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Doing so allows the sixth-generation sugar maker to keep careful track of which of the 500 taps on his 93-acre Town Line Farm, which straddles the boundary between Chelsea and Brookfield, are producing well and which aren’t.
“I love to gather sap and I know what each tree, each tap is doing,” Mattoon said in a recent phone interview. “It’s the only way I can check what the sugar content is from each tree.”
Mattoon’s appreciation for the old ways is readily apparent in his extensive collection of wooden, cast iron and metal spouts, as well as arches, maple sugar molds, syrup tins, metal and wooden buckets, and other sugaring-related items dating from the early 1800s through the present day.
The collections, which are stored in the basement of his East Randolph Road home and sugar house, began when, as a young man, Mattoon noticed one cast-iron spout looked different from the rest.
But after he pulled it out of use, it was just a “poor thing sitting there by itself.”
Through flea markets, yard sales and trading with other collectors, Mattoon’s collection has grown over the years. And, in 2013, at the urging of former Chelsea High School vocational-agriculture teacher Fred Webster — now 96 and living in his native Coventry, Vt. — Mattoon published a book, Maple Spouts, Spiles and Taps. He published a sequel this winter.
A defining feature of sugaring, one that goes back even further than Mattoon’s collection of spiles and taps, is the changeable weather that determines what kind of crop comes out of the steaming sugarhouses.
The old saying went “sugaring was a farmer’s poker game: You tap the trees and wonder what you’re going to get,” Mattoon said.
But as much as sugar makers look to the past, they now must look to an uncertain future. Changeable weather is still a challenge, but sugar makers must now reckon with a changing climate, as well.
Because of its reliance on the freeze and thaw cycle, maple syrup production is potentially vulnerable to climate change, said Abby van den Berg, a research assistant professor at the University of Vermont Proctor Maple Research Center.
But the threat is not imminent, at least in this area.
“Technological advances have well overcome any kind of impacts of climate change so far,” van den Berg said.
The southern portion of the maple production zone are under more immediate threats, she said.
Other impacts of climate change on the syrup industry are less direct. For example, the increasing prevalence of invasive species such as barberry and honeysuckle can prevent the regeneration of native species including sugar maples, van den Berg said.
The Proctor Maple Research Center is currently gathering information to better understand the impact of sugaring on the growth and health of maple trees, van den Berg said. Such research is necessary to have a baseline of information about tree health as the climate changes, she said.
“Tree health is always an issue,” she added.
Not far from Mattoon’s, in Vershire, fellow sugar maker Marc McKee has established a nonprofit, North Road Sugar Works. Through the organization, McKee aims to draw attention to the long-term threat climate change poses to sugaring, he said in a phone interview.
“My hope is that future generations will be able to do what we do,” McKee, who ran the sugaring operation at the Mountain School for 25 years until he retired at the end of 2012. “I love sugaring.”
“I’m really concerned about the planet,” he said. “I don’t like what I see.”
McKee, who sits on the Vershire Selectboard, said he hopes to bring together the state’s sugar makers to bring awareness to the threat that climate change poses to the future of the industry.
In particular, McKee said he aims to reach sugar makers who feel that the predicted northern shift of the region where maple trees grow and maple syrup can be produced is so far in the future that it won’t affect them, as well as those who aren’t sure what they can do to alter the predicted shift and those who aren’t convinced these changes are human-caused.
To do so, he holds events and plans to make syrup on his Vershire property beginning next year, perhaps with the assistance of school children.
He holds an annual pancake supper and lecture at the Vershire Town Center in March. Last year’s featured speaker was Bill McKibben, a climate activist who teaches at Middlebury College and sits on the board of North Road Sugar Works. This year, the organization will host Franklin County Forester Nancy Patch on March 25.
In a recent phone interview, Patch, who is based in St. Albans, Vt., said she plans to speak about ways sugar makers can maintain their forests as the climate changes, in a presentation she regularly gives around the state.
Though landowners have traditionally preferred maple trees over other species in their sugarbushes, Patch said that type of monoculture does not create a healthy forest.
“Species diversity is something I will be stressing,” she said.
Though it is unclear what exactly may happen to forests as the climate changes, Patch said it’s important to “allow the forest to have all the options available for the future.”
Sugar makers are leading the pack in terms of adapting to climate change, she said. As people who work in the forest, sugar makers are familiar with changes such as longer summers, more droughts, less snow, earlier bud break and introduced insects.
Climate change is unlikely to cause sugar maples to disappear, but it may mean that they are more stressed by pests, extreme weather events and nutritional deficiencies, she said.
