Season Updates

2024 Maple Season Summary

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Thanks to Les for his take on the 2024 maple season. 

If you are an Ohio Maple Syrup Producer, how would you describe your 2024 maple season in one word? Early, different, weird, disappointing, average, surprising, long, short, exhausting, and the list goes on – perhaps even some words that cannot be printed here.  Many local producers experienced the earliest start in the history of their sugarbush.  This was followed by the earliest shutdown in the history of their sugarbush.  Early tappers (NEW YEAR’S DAY!) were the fortunate ones, producing three quarters to a full season crop.  There were some hardcore traditional sugarmakers that like to go by the calendar; it was a one run and done for them.

From a metrological viewpoint, this was as close to a record winter as you can get, and we are not talking about cold.  The climatological Winter – December, January, and February – was the warmest since 1931.  By month, December was the third warmest on record.  January was close to average except for the lack of snowfall.  You need melting snow to keep moisture in the ground, and sap flowing from the trees.  February was one of the warmest on record.  This was all predicted in NOAA’s three month forecast back in December 2023.  If you are a maple producer, it was fairly clear.  You were warned.  Waiting until the first week of February to tap was not a good move, but it was better than waiting until President’s Day or when the Moon was right or because Grandpa always tapped that weekend.  The middle of January saw the only extended cold period, but after that, it was game on.  Those that tapped in early January were ready to harvest the big runs that came at the end of month and into February.  This gave the early birds a running start at an average to above average season.  The downside was low sugar content in the sap.  Despite getting record volumes of early sap, the sap to syrup ratios were dismal.  50-60 to 1 ratios were common and widespread.

This is a very lighthearted overview of a very challenging year.  On the positive side, producers made some very good syrup that did not have quality issues.  Officials at the Geauga County Maple Festival Contest reported, “The overall grade color was darker than last year.  Flavor was decent and was representative of the color.  In a year like this with an abundance of warm weather, you would expect some off-flavor syrup to show up in the contest, but that was not case.”  Thanks to adequate crop being produced in Northern New England, there will be no shortage of maple syrup for US markets.

When you have higher than average seasonal temperatures, it is far more likely that off flavors will appear.  I have noticed that it is not uncommon to make Amber and even Golden syrup with an off flavor at the very end of the season.  The off flavor is the product of sour sap, or possibly buddy sap.  Most off-flavor issues are the result of warm weather leading to a massive buildup of microbes in the sap.  An indication of this quality breakdown is rust colored niter in your filter press that is very hard to filter out. Ignored, conditions will go to slime and end up as ropy syrup.  This is caused by bacteria in the families Bacillus and Micrococcus.

Now comes the real challenge!  How do we prevent the possibility of this poor-quality product from entering the market in a year when a large percentage of producers may be facing a shortage of syrup for their customers?  Do you bottle the syrup and hope no one notices?  After all it may have good color. The rationale of the past was that most customers would not pick up on the off flavor.  After all, they are used to high fructose corn syrup imitations.  The answer is clear – never compromise the quality of the syrup you sell.  Quality should always be the trademark of your maple operation.

In the end, what have we learn?  We added one more year to the string of abnormally warm maple seasons that we have experienced over the last 5 years.  Ohio producers need to be ready to tap earlier than they have in the past.  If you are an experienced maple producer, you know when the time is right.   This means that in 2025, when New Year’s Day rolls around, you may need to cut the party short and head to the woods.  In fact, it is not a bad idea to be ready before Christmas.  This is not a recommendation to tap in December, just an admonition to be ready.

Glad to See It Come, Glad to See It Go

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Thanks for Les’ contribution last Monday in his post – Is February the New March?  This is a more Mansfield-centric take on the 2024 season with a more in-depth analysis of statewide Growing Degree Days to compliment last week’s content.

What a season!  That sums it up in all the best and worst ways.  I stand by the words I typed in my 2/19 post – I believe we nailed our tapping date just about perfect.  The first run to follow was a marathon of 7 or 8 straight days, and the second run of the year culminated in our making syrup off the new OSU teaching evaporator for the first time ever.  Though many producers’ woods performed below average in terms of sap sugar, our Brix registered consistently at 2.0.  Talk about some highs.

