Through his college years he worked at the Proctor Farm, first for free and then on the payroll. For ethical reasons his father wouldn’t hire him, but Fred Taylor did. David boiled and worked in the woods. After college he wanted to make a go of it as a sugarmaker but didn’t have enough money. He saved for three years before leaving his job. James advised against this, saying it was too hard to make money in the maple business (he was right, David would later say). James thought David should stay in the Forest Service, let them pay for a master’s degree, and do sugaring full time in his retirement. By then David was beyond being influenced by that.
He put up tubing and 4000 taps on Butternut Mountain and boiled in the sugarhouse he built on a barn foundation using a chainsaw, making a crop of 990 gallons in 1973. That wasn’t enough to live on, but he made money in other ways in those woods by harvesting timber and cutting firewood. One winter he cut 500 cords—in all a stack of wood three-quarters of a mile long. He sold balsam branches used to weave carpets for graves. He sold brush for making wreaths at $2 a bundle. Occasionally he cut a pickup load of ash, took it to a plant that made hockey sticks, and was paid $200. He sold pulpwood to a company that made cardboard holders used for hot dogs purchased in baseball parks—an opportunity that fell away during a baseball strike and that made him think about the interconnectedness of the economy.
After he had two bad crop years, one right after the other, in 1986 and 1987—1800 gallons and 1300 gallons—everything changed for David. He had to sell a second farm he had bought for sugarmaking. To meet his accounts he borrowed everything he could and bought all the syrup he could find. Syrup was scarce in 1987, and he paid an exorbitant price for it, $3 a pound, crazy high. But he discovered something: if you are the only one with product and people want it, you will sell it. He developed markets that year.
The producers he bought syrup from in 1987 in northern Vermont, many in Franklin County, asked whether he would continue to provide a home for their syrup. That next year David became a buyer for Maple Grove and made a deal for a large supply, but then Maple Grove backed out of the deal. In trouble, in possession of a buying base that had suddenly become outsized, he scrambled to sell the syrup and make a profit.
“And that’s how I got into the packing business,” he said.
ON MARCH 8, the day after I visited Georgia Mountain Maples, I stopped at the Butternut Mountain Farms plant in an industrial park in the town of Morrisville. Butternut Mountain Farms is about the same size as Bascom Maple Farms. Both employed sixty to seventy people full time, and both ran a sugarbush, though Bruce’s was substantially larger. Bruce Bascom and David Marvin both purchased in the neighborhood of 10 million pounds of syrup each year. Both inhabited the second tier of the industry. Actually, I realized, Marvin and Bascom were the second tier of the industry in the United States. Butternut Mountain Farms was also the only other company that made granulated maple sugar in substantial quantity.
The plant in Morrisville was housed in a single building—offices, bottling plant, sugarmaking, candy making, shipping, and storage. But that was about to change. Ground preparation was underway for a new large facility that would be used for syrup storage and warehousing. It would be a new building much like Bruce’s, with some variations: Marvin’s building would have solar panels on the roof, offsetting the energy costs for both buildings.
They had known each other since college, seeing one another at maple meetings. Bruce competed with Marvin, but he also consulted with him on all sorts of things. Bruce talked frequently with Marvin when planning his building, bouncing questions off him, including the problem of whether to erect the building on Mount Kingsbury or place it in an industrial park a few miles away in Charlestown. Building it on the mountain would forever alter the farm, but Bruce wanted to be able to walk to the place from his house. Marvin told him he should do it if that’s what he wanted.
From the very beginning of my visits to Bascom’s, Bruce talked about Marvin and suggested I visit him. It seemed a generous gesture to me, sending a writer off to talk with your primary competitor, someone who had taken accounts away—someone who was, Bruce told me, the only person in the industry he envied. Marvin spoke well, he said, like a writer. And he was, Bruce thought, as shrewd a businessman as any, despite his professorial appearance. I first met David when I traveled with Bruce to Leader Evaporator for the panel discussion when the two talked to bankers about how to lend to the maple industry. I saw him again at the Maple Hall of Fame when Bruce was inducted—David was already a member, and the two were the youngest members of the Hall of Fame. With their fathers, who were also members, they formed two of the three father-and-son pairs at the Hall.
