The road curved up the mountain and passed by a beaver pond, an open and untended space. I wondered about the beaver, whose options seemed to have been limited severely. I walked by a high point on the trail, to a rocky knob that had been blasted and crushed to make the road, which was a mile and half long and a flat, workable surface. Roads are everywhere, but what a thing it seemed to make this road so quickly, as an accessory to the woods.
Coming down the mountain on the western slope I caught a glimpse of Lake Champlain, a faraway silver sliver of water. The sun was shining, it was a beautiful day and easy to forget it was winter. The temperature had hit 60°, and I took off my jacket.
THE FLOW WAS UNDERWAY, and the sap was gushing from the mainlines into the pump room. Doug Edwards arrived and took a reading of the sap—the sugar content was at 2.3 percent, a very good level.
Doug Edwards was a burly, bearded man, a professional logger and sugarmaker with 43,000 taps of his own and about to increase by a few thousand more. He was at the sugarhouse to advise and help out as needed.
Kevin Harrison arrived soon after Edwards. They referred to Kevin as the brains of the operation. He had a small office up on the second floor with a window that looked out over the sugarhouse floor, but Kevin stood near the evaporator and by the R.O. room and watched things closely that afternoon. He was wearing a heavy jacket and a baseball hat and had a dark beard. Kevin was a quiet man, even shy, I thought. Clearly he had concerns about the weather on this day, with the temperature at twenty degrees above average. Adding to his concern was the new weather forecast, calling for an entire week of 60° weather.
He and Doug Edwards stood together talking about this.
“I usually have thirty boils a year,” Doug said.
“How many have you made this year?”
“Five. If it gets into the fifties next week it could slow things down.”
“I’m going on a ten-year average. I can take a bad year this year. Just don’t give me two bad years in a row.”
Of course Doug had nothing of that sort to give. All he could offer was advice and information. Marty had also made five boils, the first on February 2 during that heat wave and the last on March 3, four days ago.
Two men arrived from the CDL company. One I noticed was Daniel Lalanne, one of the owners of CDL and a French Canadian. CDL is a Canadian company. Bruce had introduced me to Lalanne on one of his trips north when we stopped at the equipment companies. Bruce thought of CDL as an aggressive company on the move.
Georgia Mountain Maples had bought the top-model evaporator produced by CDL, the “Tornade” (the French word for tornado), which ran for about $60,000 with all the bells and whistles, Lalanne soon told me.
Marty was having some problems with the oil burner. The technician opened a front panel, worked for a few minutes making adjustments, and then, with a whoosh, the Tornade shuddered into being. Lalanne and the technician went into the pump room to confer on the equipment there. They stayed for a couple of hours, going back and forth from the pump room to the evaporator.
I waited for the opportunity to talk to Lalanne because I wanted to know his thoughts on the expansion of the US industry. Bruce talked about it often, how in this new era the production on the American side of the border was growing. Actually that was why I was here on this day: Georgia Mountain Maples was a premier example of the expansion. People with money getting into the maple business.
When I saw Lalanne standing alone away from the evaporator, I walked over and reintroduced myself. Almost immediately we began talking about the Federation. You couldn’t talk about American expansion for long without talking about the Federation, and you couldn’t talk about the Federation without talking about the surplus, the Global Strategic Reserve.
The Global Strategic Reserve was more commonly called simply “the surplus,” which was a supply kept in reserve in case of a shortage. The surplus had been established in 2002 by vote of the Quebec producers who were members of the Federation. At the same time a provision called “sales agency” was established, after which all bulk sales of Quebec syrup were channeled through the Federation. By 2004 the Global Strategic Reserve had grown to be as large as an entire year’s crop, and the Federation established production quotas for its members. These measures were controversial and brought on a difficult time—plainclothes policemen attended Federation meetings, leaders received threats, and the president’s sugarhouse was burned down. The leadership assured its members they were being visionary for making the changes, and this proved true after four consecutive poor crops between 2005 and 2008 due to prolonged winters. Prices went from $2.50 to as much as $4.25 a pound, and in US stores there was a twenty-five percent loss of shelf space—for every four quarts on the shelves there were now three. The Federation surplus, depleted during that time, prevented much greater losses. Arnold Coombs was still working in 2012 to put that fourth quart back on the shelf.
“The Americans have the best of both worlds,” Lalanne said. “They get the Federation price and no production limits. I think the Americans should support the surplus. But that will never happen. The Federation has thirty-something million pounds in storage now. It’s protecting the industry if there’s a shortage.”
I mentioned a prediction Bruce had made, that with continuing increase on the American side, by the end of the decade the US crop would be 50 million pounds, half the production of Quebec.
Lalanne’s prediction went way beyond Bruce’s. “I see the US out-producing Canada in five to six years,” he said. It sounded so outrageous that I stepped back to get a better look at him.
He had warnings about rapid US growth. “I think the expansion will continue for at least another four or five years, but eventually there will be a bad year. It won’t be like this forever. I tell all the sugarmakers: be able to live with two-dollar syrup.”
