HARTLAND — On a February morning that was cold, but not as cold as Vermont’s icy reputation suggests February ought to be, steam and smoke billowed out into a white, rolling cloud over the Richardson Family Farm sugar house. Warm days and freezing nights had stirred the sap to flow, and the season was underway.
Lore built over generations in the Upper Valley said that the first run of sap would be close on the heels of Town Meeting Day in early March. But these days, February runs are common. The Richardsons, who have farmed the highest land in Hartland since 1906, have seen the climate change.
Gordon Richardson, 79, started sugaring young. A pail that had held lard was just the right size for a child to collect a few quarts of sap from the buckets in the woods.
He is old enough to remember when horses pulled wagons on steel-rimmed wheels through the snow during sugaring season. The Richardson family is still sugaring, and at a much larger scale than in decades past. Technology has transformed what was once a seasonal occupation over the last several decades. Plastic tubing, vacuums, reverse osmosis machines and tractors took the place of open taps, gravity, wooden buckets and horses.
And the rhythm of sugaring has changed with the warming climate.
“My father’s saying was that we made the bulk of our syrup in April. That’s definitely not the case now,” Richardson said. March brings the harvest now.
The wooden sugar house, first built in the 1960s, is perched at the crest of a snow-covered hill. The Richardsons harvest wood from their forest, bind it into bundles just the right size for the tractor, and pile the bundles above the sugar house.
Inside, the Richardsons mark the dates and yields each year on a sheet of freezer paper. A three-ring binder in the sugar house holds sheets that go back to 1981. Forty years is short in terms of the 115-year history of the Richardsons on the farm, and even shorter in terms of climatological history. Still, it is enough time to see a change. The first February boil was in 2012. Since then, six years — including this one — have begun with February boils.
The Richardson Family Farm has been in the family for five generations, although Richardsons have been in Vermont far longer. Dairy had always been the core of their business; they milk for Cabot. But the dairy industry has struggled in recent years. Meanwhile, technology turned sugaring into a profitable enterprise. These days, sugaring accounts for nearly half of the farm’s revenue stream, said Reid Richardson, Gordon’s son, who leads the sugaring business.
He tends 12,000 taps, which yield 4,000 to 7,000 gallons of syrup “depending on the weather that Mother Nature gives us.”
It’s difficult to tease out the effects of climate and technology, Reid Richardson said. Vacuums and reverse osmosis machines temper the impact of weather, promise consistent production year after year, and allow him to take full advantage of early freeze-thaw cycles. (“Reverse osmosis” machines force sap through highly engineered filters whose pores are just large enough for water molecules to squeeze through, but too small for sugar. The concentrated sap reduces how much time and fuel sugarers need to spend boiling).
An upgraded stove equipped for “wood gasification” cut back the amount of wood they need. They used to fill it every 15 minutes, and now they fill it every 40. They also installed solar panels that supply all of the farm’s electrical needs.
Still, after he gave a tour of the new equipment that he had bought for the sugar house, Reid Richardson acknowledged its limits.
“Weather is the real kerfuffle. There’s a limit on what we can do,” he said.
Warm weather spells trouble. Bacteria swimming in a food source of sugar multiply when below-freezing temperatures don’t keep them down. “Ropey syrup” has a bacteria count so high that it cannot boil; it turns into a phlegmy, sticky pudding.
In 2021, warm weather cut off the season in early April. Sugarers across the Upper Valley saw yields far below their anticipated harvest, and sap production was down between 25% and 50%. In 2012, a stretch of March days when temperatures soared into the seventies scorched away the season.
“It only takes two or three days 65 to 75 degrees and sunny to basically kill the season for you,” said Richard Menge, who sugars at Maple Leaf Farm in Lyme. When he was little, it was “nip and tuck” if there would be any syrup for St. Patrick’s Day on March 17. But now syrup is almost a certainty by then. This year, the first run came especially early — Feb. 12.
Mark Isselhardt, a maple specialist at University of Vermont Extension, said the sugaring season had contracted, starting earlier and ending earlier as temperatures warm.
But a season that’s 10% shorter is not necessarily 10% less productive, he said.
“I’m optimistic that there’s going to be a vibrant maple industry in 50 to 100 years, but still, these things are hard to predict,” he said.
Isselhardt rests much of his optimism on technology. Experimental studies show the potential to get much more sap out of a given tree, without extracting too much for the tree to sustain itself.
But weather conditions that will become more common in the Upper Valley as the climate warms will put maple trees under stress. Large, rapid floods undermine soil structure, he said.
“Drought doesn’t get as much attention as it should,” he said. “It’s not as dramatic as an ice storm, but its impact is bigger than its visibility.” And climatologists predict that seasonal droughts will become more common in New England.
Modern sugarers use red maples, not just sugar maples, he added. The red variety are hardy trees that survive as far south as Florida, in both saturated and dry soils.
“They’re not just going to die,” he said of reds.
Sugarers tap trees that are centuries old, so it will be generations before they depend on young maples. But those young maples may have a harder time maturing in a new climate than their ancestors will have simply surviving, he explained.
And then there are the invasive species, like the soil-raiding jumping worms, that gain ground when winters cannot muster the temperatures to kill them off.
But Isselhardt also sees sugar bushes as part of the solution. The mature, semi-wild forests are managed, but not logged. Syrup is a non-timber forest product that does not interfere with the forest’s ability to sequester and store carbon.
At the Richardson Family Farm, though, sugaring a century in the future matters. Reid Richardson has two daughters, and his brother has three sons.
“We have a business that feeds several families that is based off of maple syrup and we want to pass it to the next generation, and hopefully to the next generation as well,” he said. “Climate change is absolutely a concern, but what can we do about it ourselves is another million-dollar question.”
Claire Potter is a Report for America corps member. She can be reached at cpotter@vnews.com or 603-727- 3242.