustainability. But unlike the forestry terms defined so easily above, sustainability gets awfully hard to pin down the moment you step into the woods.
I have been thinking about sustainability in Vermont’s forests for the last two years as I have interned for Audubon Vermont, an organization focused on implementing conservation programs across Vermont’s working landscapes. Over that time, it has occurred to me that a closer look at the sugarbush might shed light on some of the issues that arise when we start thinking about sustainability in landscapes where humans and wild nature must coexist, and sweeten my own understanding of the booming maple products industry in the process.
As I follow the foresters into the sugarbush, I am picturing a timeless Vermont tradition drawn straight from the label of a maple syrup jug—metal buckets hung from old open-grown maples, perhaps a flannel-clad old-timer leading a team of horses through the woods. But as soon as we make our way to the boundaries of the sugarbush proper, it is apparent that we have come upon a very different, and distinctly modern, scene. The woods are full of plastic tubing—so much tubing that the overall impression is of having stumbled into a strange, giant maze or the grips of a very large and disorganized spider.
But there is an internal logic here, which becomes apparent as Sorkin provides helpful narration. As we walk into the sugarbush, we duck under two black plastic tubes, each about an inch in diameter, strung up across the path at head-height. These are the “mainlines,” the arteries of the sugarbush circulatory system. They zigzag throughout the forest, gathering up flows of sap from smaller blue polystyrene “lateral lines,” which spread out through the woods in a giant web. Each lateral line collects sap from 10-15 trees and feeds it into one of the mainlines, called the “wet line,” which carries the sap downhill to a collection tank. The other line, the “dry line,” contains exactly nothing—but during the sap run, this is the kind of nothing that can pull the needle of a vacuum gauge to register up to 25 inches of mercury. A vacuum runs through the dry line until it is spliced into the lateral lines, where it pulls the sap out of the tree with a force equivalent to as much as 12 pounds per square inch of pressure.
As the twenty-odd of us fan out through the woods, I consider the intricacy of the webbing spread before me, whose purpose is to convey the vacuum to the trees and to carry their sap away in return. Here is an engineered landscape whose interconnectedness rivals that of other networks we bring to mind with far greater familiarity: power grids, road networks, oil pipelines. This, too, is a site where economic value is literally being extracted from the earth, pulled up through the roots of maple trees in spring. And when it comes down to it, this system of tubing simply represents a whole lot of work. Who would have expected to find it here, under the slowly yellowing leaves of an early fall in the Vermont mountains?
Sorkin would have. His company, Runamok Maple, is on the cutting-edge of the maple products industry in Vermont today. Their tastefully packaged organic syrups, infused with flavors like cardamom and coffee, aged in bourbon and whiskey barrels, and even smoked with pecan wood, retail on the company website at $16.95 for a 250 ml bottle. Some quick back-of-a-napkin math reveals that this translates to a price of roughly $255 per gallon, more than ten times the $24 per gallon that maple syrup fetched on Vermont’s bulk market in 2018.
This has been a recipe for success. Runamok has grown rapidly since its inception in 2009, increasing from 81,000 taps in 2017 to 100,000 taps on 1,350 acres of land in 2018. The really amazing part of the story: this does not even put Sorkin and his business near the top of the pack. Vermont’s largest producer, Sweet Tree Holdings LLC, runs upwards of 400,000 taps (and counting) on 24,000 acres of forest in northeastern Vermont.
As we walk deeper into the woods with Eric, alternately ducking under and clambering over the flexible lateral lines, his commentary is keen and to the point. It is all about yield.
“Vacuum systems,” he says, “have allowed us to more than double our yield.”
“Is that the same everywhere?” I ask.
“Depends on the producer,” he responds. “Depends if they’re good or not. How much leakage they have in the system.”
He points to a pressure gauge spliced into a line junction: “With the new technologies coming out, we can even monitor vacuum pressure across the sugarbush remotely.” This is helpful, I surmise, because leaks can be the size of a pinhole—hard to identify when walking the lines on a blustery March day.
On the scale at which Eric is operating, tiny efficiencies make big differences. The dual imperatives of this business are squeezing the most sap out of the sugarbush and growing as quickly as possible. And growth, over the last 20 years, has been the defining trend in the maple industry.
According to statistics from the latest U.S. Census of Agriculture, production of maple syrup in Vermont increased by almost four hundred percent between 2002 and 2017. The number of taps more than doubled over that time period, while the number of sugaring operations declined by 19 percent. As producers have grown and consolidated, the yield per tap has also increased, reflecting the continued adoption of “high-yield” vacuum techniques that can produce almost half a gallon of syrup per tap.
