We went to the bottom floor near the evaporator, where five men wearing hairnets and white coats were at their stations. Plastic jugs wobbled along conveyors and were filled with hot and filtered syrup. Further down the line a machine spun plastic caps on the jugs. The jugs spun through a machine that attached labels, then the final march to cardboard boxes. One worker placed the jugs on the line, others monitored the filling and labeling, and another placed the jugs in boxes. We watched this hum that smelled of syrup and money. Bruce smiled and said, “They want to work today because they’re being paid overtime.” David Bascom, Bruce’s cousin and the operations manager, joined us. David was pleased with the progress of the work. This initial order was for six trailer truckloads of syrup, and it looked like they would have them on the road ahead of schedule.
The order was actually for a single quart of syrup that would sit among other quarts of maple syrup, all with Gold Coast labels, in stores nationwide. In order to completely stock that shelf in all the Gold Coast stores and to have enough replacement stock to last a couple of weeks, Bascom’s had to ship almost 70,000 quarts.
Bruce explained the numbers:
11,520 quarts per trailer load
69,520 quarts for the initial order of six trailer loads
5,760 quarts per week to resupply
Because of the other competition for attention on that rack of maple syrup in the Gold Coast stores, the label on the jug had to be appealing. This label was just that—gentle waves of color, browns and reds, a motif suggesting the forest but with an artful design, like something from the scissors of Matisse, sure to appeal to the hip Gold Coast shopper.
There was one very important word on that label that meant some heavy lifting for Bruce. One line of the label read “Vermont Maple Syrup,” the state synonymous with maple syrup in the minds of many. Vermont produced forty percent of the maple syrup crop in the United States. Bruce needed to find enough Vermont maple syrup to fill those tens of thousands of jugs. He had some on hand already, but he was working the phone lines to find more.
The Gold Coast order was the achievement of Arnold Coombs, Bruce’s sales manager, and it came through at just the right time. The order would help pay for the new building, and the new building was all about orders like the one from Gold Coast.
3
EARLIEST BOIL EVER
THE AMOUNT OF MAPLE SYRUP produced at Bascom’s is less than three percent of what they sell, but it is still a substantial amount. They made 23,900 gallons in 2010, more than a fourth of the maple syrup crop for the state of New Hampshire.
Bruce’s cousin Kevin Bascom “ran the woods” and did all the boiling. Kevin hadn’t grown up at the farm in Acworth as Bruce had. Instead, he grew up in Nottingham, near the University of New Hampshire (UNH), where his father, Rodney Bascom, taught forestry and mechanics at the farm school. His family spent a few weeks every summer in Acworth, camping out near the farm that Rodney owned and where they cut about forty cords of firewood for the tenants there. Kevin came from a large family. His father and mother, Frances, bore nine children of their own and adopted a girl. In addition they took in forty-five foster children, mostly on a long-term basis. Their house was affectionately referred to as “the place of constantly slamming screen doors.” When Rodney died in 2010 more than 200 people attended his funeral, where his brother Reverend Eric Bascom spoke, and Kevin’s son met children of Rodney and Frances that he didn’t even know existed.
After attending the farm school at UNH, Kevin moved to Acworth in 1979 and began working for Bruce’s father, Ken Bascom. David Bascom, Kevin’s older brother, moved there a few years later after running a logging business. For a time Kevin, David, and Bruce were the primary workforce on the farm. They worked in the fields and cut wood. Kevin helped Ken improve the evaporation system and integrate reverse-osmosis machines. As the business grew, David moved indoors to manage operations, but Kevin continued to work in the farming operation and run the woods.
Over the years Kevin and, lately, his son Greg had been expanding and improving the tubing systems as well as the vacuum technology that went along with them. Periodically they replaced old tubing with new and rearranged the configurations for a better flow. Kevin set up the tubing systems according to the feel of the land, following the sags to take advantage of gravity.
Now in 2012 Bascom’s managed sixteen sugaring lots. Bascom’s owned the majority, and some were leased. Bruce paid 75 cents a tap for the leased lots, and for a landowner, over the course of, say, 4000 taps, this could add up enough to accept the sight of tubing lines in the woods. Bascom’s also bought sap from some producers; Bruce’s friends Peter and Deb Rhoades were one of that group. The lots covered about 800 acres and comprised a vast patchwork spreading out from Mount Kingsbury, with a few satellite lots. In all, factoring in those who sold sap to Bascom’s, there were 68,573 taps feeding into the sugarhouse in 2012.