The best of both worlds, Lalanne said. One thing that seemed ironic was that the Federation, with its price support and surplus, brought the stability that allowed Kevin Harrison to place a fairly safe bet on Georgia Mountain Maples.
As for catching up in four or five years, that seemed unlikely. Even if Bruce was correct in saying there had been an increase of a million taps in 2012, that would only put the US tap count at just under 11 million. There were about 45 million taps in Quebec. The United States would have to increase its tap count by 10 million a year for the next five years in order to equal Quebec.
Marty boiled through that afternoon, sending his syrup to the room with the filter presses, where other workers, concrete workers too, grappled with those machines. Everyone seemed to be in the tenderfoot status, though I had the feeling, just like with that road on top of the mountain, that things would be smooth and workable before long.
People came, watched, talked about sugaring. Some brought beer toward the end of the day. One offered a beer to Kevin, but he didn’t accept. Other workers from Harrison Concrete came by. Some had worked in the woods that day and put up 400 more taps. Some had shoulder-length hair and thick beards, others had hair cut short, but all had powerful physiques. I possessed a built-in respect for concrete workers, having gone to school with a boy whose father owned a cement block factory and who came a few inches within winning the state shot-put championship.
As it grew dark Kathy Harrison arrived with her and Marty’s kids, who were soon running around and sliding on the floor. Kathy’s mother came along with pizza. Kevin Harrison left the scene of the work and went over to join them, not eating but standing near the table.
I walked over to Kevin before I left. I told him I walked on the road and saw the mainlines running between the sugarhouse and the woods three miles away. He said that not many places pumped everything directly into the sugarhouse. I wanted to know about something Marty had said about Kevin and decision making. I wanted to know how he came to the decision to build this sugarhouse, how he agreed to take the leap. Maybe that was too complicated or too personal a question. His answer was that
the decision provided a way to keep people working.
“I would have had to lay off fifteen guys,” Kevin said.
He brought a large scale to his venture, brought an edge, but it seemed to me in that moment his place was like almost any other sugarhouse. The visitors, the friends stopping by, the kids playing, and the family enjoying themselves at the end of the day. I suspected that was part of Kevin’s thinking too.
When I arrived at the hotel in Burlington that night the warmth had held. At 8:00 it was 53°. The next morning it was a degree warmer, at 54° when at 8:00 I left for Johnson and Butternut Mountain. Rare is the night in Vermont in early March when the temperature rises.
12
WHY BE COMPETITORS WHEN YOU CAN BE COOPERATORS?
WHEN JAMES MARVIN went looking for a piece of land capable of sugarmaking in the late 1940s, he settled upon a farm in Johnson, Vermont, a few miles away from downtown, along a back road that coursed uphill to a place called Butternut Mountain. An old farmhouse was part of the property at the base of the hill, but Marvin and his wife didn’t move there. They remained in South Burlington near the University of Vermont, where Marvin was a professor of botany. He didn’t intend to produce maple syrup himself there, only to be a steward of the land.
Not that James Marvin wasn’t occupied with maple syrup production. He had begun conducting research on the biology of the sugar maple tree after joining the faculty at the university in 1936. After a decade of work he was convinced that the university needed its own facility. With another professor and maple researcher, Dr. Fred Taylor, Marvin persuaded the governor, Mortimer Proctor, to buy a farm on a hillside in the town of Underhill. In 1946 they established the Proctor Maple Farm, later the Proctor Maple Research Center.
James Marvin and Fred Taylor were continuing research that began in Vermont at the beginning of the twentieth century when an important bulletin was published in 1903 based on research by Charles Jones and others. In “The Maple Sap Flow” they revealed, among other things, that the mystery of the sap flow was based on the fluctuation of temperatures between freezing and thawing.
James Marvin also studied maple sap flow, published papers, and became the leading authority of his time. With Fred Taylor they discovered that the higher the sugar content in a tree, the greater the sap volume, and that the sweetest trees are sweetest every year. Marvin and his students closely observed a few select maples as they progressed through each season, taking daily measurements of temperature, internal pressure, sap volume, and sugar content. They spent summers correlating their data and recording it on large charts.
Based on this and other observations, Marvin devised a scientific equation that approached poetry in form and the mystery it conveyed: The extent of the shock is equivalent to the rate of the flow. As I stated at the beginning, what this means to me is that the thermodynamic energy of the sun, in the form of light or wind or weather, has a precise corresponding effect on the sap flow. Marvin’s formula had a beautiful symmetry—the extent of the shock on one side of the fulcrum “equivalent” and the rate of the flow on the other. It seemed to mean that sunlight is equivalent to sap in the maple tree.
Marvin and Taylor also discovered that the maple tree exerted back pressure during the freeze phase and would pull sap back into the tree. This brought bacterial contamination into the taphole, to which the tree responded by sealing the freshly cut wood fibers, and this reduced the sap flow and ultimately brought an end to the run. Marvin came up with the idea that a standing column of liquid of eighteen inches would be enough to prevent backflow of sap into the tree, and so he created the “dropline,” a loop of tubing at the end of the spout filled with sap and functioning as that standing column of water. It was a simple innovation that changed the industry by making tubing more productive than buckets.