This rapid and unprecedented growth could have serious implications for the economic sustainability of the maple industry. Increases in supply that are not accompanied by subsequent increases in demand have a tendency to lower prices—a basic principle of microeconomics. But retail maple syrup prices have remained relatively high and stable over the past few decades, a strange state of affairs which likely has a great deal to do with the fact that the province of Quebec, which produces more than 70 percent of the world’s syrup, uses a quota system which Vermont Public Radio called “a sort of legal government-sanctioned cartel.” This system restricts the amount of syrup on the market in any given year, setting the global price for syrup at an artificially high level. There is even a “strategic reserve” of more than 88,000 55-gallon drums of maple syrup held at the ready to stabilize global prices.
The question many people involved in the maple syrup industry are asking now is a simple one: How much longer can the status quo last? As American producers, most notably in Vermont, have ramped up production, talk in Quebec has moved towards increasing quotas or ditching the quota system altogether. A 2016 report commissioned by Quebec’s Agricultural Minister called the system “a heavy, inflexible handicap to the province’s performance” and recommended doing away with it entirely. This would have serious consequences for Vermont’s rural communities, who benefited from maple syrup production to the tune of $54 million in 2018. Even as maple production, in the face of the cratering price of dairy, serves as a last tenuous lifeline for many farmers in rural Vermont, the industry faces the real possibility that prices will fall significantly at some time in the future. In fact, for producers who do not sell directly to consumers, they already have—the bulk price of syrup in Vermont fell by 20 percent between 2013 and 2018.
University of Vermont Extension Farm Business Management Specialist Mark Canella writes that this drop in prices “has forced many maple business owners that sell bulk syrup to question if they are or will be at the right size to stay viable.” A further drop in prices, of the sort that might be expected if Quebec were to lift its quota system, would leave many producers stuck in a trap of diminishing returns, trying to eek more and more syrup out of their woods just to break even. This scenario does not represent what most people would call “economic sustainability.”
In another sense, though, the sustainability of the maple industry boils down to simple physiology. If trees tapped for maple sap are able to replenish enough conductive wood and carbohydrates each year to compensate for the losses they incur through tapping, then the practice of sugaring is, in the most basic sense, a sustainable one. Trees compartmentalize the wounds around tap holes by isolating long columns of wood above and below the holes. If a tree is unable to replace this lost wood each year by growing an even greater volume of new, conductive wood, it is losing out over the long-term, and so are the sugarmakers who are tapping it.
A recent study conducted by UVM Research Assistant Professor Abby van den Berg and a team at UVM’s Proctor Maple Research Center examined high-yield vacuum extraction techniques and found that they were, on average, “sustainable”—but there were troubling details in the fine print. Of the healthy, dominant and co-dominant canopy trees they examined—the core of the study—35 percent still had growth rates below the required minimums for survival over the next 100 years. Among less vigorous and smaller-diameter trees, the numbers were even more worrying—here, 66 percent of trees did not meet the minimum required growth rates. It is true that a relatively high percentage of trees in a young forest might be expected to die of natural causes over a century, but with no comparative long-term study of tapped and untapped maples, there is no way of knowing how concerning the numbers Van den Berg and her team found really are. If they are elevated over the baseline mortality rate of the forest, the consequences of these high-yield practices could be decreased tree vigor and depressed sap yields—the slow death, in essence, of the sugarbush.
One solution to this problem is to reduce the density of the sugarbush by the judicious use of a chainsaw. The “Guide to Improving and Maintaining Sugarbush Health and Productivity,” widely used by sugarmakers in the United States, describes “thinning” as the act of “removing poorer-quality, slower-growing trees, freeing up resources for those that remain.” Thinning increases the light and nutrients available to “crop” trees, improving their health and increasing radial growth. But this involves removing trees that may be dying but are still producing sap, perhaps briefly diminishing yields. These are the kinds of tradeoffs that some sugarmakers are loath to make.
Another disincentive to thinning is the fact that it cannot occur in a sugarbush that is rigged up with an extensive system of tubing. There must be room to bring in machinery, and to fell and process trees. For this reason, management plans tend to prescribe thinnings “once it is time to replace the sugarbush lines,” often on a hypothetical ten-year cycle. But in fact, advances in tubing technology have led to increased durability and longer tubing lifespans, rendering this ten-year cycle more wishful thinking than reality. It is as if the trees are prisoners: trapped in a network of tubing, bound to an ongoing process of extraction, unable to break free.