As for the total length of tubing on those 800 acres, Kevin calculated by multiplying the average length of tubing per tap, 30 feet including the mainlines, by the total tap count. This put the total tubing length at 1,755,450 feet. That amounted to 332 miles, equivalent to the distance from Acworth to Philadelphia.
When I mentioned that figure to Gwen Hinman she said, “And we have to walk that three or four times a year.” It was all the more mind-boggling and weirdly impressive when you considered that all of that tubing, those 1.75 million feet, were designed to be airtight and under a vacuum pressure far lower than that of the air outside.
Regarding the strength of the vacuum pressure, Kevin told me about steel tanks that had been left empty for too long and collapsed like beer cans. Timothy Prescott, director of the Proctor Maple Research Center at the University of Vermont and an expert on vacuum, told me that contemporary vacuum systems could pull water out of the ground through the trees’ roots, like a sucking straw. He also qualified that statement by adding that vacuum pressure did not harm the tree. Another scientist and former director of the Proctor Center, Mel Tyree, a specialist in sap hydraulics, agreed. He told me that a tree generates negative pressures of its own far greater than those that vacuum pumps apply. He told me that the tree’s ability to transport liquids under negative pressures is a wonder of nature.
ON JANUARY 26, when the temperature ranged from 25° in the morning and got up to 45° in the afternoon, Kevin noted on his production chart that the sap “ran a little.” For Kevin, “ran a little” was a relative term. In 2010 they dumped 500 gallons on the ground after a little run in February. Kevin liked to have at least 17,000 gallons on hand before he fired up his evaporator. That would yield about 300 to 400 gallons of syrup, depending on the sugar content of the sap.
Kevin didn’t want the tapping crew to begin too soon because he didn’t want the tap holes to dry out, for the wood to seal in the drilled holes. But his son Greg, who left a construction job each sugar season to come to work at Bascom’s for his father, said they needed to begin because they had a short crew and would never finish otherwise. They started on January 23 and three days later finished the Pond Lot, putting in 6,022 taps. On January 30 they finished Hall’s Lot, raising the count to 11,425.
The trees didn’t freeze on the night of February 1, after the temperature got up to 48° in the afternoon. When Kevin checked the temperature early the next morning it was at 33°. The crew finished tapping Ken’s Lot that day, putting the count at 13,907. They moved to Glenn’s Lot, a section on the south side of Mount Kingsbury, and finished tapping there by February 3, bringing the total tap count to 17,105. They were one-fourth done.
Kevin didn’t think there was a need to hurry because he was more than two weeks ahead of the earliest date he had ever boiled. But during those two days, on February 1 and 2, when warm air flowed up from the south, the trees awakened, and there was a major sap flow from Connecticut well into Quebec. At Bascom’s they gathered 10,000 gallons of sap.
And so Kevin made his first boil of 2012 on February 3. From t
hose 10,000 gallons, which had an average sugar content of 1.7 percent, he made 166 gallons of syrup. Many other sugarmakers over the region also boiled on February 3.
For many sugarmakers, using a wood-fired evaporator and not in possession of reverse-osmosis machines that concentrated sap, 166 gallons would have been a good year. They would have boiled those 10,000 gallons over many winter days and nights. But 166 gallons at Bascom’s was, to use a familiar term, a drop in the bucket.
I could hear Bruce’s words, saying that 166 gallons, at a wholesale price of $35 a gallon, were worth a total of $5,810, which was not so bad for a day’s effort at the evaporator. Though, actually, the production on February 3 was not a full day’s effort. Kevin would have produced those 166 gallons in less than one hour.
4
STRAIGHT AT IT AND ALL OUT
PETER RHOADES, a forester and Bruce’s closest friend, who had gathered sap with him as a boy, been his college roommate, and put together timber plans for him over the years, said that Bruce built the new building “so he could compete.” Peter knew about all the past constructions and additions at Bascom’s, how Bruce had added on to the sugarhouse six or seven times and then had torn everything down and started over. Peter said, “It hasn’t worked out well for Bruce to go slowly and wait. It’s been best for him to go straight at it and all out.”