We knew better.  The weather folks are not infallible, but there was no denying the forecast that lurked.  Warm, warm, and more warm.  But unexpectedly, February 21st was the death blow for our season.  While we were over at Malabar Farms helping out with an NRCS workshop on maple, our pump decided to quit working.  Without vacuum, the productive days of our season were over.  With a full season, we would likely have stayed tapped in until March 4th and posted one of our better season totals.  As it turned out in reality, the 2024 season ended on a low.

Looking more broadly around the state, the progression of Growing Degree Days (GDDs) was alarmingly early yet again.  If there any producers still resistant to the idea of tapping earlier than more traditional dates, then I don’t know what it will take to change minds.

Observe – Click Play for an animation of GDDs from 2021 (below).  Pay attention to 2 data points in particular.  First, the GDDs accumulated through March.  Second, the scale of GDDs on the legend.

Now, you don’t even need to see a similar video of 2024’s GDDs to know we covered lots more ground in fewer days than the previous year’s example.  Long story short, earlier AND hotter.  Hello sap season double whammy, goodbye sanitation!  I don’t believe many producers will be heard pining – “Boy! What I wouldn’t give for another season like 2024!”  And if you did hear such a remark today, then you probably also heard them quip – April Fool’s!!

Is February the New March?

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Remember when Les said he would come back at the season’s conclusion to tell you in 20/20 hindsight exactly what you may already suspect, he’s back to make some sense of the 2024 sugaring season!  Enjoy.

The Ohio maple syrup season ended on the first weekend in March.  This comes less than a week after President’s Day, the traditional starting date for the season in Ohio.  Of course, not this year as many Ohio producers started the 2024 season in January.  If you are a maple producer, you must wonder if the climatologist and everything we have been hearing about our climate is right.  Is February becoming the new March?  

Let’s analyze what we have seen and experienced in 2024.  OSU Climatologist Dr. Aaron Wilson has been telling us that the winters will get milder, and Spring will come earlier.  Once again, I refer to historical weather data to make a point using Weather Underground weather history maps.  Dating back to 2021, here is what I consider a relatively normal March (below).

Here is February of this year, 2024 (below).

It has been reported over the last several months that we ended 2023 with almost record-breaking high temperatures for November and December.  In fact, the climatological winter (December, January, and February) was the third warmest on record.  The 2nd warmest occurred in 1931.  The warm weather sent a warning to many maple producers, alerting them that something unusual was about to happen.  In Ohio, those that tapped in mid-January got it right.  Those tapping right after the first of the year were rewarded with 6 to 8 weeks of maple producing weather.  Many recorded over 14 boils before the first of March.  This year undoubtedly sets a new benchmark for early tapping.  Why did this happen and what can we learn from the experience.

The winter of 2023/24 followed the long-range forecast’s prediction.  With the exception of the invasion of a cold air mass in mid-January, the mild temperatures came back and continued throughout February.  This set up some extraordinarily good runs throughout the state.  However, a troubling and confounding factor was the overall lack of moisture.  I would say that many parts of Ohio were below average on moisture during this period.  Dryness in the woods is not good for maple production.  It is much preferred to have 4 to 8 inches of slowly melting snow, at the very least, lots of rainy days interspersed through the season.  I have seen woods that face north where the snowpack will last almost to the end of March.  These woods have produced good runs all the way to the end of March and even into April.  Not this year.

Here is the graph (above) showing the high, low, and average temperatures for the first two weeks in March.  The important thing to look at here is the minimum and maximum temperatures that clearly show we not only had daytime temperatures in the first two weeks March above 50 degrees F, but also had nighttime temperatures that approached and even hit 50 degrees.  This totally wiped out the freeze/thaw cycle, and we all know you cannot make syrup without a freeze/thaw cycle.  Sustained temperatures above freezing will undoubtedly be a recurring problem into the future.  Warm temperatures also accelerates the accumulation of Growing Degree Days, pushing the trees toward budding.  However, buddy sap did not end the season in much of Ohio.  It was the acceleration of microbial growth resulting from an abundance of unseasonably warm temperatures causing the sap to warm and foul systems.  It is almost impossible to make quality syrup under these conditions.  During the Ohio Maple Tour, I tasted multiple samples of syrup made in early March.  Just about all had that sharp taste of syrup made from sour sap.