Efforts to minimize these negative effects include protecting the land where sugar maples grow best, controlling the deer population and slowing the influx of invasive species. In addition, climate change adaptation may require a shift from a reliance on sugar maples for maple syrup production toward greater reliance on the more resilient red maple, sap from which can also be used for maple syrup production.
“That is going to be a species that we’re going to be relying on more and more,” she said. “We need to grow it well.”
While it can be easy for people to throw up their hands in the face of something as big as climate change, Patch said, “what’s important to remember is that there are things that people can do.”
Matthew Gordon, executive director of the Waterbury-based Vermont Maple Sugar Makers’ Association, said his organization’s members are thinking about climate change.
In an email, he said that there can be marketing benefits for producers who manage their forests for greater diversity, such as through initiatives for example the Bird-Friendly Maple Project, which offers a special label to maple producers who commit to certain management practices.
Technology also helps sugar makers to adapt to the unpredictability of the start, end and length of sugaring season, Gordon said. For example, reverse osmosis helps sugar makers use sap with a lower sugar content and vacuum tubing systems convey sap more reliably and quickly, he said.
“These all help play a part in making sure a sugar maker can still have a successful season even if the weather gives us a short season,” he said.
Sugar makers are also looking to reduce their carbon footprints by cutting back on their fossil fuel consumption by installing solar panels, using higher efficiency evaporators and through technologies that reduce boiling time, Gordon said.
Woodstock sugar maker Don Bourdon, the Windsor County director of the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers’ Association, said he doesn’t expect climate change will affect the industry in his lifetime and he doesn’t spend a lot of time reflecting on it.
“Maple is doing very well in Vermont,” Bourdon said. “It’s a growth industry. Production has doubled in the last eight years. I see no reason to think it might be decreasing.”
In 2016, Vermont sugar makers produced nearly 2 million gallons of maple syrup, which was up from 1.4 million in 2015 and 1.35 million in 2014, according to the National Agriculture Statistics Service.
Despite the recent growth in Vermont’s maple production, Bourdon is aware longer-term changes may be afoot.
He began boiling on Feb. 20 this year, the earliest start to the season he’s ever seen.
“(We’ve) never made so much syrup in February as we have this year,” said Bourdon, who has been operating Bourdon Maple Farm on a commercial basis since 1995. “History seems to show that the season is opening sooner.”
Like Gordon and van den Berg, Bourdon said technology, such as his vacuum system, has helped him to overcome any reduction in sap the change to the season might otherwise entail.
With an eye to maintaining this success into the future, Bourdon is working with foresters to keep his stand of maples healthy.
“I try to do the right thing when it comes to the trees,” he said.
Orford resident Peter Thomson, of Mt. Cube Farm, also began boiling early this year, on March 1. While he has noticed differences like an earlier start to sugaring season in recent years, Thomson isn’t sure what he can do to address the larger problem.
But he does adapt as the season requires.
A few years ago, Thomson said, the trees began to bud before he had gotten a full harvest. Not ready to give up on the season, Thomson went out and tapped all his trees again, adding more than 1,000 taps in the process.
“That was kind of neat,” Thomson said.
An early start to the season like he had this year, can mean an early end, but not necessarily, he said.
“I feel good about it,” he said.
As a sugar-making hobbyist, not a commercial operator, Mattoon has resisted many of the modern syrup-making technologies others have adopted. But, even he has integrated some new methods into his work. He gathers sap using a 1958 John Deere, a technology upgrade from the two teams of horses he used to gather sap until 1980.
“A good team of horses is like having another person in the woods when you’re gathering sap,” he said.
And, in addition to the buckets, Mattoon has 40 taps on a small pipeline system. Though he waits until the sap runs to tap the trees with buckets — otherwise the holes might close before the season is out — he tapped the trees on the pipeline system last Wednesday when the day was warm.
By Thursday morning, the ground was frozen again and a cold breeze was blowing a few snowflakes through the air around Town Line Farm.
He wasn’t worried about his season, which usually starts around March 15.
The cold will “give sugaring a shot in the arm,” he said. “When it does run, it will run good.”
The third annual North Road Sugar Works pancake supper will take place at the Vershire Town Center on March 25. The meal, which costs $10 per plate, begins at 5 p.m. and Patch’s talk will begin at 7 p.m. Reservations are recommended, 802-685-3147 or marcmckee72@gmail.com.
Sugar makers in both states will open their sugarhouses to visitors during an open house weekend on March 25 and 26. More information about the events can be found online at nhmapleproducers.com/directory/categories/march-25-26-maple-weekend and vermontmaple.org/openhouse.
Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