In the summer of 2010 I took Bruce’s advice and visited David in Morrisville, and we had lunch at the sugarhouse at Butternut Mountain. When I expressed interest in the trees, he told me that he would be happy to walk in his woods with me—no one came by who was interested in the woods, he said. We walked a few months later in the peak of fall, when the leaves were yellow and the ferns on the ground were still green. Because David seemed to enjoy the walk so much (“It’s always good,” he said at the end), I invited myself back and we took several more.
If I came to believe that mountainsides managed by sugarmakers reflected the narratives of their lives, Butternut Mountain was where I hatched that notion. On that first walk we covered most of the five miles of roads in David’s sugarbush. He had made the first of those roads in the early 1970s using a bulldozer. We passed by some of the fifteen stone foundation sites that he kept clean and intact—he thought maybe he was overstating their case in Vermont, where there were so many, but the foundations, from the time when people lived by subsistence farming on this mountain, seemed like archaeological sites, and he wanted to keep them for future generations. We passed by Horse Barn Bank, site of a logging operation before World War II, when they cut the spruces down, when loggers and horses lived in the same barn, separated by a curtain, sharing heat. We passed by the 83-Woods, named for the year their son Ira was born, after passing by the 82-Woods, named for the year when David and Lucy had an infant child under intensive care in a hospital in Boston, when David got to know the roads to Boston really well during the six months she lived, when he cut heavily to pay medical bills. We passed by the Glade, and the Glade Landing, and Belvidere, near the top of the mountain, near where the Butternut Mountain Sugarbush came within a few feet of Vermont’s Long Trail and where the trees once looked like a park until the tops broke off in the ice storm of 1998. David couldn’t look up at them, even now; he hired a plane to fly over the area, then took Lucy and the kids on a tour into Canada, where he talked to a sugarmaker who said he was finished—“fini,” he said; twelve years later he was sugaring again. We stood on a place called Hard Rock, an outcrop with a view beyond Mount Mansfield to Lake Champlain. David had always lived with a view of Vermont’s grandest mountain. We walked by a brook; he pointed out that the spring where the brook began was further up the hill and that the brook emptied into the St. Lawrence, which emptied into the Atlantic, and said that you had to think about the implications of messing around with a mountain. We walked along Ira’s Road, the new road David’s son was building in a part of the woods David tapped in the 1970s, and beyond that we came to what they called the Park. It truly did look like a park, with stands of tall, mature maples 150 years old or more, and other mature full-growth trees. At another stand, much newer, David said it would take 100 years “to get an expression.” He said of maples, “During the history of the white man on this continent we haven’t been through two rotations of maple forest. We can’t know what that means for forest planning.”
WHILE WE DROVE to the sugarbush at Butternut Mountain I asked what had been going on, aside from the weather. He answered, “You said ‘aside from the weather.’ But I think it’s all about the weather.” With a week of 50° days in the forecast, he wanted to know if they could maintain a sap run on the pressure differential between
35° and 55°.
We passed through Johnson, where David owned a small store he opened in 1985 where they sold syrup and other Butternut Mountain products, and equipment for sugaring. Over the years some of James Marvin’s students had stopped by after they saw the name. We headed out of town, by Vermont Studio Center, an artist’s colony, and by the state college, uphill by pastures and fields, through some scraggly woods, along an unpaved road, and up a steeper hill. In a hollow was the sugarhouse, painted a light shade of gray. A road from the sugarhouse led up the hill. Mainlines ran parallel to that road and coursed into the upper story of the building.