Now comes the real challenge!  How do we prevent the possibility of this very marginal syrup from entering the market?  Especially in a year when many producers in states like Ohio had a poor year and now have syrup of questionable quality to sell.  Do you bottle the syrup and hope no one notices?  After all, it may have good color somewhere between Amber and Dark Robust.  The rationale in the past has been that most customers will not pick up on the off flavor; after all, they are used to high fructose corn syrup imitations.  The question now turns becomes, how much high-quality syrup will be made in the Northeast and in Canada this year?  Will the syrup they sell to the big box stores have better quality than what our customers can buy locally?  We already know it will most likely be less expensive.

In the end what have we learn? We added one more year to the string of abnormally warm maple seasons that we have experienced over the last 5 years.  For Ohio producers tapped in January, many experienced a near normal season.  Operations made some very good syrup that did not have quality issues.  Their markets are covered.  This also means that in 2025 when New Years Day rolls around, those producers who gambled right in 2024 will again be ready to tap trees at the first signal of good sugaring weather.  Unfortunately for many Ohio producers tapping later in the calendar, this year will be a hard lesson.  Those that tapped after mid-February found out that you cannot trust Mother Nature, because she does not read the Calendar.

Ohio Maple NPR Soundbyte

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You are never quite sure how a piece of media coverage will turn out after a couple of hours of interaction gets boiled down (yes, that’s a pun) to 4 minutes and 30 seconds.  But I’d say the NPR creative machine did a great job churning out something engaging that highlights work across the state from the past, present, and even into the future.

This is as good of a time as any to remind everyone of Ohio’s Maple Madness weekends on March 2-3 and March 9-10.  You can scan the following QR code off your monitor or visit the Tour Map to plot your own route.

At Ohio State Mansfield, we will be hosting our Maple Madness event on Saturday, March 2nd – we hope to see you there.  Come hungry!

Mid Season Update & Cornell’s Maple Climate Network

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Our sap season at the OSU-Mansfield sugarbush is well underway after tapping trees beginning January 29 and officially collecting sap by February 1.  While I still have time to change my mind, my current belief is that we nailed the “When should we tap” question with the right answer this year.  Our first run was a solid week long with solid nightly resets below freezing as this forecast basically fulfilled itself just like the weather prognosticators predicted.  Though overall sap volume was not as productive as it could have been, sap Brix started off at 2.1 and stayed ready right around 2.0.  By the end of the first run and through roughly Valentine’s Day, the woods got downright crunchy and dry highlighted by a few days that pushed temperatures almost up to 60 F.  During a second run of several days, flows remained average at best but Brix still hovered at a good sap: syrup making ratio.

As far as growing degree days go, we are almost exactly halfway to seeing silver maples break bud, and the rest of February and first couple days of March as currently forecast will likely push us right up to that threshold.  If I had to guess, we will be shutting off a couple main lines that are heavy “Rilver” (red x silver hybrids) in the March 1-5th range and hoping for another week or two production out of our sugar maples.

While there are a few nights with temperatures forecast for the low-mid 20s, it appears the OSU-Mansfield sugarbush will spend more nights above freezing as February drags into March.

Checking forecasts further north in towns like Chardon, Middlefield, and Geneva, all the way north to Ashtabula on the lakeshore, most nighttime temps are currently sitting on the wrong side of 32 Fahrenheit and the next 2 weeks offer only a few opportunities at hard overnight resets to stimulate good sap flows.  What March holds in store, I certainly don’t know.  And if another great sugaring weather pattern emerges, will our taps still be putting out lots of high quality sap if and when that occurs?  What I do know is this – Mother Nature has always and will continue to be the one holding the cards.  Even if my hindsight is happy with our initial tapping dates and I don’t eventually wish for a do-over, that is still no guarantee of a banner season.

