URGENT: Please do us the favor of returning your producer survey in our ACER research project!
As you might know already, we (Ohio State University) were awarded an ACER grant in 2019 in collaboration with Future Generations University in West Virginia and Penn State University. You can peek under the Research tab on the Ohio State Maple site or read this press release through the School of Environment and Natural Resources webpage for more general information about the award.
A main focus of the award was to send a survey to Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania producers to update our knowledge of production practices, where producers are marketing and moving maple syrup and other value-added maple products, and get a grasp on maple production numbers across the tri-state region. The latter piece of information is extra important now that Ohio has been removed from the list of states in USDA’s NASS maple survey.
Survey science is a tricky business and while we do not need every single producer to respond, each response helps. Each producer increases sample size and incrementally reduces our uncertainty about the different elements we are trying to explore. Due to the fact that only Pennsylvania is still on the list of NASS-surveyed maple states (West Virginia and Ohio having been dropped), getting a firm grasp on production data will be more important than ever. Our tri-state team sent nearly 2,000 surveys to producers across the 3 states and is currently rolling out a round of “take your survey” reminders. All respondents’ returned surveys are de-identified and we don’t share data with anyone outside the primary ACER award team, and you can be assured that your confidentiality is being prioritized!
So we will leave it at that. Please, if you received a producers survey from Ohio State’s ACER team, be an active member of the maple community and make your anonymous contribution on behalf of the broader maple community. We value your input and look forward to sharing results when the surveys are in and the analysis starts!
Author: Gabe Karns 