Of course Bruce had already been competing. Bruce operated in what was deemed the “second tier” of maple companies, composed primarily of single-owner proprietor businesses. Bruce’s primary competitor in the second tier was David Marvin of Butternut Mountain Farms in Morrisville, Vermont. They ran neck and neck, or hand in hand, depending on the situation. Others in the second tier were McClure’s Maple (which was bought by Dutch Gold when David McClure retired), Anderson’s in Cumberland, Wisconsin, and Highland Sugarworks in Barre, Vermont. There were also a few Canadian companies in the second tier, such as Bolduc’s Maple, Bernard & Sons, and others in the maple-rich region of Beauce County, Quebec.
Arnold Coombs had a description for the type of individual who owned these companies and played in the field of the second tier. He was a person who could manage risk, and also someone who could manage a large number of relationships. In Arnold’s words, “He’s the type of person who can borrow ten million dollars and put his house on the line.” Arnold said that person also needed a wife who could stomach those risks.
But Bruce did not put up the new building to compete in the second tier. He was aiming for the first tier. For him that meant Maple Grove, the largest maple syrup distributor in the United States. Maple Grove is based in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and has a long history of owners. Maple Grove is now owned by B&G Foods, the food products corporation that owns Ortega, Polaner, and Vermont Maid, an artificial pancake syrup. Maple Grove has sales of $80 million per year, and people on Wall Street read B&G Foods’ financial reports to see how the maple syrup industry is doing. Maple Grove supplies Walmart. They sell 40 million of those 1.5-ounce bottles of syrup each year, primarily to the Cracker Barrel Restaurants. Those nips contained pure maple syrup until the shortage of 2008, when, out of necessity, Maple Grove blended with other sugars. After the shortage passed, Maple Grove continued to blend because it would have cost several million dollars to return to pure maple syrup. For Bruce, Maple Grove had long been a model. He used to go on tours of Maple Grove, look at the machinery, memorize the names and numbers, and then slip out to his car to write down the information.
He didn’t ever directly say that he wanted to overtake Maple Grove; in fact, he said it would never happen in his lifetime, though he didn’t actually mean it. He would say that someone else was going to: “I predict that David Marvin will overtake Maple Grove one day,” he told me more than once. It took a while for me to understand that, by that statement, Bruce also meant himself. Once, when he gave me a tour of the new building when the foundation was being poured, we were looking down at the deep hole in the ground, at what would be a storage area for syrup, and I asked, “So will this put you in the first tier?”
“Oh yeah,” he said.
They started clearing the site for the new building the week before Bruce was inducted into the Hall of Fame. The trees were in Ken’s Lot, and because Bruce often talked about the difficult relationship he had with his dad, who was a tyrant to work for, there was a shade of symbolism hanging in the air that week. Once, when Bruce saw me coming from Ken’s Lot, he leveled a look at me and said, “You’ve probably been over there watching them cut those trees.” They were trees that Bruce knew very well, having grown up in the house that stood next to them. When Bruce returned from college he and Peter Rhoades inspected those trees and tested the sugar content of their sap, writing the percentages on the trunks and thinning the orchard to leave the sweetest trees.
“Did it work?” I asked.
“We’ll never know,” he answered. They conducted that experiment before reverse-osmosis machines came along and made high-sugar content redundant.
Some of the trees would be cut for firewood. Others would be shipped to a mill in Brattleboro, to be marketed as “taphole maple.” Taphole maple could be an appealing wood, with its holes suggesting another time and the work of the sugarmaker. The equipment store was paneled with taphole maple.
George Hodskins cut the trees in Ken’s Lot. George had been working at Bascom’s from the time he was nineteen, more than twenty years ago. His primary function was as a logger, and he owned a log skidder, a tractor designed to work in the woods, that he leased to Bruce. As the maples on the flatter part of the ground were removed, the others on the steep bank stood out in relief. They looked beautiful to me, perched alone on the hillside, and I pointed them out to George. He thought they didn’t look so great. Their crowns were too thin, he said. From a producer’s standpoint, the crowns of trees produce leaves and the leaves make carbohydrates, which are then converted into sugar once the thaw begins. Good maples need golden crowns.