As this year’s season ticks along, we’re excited to have an Ohio maple producer in Geauga County hosting a tree monitoring system for Cornell’s Maple Climate Network database.  You can track various metrics, such as Total Sap Production, Atmospheric Pressure, Tree Pressure, Rainfall, and Soil Moisture on this Dashboard.  Just look for the legend indicator so you can focus on some Ohio data and watch the season unfold from a single sugar maple tree’s perspective.  A great project with lots of potential, we’re glad Ohio can be a small part of the effort.

Buckeye Teaching Evaporator: The First Boil!

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Exciting developments at the Ohio State University-Mansfield campus!  We installed a teaching maple evaporator under our new pavilion near the research sugarbush and just completed our first boil last night.  This step is fairly monumental for Ohio State Maple, and there isn’t anything quite like the feeling of seeing that first draw-off.  Somehow we’ve got a grainy image of that moment last night to commemorate the experience!

First things first – a formal thank you to Roger and Suzie Gortner for continuing to do our production sap processing.  They have made exceptional maple syrup from our OSU trees for the past 5 years and will continue to be instrumental in that regard.  We literally could not do it without them, and we’re grateful that it’s an arrangement that works for both parties involved.

But now for the first time ever, we have our own evaporator.  No, it is not sized to keep up with a production woods of almost 1,200 taps, but it is perfectly sized for demonstration boils on a teaching scale.  With help from local producer Galen Smith from Mount Vernon, OH, our team set up an 18” x 66” drop flue evaporator early in winter of 2023-24.  After a test boil to dummy out a few variables (or maybe to dummy out the dummies…us!?), we put fire under sap concentrate on Wednesday, February 14th – Valentine’s Day.

Four 5/16″ lines kept sap flowing from our larger sap tank into a holding chamber that our reverse osmosis unit was drawing off.  We adjusted the PSI on our RO to almost perfectly sync and match the raw sap movement with our RO processing speed.  After some adjustments to align the 2 processes, we were taking sap from 2.1 to 4.6 Brix concentrate.  6 hours later, we were halfway there…

Eventually, we crept up to 7 degrees F over the point of boiling water.  You know what happens next.

A teaching evaporator with small-scale RO unit allows us to now teach via-demonstration tree-to-bottle workshops and seminars on an Ohio State campus, provide more complete tours for events like the upcoming Maple Madness event on Saturday, March 2nd (more on that in a second), and sets the table for a new Sustainability Theme GE course debuting in Spring of 2025 – Maple: A Sweet Taste of the Past, Present, & Future.

So yes, come visit us on Saturday, March 2nd at the OSU-Mansfield Maple Pavilion.  We are excited to host folks for pancakes and syrup between 10 AM-1 PM, tours of the sugarbush and nearby vernal pool wetlands all day long until 5 PM, and good fellowship with one another for the Ohio Maple Madness Tour.  Once you are on campus, just follow the signs!

We Are Tapped!

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We had a great turnout of folks to help tap maple trees on Monday and Tuesday at the OSU-Mansfield sugarbush.  A big thank you to Anthony Tambini and Rachel Coy – both former students who worked in the maple woods and returned for a fun day of tapping!  My gratitude to Marne Titchenell who appreciates maple amidst the larger sphere of wildlife, her Extension expertise.  Thank you Chelsea and Kris, current students who are working for me this semester.  Of course, Carri and Jake were there helping as always, and it was great to have Katie Gerber, one of ODNR’s State Service Forester, who came to get some hands-on maple experience too!  Many hands make light work and we are planning to shut the sap tank valve first thing in the morning and officially start our production season.  Happy sugaring to everyone already tapped, and may your crystal ball of weather forecasts and prognostications be clear if you are still trying to decide when to tap.

A Little Science behind Maple Sugaring Weather

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Hands down, the number one question that comes up this time of year is “When should I tap?”

Due to the warmest December on record, I have heard a few Ohioans even asking “Should I have tapped in December?”.  When you look back over the years, the trend has been toward earlier tapping dates, but hoping that you can keep taps open for 3+ months is a bit of a stretch.  There is no way that will happen on a gravity system, and you will need more than a little luck even on high vacuum.

