Maple syrup production in NJ affected amid warm winter

FRELINGHUYSEN - In early March there's often snow on the ground, sap flowing strongly through plastic tubing on the hillside, and steam rolling out the peak of Sarah's Syrup's sugarhouse in the middle of a sugar maple grove on Kerr Road.

Instead, on Monday warm temperatures brought ants out of the unfrozen ground to a spigot hammered into the side of a maple tree, lured by microscopic traces of sugar in the sap slowly dripping into a large galvanized bucket.

The few buckets on maple trees near the sugarhouse are there celebrating the springtime ritual of making maple syrup the traditional way.

Veteran maple syrup producer Gary Kapitko said it is one of the worst maple sugaring years in his decades of gathering maple sap and boiling it down into the golden liquid,

"We're just not getting the cold nights, warm days the trees need for a good run," he explained. "The sap is there, but it's just not running unless you got a vacuum system."

The sugar maple tree is designed by Mother Nature to be the only species which will produce sap with enough sugar content to make maple syrup and maple sugar.

Straight from the tree, sap is about 2% sucrose (sugar). One gallon of finished syrup can require 20-60 gallons or more of sap, so a large amount of water must be evaporated from the sap to produce a finished syrup of 66 to 67% sugar.

Using numbers from the 2019 "sugaring season," Kapitko said he collected 14,000 gallons of sap and produced 235 gallons of syrup. "We normally collect 12-14,000 gallons. This year, only 6,800 so far."

And, he notes, the season is more than halfway over, even in a normal year. He finished tapping trees on Feb. 17 and the normal season would last into early April.

But this year, there is no frost in the ground; no snow cover to "keep the cold ground insulated." While the days have been warm, the nights have not been cold enough to activate the maple trees' singular traits which produce the starches which convert to sugars; internal tree pressures which forces the sweetened sap out to tree branches or through man-drilled openings into which the spigots are hammered in.

"This year, we're not getting that regular spring weather," Kapitko said. "The sap's very cloudy - the color of watered-down milk."

All trees have some sort of liquid in them which carries nutrients from the roots up through capillaries and out to the plant's leaves. There, sunlight causes the nutrients to be converted into material that a plant uses to grow.

Sugar maple trees have some unique features. In late summer and fall, maple trees stop growing and begin storing the excess starches in the sapwood. That starch remains stored in the wood as long as the wood is less than 40 degrees.

At that temperature, the tree converts the starches into sugars, mostly sucrose. That sugar passes into the tree's sap.

When temperatures rise again, interior pressure in the sugar maple causes the sap to flow and if the tree has a hole or wound, the sap will flow out of the tree.

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However, when the wood temperature gets to about 45 degrees, the enzymes stop converting starch to sugar. While the sap continues to flow, there is less sugar content and when buds begin to form and swell, the sap flow stops.

In sugar maples, sap will freeze within the tree when the wood temperature drops below 32 degrees. This causes a reverse pressure within the maple tree and, as Kapitko said, the pressure might be enough to actually suck sap back up the tubing and into trees.

He said a "40-degree high temperature day is good and if it drops to 15-20 at night, that's great."

This year, there have been few nights where the temperature got as low as 20.

Preliminary observations from New Jersey climatologist David Robinson show this winter rose into the top 10 warmest since records began being kept in the late 1800s. He noted that even the "coldest nights" are getting warmer, something which could severely curb future maple sugaring seasons.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's 2017 census, the latest in a 10-year-cycle, shows 57 farms in New Jersey with 8,606 taps produced 1,722 gallons of syrup valued at $91,000.

Sussex County was the leading county in the state with 29 farms and 3,453 taps that produce 906 gallons per year. Warren County has six farms, with 2,345 taps that produce 366 gallons. Hunterdon County has eight farms that produce 263 gallons of syrup from 1,790 taps.

That amount pales in comparison with the 2.55 million gallons of syrup produced in Vermont, which leads the nation.

While a maple tree might "freely" give up its sap, the process is not cost free. In addition to his own labor there is the cost of taps, about $10-$17 each, tubing and the stainless steel tanks. Then there is the cost of building a sugarhouse around the evaporating equipment and finally the cost of bottles to store the syrup.

Kapitko chuckled about his major "maintenance headache" - squirrels. "They love the sap," he said.

This year's warm weather has also brought out another four-legged sweet-seeking animal - bears.

"It so warm, they aren't sleeping through the cold weather," he said.

Kapitko got his start in "sugaring," when his daughter, Sarah, was in elementary school and came home one day in spring excited about a project in school where the class boiled down some sap into maple syrup.