The sugarhouse at Butternut Mountain Farms was of a modest size, capable of handling about 14,000 taps. The sugarbush was of a size that two people could manage, and one person could manage the sugarhouse. They decided for the time being not to increase their tap count substantially, as doing so would require another full-time worker. David’s son Ira, who was twenty-nine then, had taken over management of the sugarbush, and David was training him to eventually manage the business. David’s daughter Emma was involved in management too, working at the plant on the marketing end of things. On this day Emma was at a food products convention. Ira normally would have been here, but instead he was at the plant working on the plans for the new building. He had been writing grant applications. David said, “I’ve done to Ira what I’ve done all of his life, which is to put him in charge of something over his head.”
Inside the sugarhouse doing the boiling was a man named Steve Wilbur. He was a former baseball player with broad shoulders and an athletic physique who wore a frayed wool jacket and coveralls. Steve was in his sixties and had worked for David for many years and, before that, for James Marvin. Steve spent his time working in the sugarhouse and sugarbush, checking tubing lines, installing tubing, or doing forestry work. Checking tubing during the season was something he shared with David’s wife, Lucy, who liked walking the lines and sometimes took friends along; checking tubing was also somewhat easier in the Marvin sugarbush than other places, as they had placed pressure gauges at key points and could narrow down the areas where the leaks occurred.
They were making their third boil of the year. The second had been yesterday, March 7. It was a normal time to start the season in northern Vermont, but there was that problem of the temperature getting into the high fifties. David asked Steve the question he posed earlier.
“I wonder if we can maintain on a twenty-degree differential. What do you think, Steve? Can we manage between thirty-five and fifty-five degrees? Will it be enough?”
Steve thought they could, with vacuum. “If you have high enough vacuum, you can keep getting sap,” he said. This was the new truth in sugarmaking, with these pulses of warm weather in spring. Vacuum was a way of coping with a changing climate.
This sugarhouse was neat, tight, and shipshape, a model of David’s thinking. And with backup systems, two of everything—like Noah’s ark, David said. A smallish sugarhouse with a substantial reverse-osmosis system. With R.O. they could manage 13,000 taps here; without, about 2000.
The tubing systems traveled through the various zones and over the two miles to the upper reach of the sugarbush, up in the area called the Glade. The mainlines narrowed down to a final six, and all fed into the releaser on the second floor. Upstairs the lines were labeled according to their origin, such as “Old Woods” and “Big Booster” and “Bottom Feeder.” David and I climbed upstairs to watch the releaser, a chamber with valves that separate the sap from the vacuum system. It can be exciting to watch a releaser, to see the sap come crashing out of the chamber and making a sound like an explosive sigh. He timed the releases of the sap, at 5 gallons each, and determined that the sugarbush was producing 390 gallons an hour at this point, before noon. Yesterday the rate got up to 500 gallons per hour.
When we walked out into the spring-like day he said, “Well, we’ve had best years three years in a row. Why expect four?” They were having a good year in Ohio, he said. “We always say, when they have good years in those places, we don’t have them here.”
The crop at Butternut Mountain was usually between 4000 and 5000 gallons and was an important part of the business, but similar to Bascom’s, they made only a tiny fraction of what they sold. David was already buying syrup in 2012, quite a lot of it. He hadn’t yet set a price, however, because he needed to know how large the crop would be. He might have to wait until the season was over before he came up with the price he would pay his producers.
“I haven’t set a price because I don’t want to go back on my word.”
He was advancing money to those who needed it. David said he had received a call from a producer in Ohio who asked for an advance. “I said to him, ‘How about ten thousand dollars?’ He said that would get him through. I did it because there is no risk.”
He told of a producer in southern Vermont whom he advanced money to before the crop came in, and he had been doing it for years to help with payments for fuel and labor. “When he gives me his syrup there might not be anything left to pay. Or sometimes we have set up a monthly payment plan that goes for the rest of the year.”
