Syrup prices expected to jump after season

EAST MONTPELIER, Vt. – At Bragg Farm, seventh-generation maple sugar maker Doug Bragg does things the old-fashioned way – with a tractor, family members and 2,200 galvanized steel buckets.

Stomping through 3-foot-deep snow wearing snowshoes, they scatter the buckets, one or two to a tree. Then Bragg drills a 2-inch hole in each, hammers a cast-iron tap into it and hangs a bucket on it.

Inside, a precious commodity will collect a drop at a time. This year, it’s likely to be more precious than ever.

High energy prices, rising demand and depleted stockpiles from two years of subpar production are expected to drive up retail prices.

Fuel oil prices hovering around $3.50 a gallon have hurt sugar makers who use oil to fire their evaporators, where the sap is boiled into syrup. Some sugar makers use wood.

“There’s been a huge increase in fuel costs,” said Catherine Stevens, marketing director for Vermont’s maple sugar industry. “When you’re dealing with materials made of plastic and steel, those prices have gone up. Even glass containers. All of those – plastic, tin and glass – have all increased.”

The price hikes won’t be seen until the sugaring season – which lasts four to six weeks – is over, she said.

“No one has actually put numbers on it yet,” said Stevens.

In Maine, the No. 2 syrup-producing state behind Vermont, production fell last year to 225,000 gallons, a 25 percent drop from 2006 and the lowest output in six years. Michael Smith of the Maine Maple Producers Association says the depletion of syrup stockpiles there and in Canada could mean price increases of up to 30 percent.

In snowy woods all across New England, sugaring season is sweeping slowly north. As the days lengthen and warm up – but freezing temperatures continue at night – sugar maples begin yielding their clear liquid. And syrup makers begin boiling down the sap, roughly 40 gallons of it to make a gallon of syrup.

Some use plastic tubing to move sap from tree to sugarhouse. In Bragg’s 50-acre sugarbush, they stick to the old way. Call it tradition, call it sentiment, call it stubborn Yankee pragmatism.

“It’s all those things,” said Bragg, 53. “It’s what we grew up doing.”

In recent years, sap seasons have shortened because of climate change, but demand is high, driven in part by TV cooking shows and industry promotions that stress the nutritional benefits of maple syrup, which contains calcium and trace minerals.

Sugar making is a family affair for Bragg and wife Barbara, who co-owns the farm. Bragg’s father drives the tractor and his brother and nephew pitch in with other chores.

He says the small, family operation is part of the appeal for out-of-state visitors who descend on its Route 14 gift shop in summer and during fall foliage season.

“This image of buckets and people working in the snow and families working together is what sells maple,” he said Thursday, standing in the woods under a bright blue sky. “We feel it has a place. People chuckle about it, but it’s key to our marketing, no question about it.”

Not that it’s easy work.

Heavy snow across northern New England has made it difficult to get into the woods this year and, in some cases, even to open the doors of snowed-in sugarhouses.

“It’s the worst setting up of the sugarbush that I’ve done in 55 years,” said Peter Thomson, president of the New Hampshire Maple Syrup Producers Association.

In Orford, N.H., where he lives, the snow is 5 feet deep, with an icy crust that is slippery to navigate, even with snowshoes. Many sap lines are buried in it, so they’ve had to be shoveled out or cut and restrung over the snow.

But there’s a bright side: The snow should keep the woods cool, delaying budding on the trees, which is what ends the sugaring season.

Jeremy Steeves, owner of Strawberry Hill Farms in Maine, said that if maple syrup producers don’t have a good year, shortages could result.

“If we don’t have a real good year there’s going to be some very severe shortages of syrup. Even if there’s a good year, it’s going to be close,” he said.

Steeves predicts that maple syrup prices will be up 30 percent, mostly because of supply and demand.

“Demand is up and production has not kept pace with it,” said Steeves, who taps 30,000 trees in Maine’s Somerset County.

AP writers David Sharp in Portland and Joe Magruder in Concord, N.H., contributed to this report.