The scientific approach to planning involves studying climatological data and developing a plan based on that data. The maps below are long range weather predictions for the next three months. You can clearly see that all indications point to above normal temperatures for the next three months. For sugar makers what does this mean?

To quote a good friend and fellow maple researcher, “when you look at forecasts you need to look at it from the big producer / small producer perspective.”  Because most small producers tap everything at one time, they need to consider the value of a good short-term, 30-day forecast.  In most cases, especially if you are on a gravity system, you need to find the best 30-day window that will allow you to make the most syrup.  Once you tap, you are on the clock and that clock runs out shortly after 30 days.  On the other hand, if you are a large producer or even a medium producer on vacuum, you need to study yearly trends.  Trends will disclose what has happened over the last 3 to 5 years.  What we have seen is a trend to earlier tapping just about every year.  In most cases, early tapping has paid off in Ohio.  A major reason is that newer technology lends itself to pushing the envelope when it comes to tapping.  You have the advantage of running a semi-closed vacuum system utilizing 24/7 operation.  This lengthens your season considerably.

One of the most valuable pieces of data you can use are temperature history graphs for your location.  Weather Underground has some of the best.  They plot the maximum, minimum, and average temperatures.  Plotting the maximum and minimum will give you a good idea on the number of freeze-thaw days to anticipate for a month.  As we all know, freeze-thaw cycles are very important and drive daily sap runs.  You can look at these cycles over a five or even ten year period.  Over time you begin to see how various weather patterns play out.

Keeping in mind these are zip code specific but we are talking at the broad scale of an entire state, here are three February graphs. You can clearly see we started February leaving a warm end to January on two out of the three graphs.  In all the graphs, conditions continued to warm up as February wore on.  In two out of the three, the temps dropped going into March.  This may be a hint for what could happen this year.  2020 and 2022 were almost normal.  In both cases, our records show average to above average production.  2021 was the outlier and production was down for that year as temperatures stayed warm through most of March.  The other two years highlight the fact that starting out February warm does not mean you will march into March warm.

Too much science?  Here is a more common sense approach that prioritizes the size of your operation.  If you are tapping thousands of taps, you must start early to get the job done.  For a moment, think about a huge 50,000-tap operation.  Should they consider tapping right after the first of the year?  Definitely!  One of their strategies is to tap 5,000 taps super early.  This results in the Facebook posts you may have seen bragging about syrup being made over Christmas.  Several big producers in the East did this in December.  Does that mean they tapped everything?  Most likely not.  A large commercial producer hedges their season by tapping some early and the rest over the month of January with everything in the tree and ready by February 1.  Small producers who are setup to boil early can also do this, the only difference is they may start tapping their early running trees shortly after New Year’s but plan to finish out in February.  This keeps fresh taps in the system and prevents you from putting all your eggs in one basket.  The best way to accomplish this is to keep very good records.

That brings us back to our initial question.  When should I tap this year?  All indications are that we are going to have a warmer than normal winter.  If you are in Southern Ohio, you might be tapped already.  North of I-70, you should probably hold back until the end of January.  This is where analyzing the 30-day forecast is critical.  Studying several long-range forecasts a little closer, I noticed that we may have some of the coldest weather of the winter on the last week of January and the first week of February.  While the forecast is showing a warming trend coming off several weeks of genuine cold weather, depending on your situation you may even want to hold off until the first week of February.

Of course, the joker in the deck is the El Nino weather event we are experiencing.  El Nino’s are known for extremes and all it takes is a bend in the jet stream and you could be looking at 10 more days of below average weather.  Once this happens, you usually go right back to the warmer than normal pattern.  In this case, cold weather is your friend.  What we do not want is 10 days straight above normal!

As for my prediction!  I will tell you what kind of season we had in 2024 on the first week in April.  May your sugar season be long and sweet.

Anyone Tapping Yet?

