Greg Morneau started sugaring as an 8-year-old during a childhood spent in northern New Hampshire.
He started tapping trees in Grantham in 2007 after he and his wife moved to town. Morneau, 45, works as an occupational therapist at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon.
He taps 600 trees a short drive from his home; the landowner gives him access in exchange for free maple syrup.
Morneau is mostly a one-man operation, though sometimes his 13-year-old son will join him in the woods.
“The joke is we sell $20,000 of syrup, and it costs us $19,500 to make it,” Morneau said.
He credits improved technology with increasing his production, particularly the use of check-valve taps, which use a small ball to prevent bacteria from entering the tree.
“One of the key pieces of sugaring is sanitation,” Morneau said. “When the sun hits the tree, it thaws the sap out inside the tree, but it also expands the carbon dioxide bubbles, which creates pressure, which pushes that ball forward and sap flows through.”
At night, tap holes freeze as temperatures fall.
“The opposite happens, bubbles shrink. It creates a vacuum, which will actually suck sap back up through your tap into your hole with all the bacteria that’s in that line,” Morneau said. The small ball inside the tap stands in its way and prevents that from happening. “I found it probably increased my production 25%.”
Morneau isn’t alone in seeing an increase in yield. Across the Connecticut River, the amount of syrup Vermonters produce has more than doubled in the last decade, according to data from the UVM Extension.
In 2015, Vermonters produced 1.4 million gallons of syrup and in 2025, that number rose to 3.06 million gallons.
“That increasing yield is likely a result of more and more producers using modern tubing and vacuums in terms of managing that,” said Mark Isselhardt, a maple specialist at the University of Vermont Extension.
Gone are the days of hanging buckets from trees to collect sap.
“Years ago when we used the buckets and the metal spouts, the hole where you would pound it in your metal spout, the air would get in there” then the hole would dry out, sap wouldn’t flow as easily, said Betsy Luce, whose family owns Sugarbush Farms in Woodstock.
Her parents, Jack and Marion Ayres, bought the farm in 1945. Luce and her husband, Larry, started sugaring on the property in the late 1960s.
“The buckets and the horses were a lot of work, but it was fun then,” she said. “Now it’s kind of more like a job.”
Plastic tubing and vacuum systems “have revolutionized the work,” she said. Sugarbush Farm now taps 10,000 trees each year.
“The average yield per tree, I don’t think it’s quite doubled, but it’s gone up a lot,” Luce said.
Weather dependent
While it’s too early to say how it will go because the weather can affect the sap flow, producers say the technology they use now helps them make the best of days when the weather is right.
“I think it’s going to be a good season for us,” Barnard resident Eric Withington, 54, said in a phone interview.
Withington, who runs Silver Lake Syrups with his wife, Sonja, had worried the drought conditions last summer could affect the trees, but he was encouraged by the rain he saw in the fall and now, the snow cover, which helps insulate the roots and protect them from the sun. The couple maintains around 1,000 taps and produce 250 to 300 gallons of syrup a year.
While the majority of the Twin States was in a severe or extreme drought last summer, last year’s wet spring coincided with peak growing season for sugar maple trees, so the dry period that followed is not expected to be an issue.
“Beyond that drought, there wasn’t any damaging insect or pathogen we saw during the growing season,” Steven Roberge, a forestry specialist and professor at University of New Hampshire’s Extension who studies maple sugaring. “The trees were in fairly good shape coming into this season.”
“I’m optimistic,” said Roberge.
Because maple sugaring is dependent on temperature fluctuations, it is difficult to predict what a year’s yield will look like, Isselhardt said.
Yields depend on the daily forecast: If the temperatures are above freezing during the day and below freezing at night, there’s a good chance it’s going to be a good day for sap collecting.
“It’s really the weather we see going forward that’s going to dictate what happens,” Isselhardt said in a phone interview the last week of February.
Though the region’s climate has warmed in recent decades, syrup production has largely remained unaffected and continues to increase in Vermont, Isselhardt said. But that is not guaranteed.