Back in the sugarbush—once Sorkin has left—the foresters are quick to discuss this issue. “It’s time for a thinning,” the property’s consulting forester Addison Kasmarek says pointedly. “We’re rewriting the management plan now, and we’ve said over and over that the stand is overstocked, but we’ve been having a tough time with Eric. He is just refusing to take down the lines. It’s really tense.” Others are quick to chime in: “I’m seeing the same thing!” “What are we supposed to do?” “There’s nothing to do but change over to a fifteen-year cutting cycle—or longer.” “Yes, but the consequences of that…” Voices overlap and intersect like the tangle of lateral lines running through the woods around us.
Tubing networks are not the only human systems shaping the sugarbush. Political networks overlay and interpenetrate this landscape as well, further complicating an already-challenging situation. Use-Value Appraisal (UVA), a Vermont tax-incentive program started in 1977, changes how the value of land is calculated for tax appraisal purposes, basing the calculation on the value of the agricultural or forest products that the land can produce, instead of the land’s value if it were to be sold for subdivision and development. In essence, UVA is a big tax break for Vermont’s rural landscape. UVA is perhaps the most boring, yet most important, aspect of the maple industry in Vermont today. There are two UVA categories, Agricultural and Forestry, and sugarbushes, as both “agricultural” and “forested” landscapes can be enrolled in both. The catch? The Agricultural category requires nothing of landowners other than that they produce an agricultural product from their land, while Forestry UVA requires a detailed management plan with information about the current condition of the forest and intended management activities. This plan is legally binding—a choice to disregard it can lead to hefty fines or removal from the UVA program.
Kasmarek enumerates the consequences of this dual vision of the sugarbush to me and a few others as we turn around and begin to make our way out of the woods. “When we’ve really pushed sugarmakers on their management practices,” she says, “and insisted that something be done according to the plan, we’ve had people just up and leave Forestry UVA for Ag, because they say ‘look, why would I stay when Ag doesn’t require me to do any of what you’re telling me?’”
On top of the leniency of the Agricultural designation, back-end enforcement of the Forestry UVA standards is severely lacking, as it is delegated to already-overworked County Foresters who each administer thousands of parcels. Take this lack of enforcement and habituate landowners to it over the course of 40 years, and the term “legally binding” starts to lose its bite. Given all this, it is not hard to imagine why the talk in the sugarbush turned towards something approaching despair as we made our way out of the web of tubing.
The fact of the matter is, sustainability is and always has been a tricky concept to pin down in the maple products industry. Although maple sap is, in the academic jargon, a “non-timber forest product,” a term with the ring of sustainability to it, sugaring is an extractive process that cannot do anything but leave a mark on its environment. When producers make maple syrup, they—and by extension, we as consumers—are condemned to have an impact on the landscape. The discourse of maple producers, as found in promotional materials, packaging, and news coverage of the maple industry, tends to obscure this simple yet profound fact: Maple syrup production changes the landscape from the level of the individual tree on up to the whole forest, and it is also entwined with forces like globalization and industrialization. In the industry’s vision of itself (or at least the vision it wants the public to see) maple syrup is a kind of panacea, a cure for the world’s ills. In this telling, syrup and the sugarbush it comes from exist somehow outside of the forces that drive the human lifeworld—markets, capital, the state. The evidence strongly suggests that this is not the case. Maple syrup, and maple trees, are deeply entangled in our human systems, from the tubing that marks out the sugarbush to the regulations that govern it. And when it comes down to it, the chain of practices that constitutes “sugaring” is only as sustainable as the links that make it up—the trees that produce the sap, the regulations governing how that sap is harvested, and the economic viability of the industry doing the harvesting, to name just a few. Maple syrup is only as sustainable as the choices that are made throughout its production.
As we reach the edge of woods, walking on a logging road that is blessedly free of tubing, I pause and look back at the sugarbush. It stands quietly in the low daylight of late afternoon, shades of yellow and orange glowing softly under the almost-setting sun, tubing just visible among the trees. I wonder what happens in the sugarbush after we leave and the last faint sound of our voices fades into what seems to be silence. Do the noises of birds and animals, leaves and wind, slowly reemerge, replacing our own? Or does it stand quiet, still, expectant, waiting? “This land is still feral,” writes Laura Sorkin, co-owner of Runamok Maple, in a 2018 piece for Modern Farmer. But looking back, I see a forest somewhere between tamed and feral—a woods on the edge.