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When to tap?  That is the question.  And when it comes to maple sugaring, that is THE question.  Currently, we are in the holding position at our Mansfield sugarbush and thankful for the cold temperatures that have descended on the region.  The longer the woods stay cold, the closer our trees will get to meeting their chilling requirement, and the more optimistic I will be when we do eventually start our season.  Put simply, if trees don’t sleep well, they can wake up cranky!

When we look to the south along the Ohio River, I see more good signs of zero accumulated growing degree days since the start of the year.  Note, this does not account for any warm spells we had around Christmas.

With that map in mind, a peek at online chat forums like the Maple Trader’s Ohio Forum reveals that several folks are already tapped in part or in full (January 2nd in Ross County, another early report out of Muskingum County).  Looking even further south to states like Kentucky and West Virginia, only early tappers were rewarded with last year’s ultra-warm and sporadic 2023 season.  That likely pushed some producers to move their tapping date earlier on the calendar.  Still, others are crossing their fingers that last year was an anomaly and going with a more traditional schedule again for 2024.

Taking the forecast up top at face value and speaking directly to our Mansfield site, there aren’t many (if any) quality freeze-thaw cycle days for a truly big run in the next 2 weeks.  If we do decide to tap in a week or so, we should at least get all our lines flushed and spot check the vacuum on the system while we wait for better conditions to kick things fully in gear.

Come back next week for a post from Les Ober where he discusses the question of tap timing and the effects of El Nino as we all wring our hands and stare into muddy crystal balls in search of the right answer to our question!

Updates from the Sugarbush

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Based on the forecast, it’s hard to tell when our season will launch at the Ohio State Mansfield campus, but we’ve been hard at work readying the woods for whenever Go Time is.

3 years of single tree lateral lines came down from the ACER project that examined differences between sap production in Freeman’s (red x silver or “Rilvers”) maples.

Lateral lines in bad shape from wildlife damage or sanitation issues were replaced.  Some of these issues are pretty small and hard to spot unless you have your vacuum pump running.  Other wildlife damage…guessing raccoon or coyote here, pretty obvious.

Bucked rounds were hauled and split to feed our new demonstration evaporator at the also brand new maple pavilion (more on that later!).

We’re nearly done replacing all of last year’s spouts.

As we find drops and T’s that need replaced, we are shifting to a pin- or peg-style T so that we cut off the old spouts when taps are pulled at the end of season.

New trees that have grown into a minimum tapping size have been added to the system.  Surprisingly, our second main line that originally featured 99 trees when the tubing was installed in 2019 grew by 9 additional taps this year.  This was a good reminder to keep a diameter tape handy when getting your sugarbush ready for the season.  Sure, trees grow slowly, but they are growing and it’s sometimes surprising what just a few years can do when conditions are right.

End-line sensors are out gathering sunlight to keep our monitoring system operational, and we’re adding valves to the end of our main lines to facilitate a more complete and convenient sanitation regiment.

And our invasive species contract to control multiflora rose, particularly where it was worst along main lines 1 and 2, is already paying dividends with increased mobility and ease of access throughout the system.  A chest-rigged brush cutter was used to sever stem clusters in tandem with a timely and targeted application of glyphosate to the cut stem surfaces.  **This is a good reminder that any herbicide treatment in and around a working sugarbush should be done with caution!  Being cognizant of compound half lives, targeted treatment that stays where it belongs, and a well-trained applicator are keys to ensuring these sometimes necessary steps help and don’t hurt.**  Honestly, having the ability to freely negotiate through the woods wherever we please probably contributed to finding 9 additional taps along our second main line.  I also couldn’t help but notice that the majority of our lateral sanitation issues were cropped up around the second main line too.  Certainly trickle down penalties of thorny access because of a nasty invasive thicket infestation in the woods!

You literally could not walk through this area of the forest before, and the stem clumps that are left (and hopefully dead!) are the reason why.

One last major priority for this off-season will be attempting to remedy the long flat (at best!) stretches of main line between our pump house and where the majority of our taps start on main lines 4, 5, and 6.  I’m sure that will be a learning process complete with a couple of bumps in the road, but the goal is to perhaps install a couple lift options to show producers different ways of overcoming this common challenge in Ohio maple woods.  More on this last point later!!