“If we get an abnormally warm stretch, like really out of the realm of what we expect to see in March or April, that could really put a significant impact on yield,” he said.
There is some precedent for that: In 2012, a string of days in the 70s caused yields to drop off, Isselhardt said, citing data from the UVM Extension. In 2021, early season warm temperatures also affected production, but to a lesser extent.
Prolonged cold weather can have a similar effect: In 2023, Northern Vermont — where the majority of the state’s syrup is produced — a period of below average temperatures caused a decline in yield.
“The longer we go before the season really kicks off it just puts more emphasis on the remaining days to be really productive,” Isselhardt said.
While location and elevation cause variations, President’s Day, or sometime in mid-to-late February, is usually the benchmark for when sap starts to flow, Roberge said. This year, sap started flowing at the end of February.
“Historically, it used to be Town Meeting Day. That’s what they could rely on,” he said. “Now if you wait until Town Meeting Day, you’re probably going to miss a lot of days of sap flow.”
Threats of ice, squirrels, wind
Withington said he is keeping an eye on some of his trees that were damaged by an ice storm at the end of last March.
“That’s really a lot of my concern right now: how do those trees fair from all that?” he said. While none of his trees died, some lost limbs. “The tree’s going to heal itself more than produce sap,” Withington said, which could lead to less syrup.
Luce, too, worries about ice: Last year, the family missed out on more than 10% of what they could have collected after ice damaged a portion of their maple trees. The trees at the highest elevation (which were snow covered) and the ones at the lowest elevation (which had been rained on) were fine, but the trees in the middle elevation range suffered. Additionally, last February’s cold snap meant sap didn’t start flowing until early March.
“We didn’t have time to repair it all,” Luce said. “When it’s so short every minute counts.”
That being said, they still ended up with a similar number of freeze and thaw days as previous years. In 2025, they had 12 days where they collected enough sap — around 16,000 gallons — to fire up the evaporator and make syrup, Luce said. That was in line with 2024 (13 days) and 2023 (12 days) when sap runs began in February. Last year — even with the damaged trees — they ended up with 2,600 gallons of syrup, which was slightly more than previous years.
“We can see good vigorous sap flow and relatively high production in a short period of time,” Isselhardt said.
That’s been Morneau’s experience.
“You can have an eight-week season or you can have a four-week or three-week season. I almost like it where it’s four weeks and you just get blasted with sap right through and then it’s done,” Morneau said. He’s noticed that, regardless of how long the season is, he tends to end up with the same amount of syrup.
Often, Morneau’s biggest concerns are red squirrels which have a taste for the sweet stuff and use their sharp teeth to try to get at it through the plastic tubing.
“I don’t know if it’s a climate change, how it affects the animals in the woods,” he said as he replaced a damaged section of tubing. “But boy, some years, the red squirrels are absolutely horrendous.”
Squirrel populations can fluctuate based on the mast crop, which are fruits and nuts from trees and shrubs. If there the mast crop has a good year, the woodland rodent population — including squirrels and chipmunks — tends to grow.
He also keeps an ear out for wind in the weather reports.
“Wind is a major challenge because if you start knocking branches down, you can break across a tree, snap a tap off, and then you get a major” leak in the vacuum system, he said.
While there is hope for a robust syrup season, Morneau’s commitment to sugaring is more about the process it takes to produce the roughly 300 gallons of syrup he aims for each year.
“This part of the season, I absolutely love being out in the woods,” he said during an interview as he inspected each tree. “If I didn’t have the out in the woods component each year, I’d be really missing it.”
Over the years, he’s gotten to know the patch of woods in Grantham quite well.
“When I look at this orchard, (when I) lay in bed at night, I can envision every tree in this orchard. I can envision every line, every tree,” he said on a Thursday in mid-February as he used snowshoes to navigate snow surrounding sugar maples that was at least a foot deep. “I can tell you the health of every tree. Having a connection to it is pretty awesome.”
