It is the Ides of March in Fairfield, Vermont, and there is very little snow on the ground, but Damian Branon is not worried.
“We've gone years with no snow. We've gone years with deep snow. We've gone years when it was too warm, too cold. It usually balances out in the end, and we usually always come up with a crop of syrup.”
Branon and his son (also Damian) stand outside their aging sugarhouse (a new one will go up next year) on this brisk evening and offer a positive outlook on the state of maple.
“Maple, I would say right now is in a really very good spot,” Damian, Sr. says. “They have had abundance of syrup for five or six years now, and that surplus or abundance… is dwindling now. They are probably outselling production right now. So maple is in a very good spot for the producer, not only the packer for the producer.”
“As supply and demand gets closer,” son Damian adds, “the price obviously climbs and the markets are very, very strong right now, very strong. They are selling a lot of syrup around the world, and we need to supply those markets. We need big crops of syrup here in the future to keep up to those markets. And that's going to be very good for the producer.”
The family’s operation, Shady Maples Farm, is at the epicenter of the state’s and the country’s maple belt. And for Damian, Sr., maple has been a lifelong passion. “I've sugared all my life,” he says. “I was born here and I've been here ever since. I now own the family farm. I started here when I was five, six years old. We had horses, and I can remember driving the horses when I was big enough to hold the reins. And times changed after that. The buckets went away and the tubing came out.”
The farm currently has from 70,000 taps, 32,000 of which are their own. They have a tight, efficient boiling operation where nothing is wasted and the numbers are closely watched. A 6x16 evaporator with max pans and a Steam Away sits in the center of the sugarhouse with not a lot of room to spare. (Noteworthy historical sidenote: late Leader President Gary Gaudette used to come here to help boil.)
Reverse osmosis is also a key part of the equation and two XX units are wedged tightly in the shack’s anteroom (double filtering??), helping to keep the considerably limit the boiling time. “I can remember as a kid,” Damian, Sr. says, “we would burn roughly three gallons of oil to a gallon of syrup. Today we're in the heart of sugaring here. So the syrup is filtering good. And we're pushing the rig pretty hard tonight. I'm probably burning less than a quart of oil to a gallon of syrup.”
The Branon family has been sugaring for X generations. And Damian, Sr.’s father bought into Leader as a shareholding dealer in the 1960s. “It’s always been Leader equipment here,” Damian says. “It's nice to have an American company. It supports the local economy. It's nice to see the people that work there. You're supporting local families, local people. A lot of them end up being your friends.”
And the maple business has been good to Branon. “Maple, like I say, is getting stronger all the time,” he says. “There's more equipment. There's a lot of people sugaring. It's a very, very big industry, because the sales are so high. More people getting into it, more people setting up. People getting bigger, larger producers. It's a pretty big industry compared to 20 years ago.”
And it’s an industry with plenty of room for newcomers. For them, Branon has some pretty simple advice: “Hang in there. Keep positive, because it may look gloomy. The forecast sometimes looks awful gloomy, but by the time it gets here, it'll change and then things will work out.”
The Branons are itching to get back at it. The sap ran good today and is expected to run even better tomorrow. “We’re just trying to get everything cleaned up ahead for the big run that's coming tomorrow,” Damian, Sr. says. “We'll probably make maybe a 1,000 gallons tonight and hoping for a big day on Thursday. Not freezing Wednesday and tomorrow night. So we're expecting a big run… You got to make hay when the sun shines.”
Get Maple Done, Spring 2022