Bruce had said he was better at buying syrup and David was better at selling it. David agreed, though he thought he knew just as much about the business as Bruce did. They used different strategies when it came to buying syrup. Both had suppliers they dealt with every year, the group of producers who were the foundation of their businesses. David understood his markets and tended to buy everything he needed for the entire year. He didn’t want to buy syrup on the spot market because he didn’t like speculating. Bruce was always on the hunt for good deals, ready to trade, and loved to make profits on swings in the price when he could. He liked to win. David noticed that Bruce used the language of war when it came to buying syrup. He thought Bruce had nerves of steel when it came to buying, and to business in general.
David’s supplier base was made up primarily of larger producers. Bruce had told David that he had 3400 suppliers in 2011, a number that included those small producers who came to Bascom’s with five-gallon containers. To David that seemed an impossible number. “How do you keep track? I’m very engaged in the agricultural community in Vermont and want to support local agriculture, but I could probably do well with three hundred suppliers, not three thousand.”
He bought according to relationships, some that had begun twenty-five years ago when he had to scramble for markets. The majority came from Vermont and many from Franklin County. David had locked up Franklin County long ago and, in a way, all of Vermont, as he controlled fifty percent of the syrup in the state. His supply had at one point become so concentrated in Vermont that he decided to broaden his base and sought out suppliers in other states and in Canada. He and Bruce were the majority buyers in the St. Aurelie region of Maine.
He had a waiting list of producers who wanted to be part of what David referred to as his community. This community was composed not only of him and his suppliers but also, as he saw it, the biological community consisting of the forests and the greater environment. David had written a mission statement to express that idea and worked on the definitions with his family. He rewarded his suppliers for their loyalty with a 10 cent premium per pound, and he extended his loyalty to them. When he took a supplier on, he bought their entire crop, no matter what fortunes the season delivered. With the many millions of taps that fed into his warehouses, he sometimes bought more syrup than he needed. This happened in the bumper year of 2009 and again in 2011. For that reason the short season of 2010 had been a kind of blessing.
“I go by the feeling that if you trust someone they’ll trust you back,” he said. “And that if you’re loyal, you’ll get repaid for it. I like the people I deal with. On the producer side there are very few people I don’t enjoy working with. We are lucky and can be selective now. I’m not as good at being as selective as I might be, but the people I have been working with and who have been loyal to me, I do a lot for them. We
have put our business in jeopardy. In 2009 I bought too much syrup. It was probably a bad idea.”
David hadn’t set a price yet because if 2012 brought a large crop, he would have more syrup than he needed and would have to price on the low end. A short crop, and he could pay more per pound, use up his inventory, and comfortably buy all the syrup his producers made.
“EVERYONE IS SO ENGAGED with maple,” David said as we drove back to Morrisville. “I don’t know of any other crop that people respond to in that way. No one comes up to you and asks how your corn crop is going. Or how your second cutting of hay was. But everybody this time of year asks about maple.”
If there was one topic that he wanted to emphasize when we were together, I learned, it was the cause of pure maple syrup, a cause that had begun for him when he researched the blend market for the Forest Service.
The market for imitation maple syrup was an estimated $18 billion yearly. Imitation is a key word, because those products came as close as possible to resembling the real thing short of using the word “maple.” David would say that in the mind of most consumers, any breakfast syrup poured on pancakes had an association with maple. But those other products—Log Cabin, Vermont Maid, Mrs. Butterworth—contained no maple syrup. The laboratory stuff, Marvin called it, the junk. Their flavor was a derivative of the fenugreek plant, and the sugar was primarily high-fructose corn syrup, the ubiquitous processed sweetener responsible for major contributions to the obesity epidemic in the United States.
David liked the fact that Vermont syrup had the reputation as being the best and hoped it would continue. But he also argued that sugarmakers should not compete with each other to prove that their brand was better than any other producer’s or any region’s. There was a better way.
The Sugar Season Page 13