James Marvin’s son David was born the year after the Proctor Farm opened. As a boy David often came to the maple farm, spending time by the heater in the shed that served as an office. Fred Taylor kept a jar of jellybeans, and James Marvin had replaced an addiction to tobacco with an addiction to chocolate, which meant the shed was a good place for a kid to be. As was the sugarhouse. They kept a coffee cup near the evaporator and filled it with hot, fresh syrup. The first cup went down easily, the second with some difficulty. David played on the bulldozer his father purchased for the farm and rode on the sled when they went to gather sap from buckets.
David was someone who thought about ways of making money, a trait he felt he may have inherited from his grandfather, who ran a feed and grain store on the docks in Norwalk, Connecticut. At the age of ten he came up with the idea of raising a flock of chickens in the basement of their home, but his parents wouldn’t sign on—maybe that was for the best, he thought later. He also wanted to make maple syrup of his own and bugged his father so much that James set up a garbage can for David to boil sap in. James wouldn’t allow him to tap the big shade maples in the front yard, out of concern for their health, so David trekked into the woods, for quite a ways, and tapped other maple trees. The next year James went to Leader Evaporator, bought a flat pan with a draw-off spout, and placed it outdoors on cement blocks—a real evaporator! David still owns it.
As college approached he struggled with the question of how to make a contribution to society that was compatible with how he wanted to live. His parents were academics and avid readers, and he thought at first that he should get an academic degree. After two miserable years at the University of Pennsylvania he did what he wanted to do, and enrolled in the forestry school at the University of Vermont. David thought his parents would be disappointed but realized that, like most parents, they wanted their son to be happy. They only worried about his chances of finding a place in his chosen profession.
David had to hold his tongue in forestry school, and sometimes he couldn’t, when encountering the standard practice of clear-cutting forests and reproducing them with hardwoods block by block—the even-management plan, considered to be the best way to get the most fiber per acre. David wasn’t the only student who questioned even-management. The 1960s were a time of change in forestry too, and David’s classmates also believed there were better ways to manage woods. David thought that if you owned a small piece of forest and cut everything, that would be the end of those woods for you, your kids, and your grandkids. They argued for single tree management, for practicing forestry by assessing trees individually whenever possible.
When David began to practice forestry, working for private clients, the Forest Service silvicultural (the growing of trees) guidelines required even-age management when writing current-use plans to have land appraised according to forestry value. In his first plans David gave a wink to even-age management but actually managed by the individual-tree approach.
Thinking like a forester and a sugarmaker, he grew to believe that maple syrup production was the best possible approach to stewardship of the woods because sugaring was all about single-tree management. As a sugarmaker you could take a piece of land depleted by previous logging operations, designate it as a sugarbush, and the silvicultural guidelines went out the window. You could take timber off the land, but you did it by selecting individual trees. You left the maples, most of them, and you also left nonmaples that were good trees and that you could watch as they developed. Maybe you cut them later, maybe you didn’t, but that wasn’t the goal, only a possibility in a sugarbush.
As a proponent of individual-tree management, David was excited by the idea that when managing a sugarbush you had a much closer relationship with the forest than almost anyone working in the woods, past or present. The settlers came primarily to cut the trees down. As a commercial forester you normally visited a tree two or three times—when you planted it, maybe when you released it, and finally when you marked the tree for cutting, before losing it to a chainsaw. As a maple syrup producer you might visit a tree eight or ten times in a single year. What sugarmakers did was more akin to agriculture, where you intensely knew fields
or animals. For David maple production was a way to farm without working with animals, and importantly, there was a preservation ethic embedded in maple production. You could take a run-down piece of abused forestland and make something of it financially over time with a sugarbush—a sustainable effort with an intimate connection to the trees and land.
David felt that he had inherited more from his father in the way of preservation than in the biology of maple trees. James Marvin established the first Nature Conservancy chapter in Vermont; the first meetings were held in the Marvin kitchen. His father was on the first board of what was called Act 250, a legislative effort to control statewide planning, and which resulted in the statewide billboard ban. James Marvin was one of the founders of the Vermont Natural Resources Council, which recognized that the environmental health of Vermont was also an economic driver. When James left the board after ten years the Vermont Sugarmakers Association elected David to it. He became chair of the VNRC the year James Marvin died, in 1977.
After finishing college David held a job for a few years, working for the Forest Service as a technician. Under the supervision of two scientists, he was the maple specialist in a study of the economics of the maple industry. David traveled and looked closely at the impact of the losses resulting from the blend syrup market, as companies began to add corn syrup and then artificial flavor as they further reduced the presence of maple syrup. He talked to people at General Foods and Quaker Oats, looked at Aunt Jemima, Mrs. Butter-worth, and Log Cabin. Blended syrup went from fifteen percent maple syrup down to two percent. Then one brand came out with all artificial and gained market share. Even at two percent, the blend syrup market was a substantial market for maple syrup producers. He wrote a research report about this devastating time for the industry.
The Sugar Season Page 12