George started working after Ken Bascom transferred the business to Bruce and went into semiretirement. Ken wanted to fire George, but Bruce wouldn’t do it. Ken Bascom was quick to fire people, I had been told. He couldn’t manage help, as Bruce had told me many times. George placed Ken Bascom in that generation of farmers who had a lot to teach but who yelled a lot. “He shouted like all these farmers around here. You could learn from them, but you learned at high volume.”
Ken was a hard guy to figure out. “A very nice guy, very charming, put on sugar parties for the kids, have lots of people up to the sugarhouse, but to work for him, he was a driver. He would yell about the oddest things,” George said. “You could let a truck roll across the parking lot and he wouldn’t say anything. But if you did something like leave a door open, he’d yell at you. He said to me once, ‘If I was running things around here I’d fire you.’ Eventually I just ignored him and did my own thing. He complained about that too.”
The excavating crew came in, dug a deep hole, removed the sand, and crushed the big rocks. The concrete workers followed and built walls fourteen feet high, with a basement floor canted toward the middle, with drains in the event of a syrup spill. They installed girders and laid concrete planks to build the upper floor, then poured concrete over the planks and buffed the floor to a glassy smoothness. The construction workers assembled supports for the walls and arches for the roof, and as winter approached they covered the sides with steel panels painted the red color of the barns in New England. Bruce was pleased with that color. They built four loading docks for semis, three opening into the second floor warehouse and the fourth into the basement. Plumbers hooked up a sophisticated network of piping, leading from the silos to the new bottling room. Bottling machines arrived that were much like the machines at Maple Grove. Running at top capacity they would be able to fill eighty quarts per minute. In the basement a plumber and maple syrup producer named Jack Fuller installed an air-conditioning system that would lower the temperature to 40°.
One Saturday
morning when the building was near completion Bruce gave me a tour of this basement. As we approached, he clapped his hands to show how the motion-sensitive and energy-efficient LED lighting system performed. We walked down a ramp into the cooler, the “New Cooler,” as this would be called. (There was also an “Old Cooler” and a “Middle Cooler.”) The New Cooler was 100 feet wide and 210 feet long; if you took into account the 14-foot ceilings, the New Cooler was a 294,000-cubic-foot refrigerator. You could have played a hockey game in that basement and had room for bleachers.
“We will be able to store eight million pounds of syrup here,” Bruce said. “About sixteen thousand drums.”
Eight million pounds of syrup. The US crop in 2010 was 20 million pounds. Therefore, in this basement Bruce would be able to store more than a third of the syrup made in the United States in 2010. He could have stored one-fourth of the greater 2011 crop. But Bruce would not be storing just US syrup in the New Cooler; about half would come from Canada. The retail value of 8 million pounds of syrup at $55 per gallon would be $80 million.
At this point Bruce couldn’t afford to buy 8 million pounds of syrup, but he intended to grow into his new basement. “I will be able to fill this cooler in about five years,” he said. “That is, if the bank will give me more gas.” That was how he saw himself, as an engine running on the gasoline of money.
Arnold Coombs was also driving the construction of the new building. Arnold wanted to increase sales by twenty-five percent a year, from his $40 million in sales in 2010. Bruce’s job was to provide the syrup, in ever-increasing quantities.
BRUCE TOOK OUT a short-term loan, seven years in duration, because he wanted to pay the building off as soon as possible. He had turned sixty in 2010. “My retirement will be spent paying for this new building,” he said, though actually the loan would be paid by the time he was sixty-seven. Time was a factor, though. “The future is my biggest problem,” he said. What he meant was that he didn’t have offspring coming into the business, neither of his two kids was interested, and he had no hard plan for what would happen to the company should something happen to him. “Fifty people would be looking for something to do,” he said. Not that he hadn’t been thinking about the succession problem; in 2010 he had hired a consultant from the business school at the University of Vermont to come in and examine the company regarding the matter of succession. She determined that Bruce, as the buyer of syrup in the field, was the one irreplaceable part.
The Sugar Season Page 3
