I’ve finally finished the 2025 State of the Maple report! I’ve put these out every year since we started making maple syrup on a large scale, dating back to 2015 (you can find them all here: https://fermeetforet.ca/category/latestnews/). I don’t think I’ve ever kept people waiting past the end of May before for this much anticipated summation of our maple season. But this year was different. Here we are in November, more than a half year since the last fire in the evaporator died down. Summer has come and gone, and a new layer of snow has just blanketed the earth again. My thoughts are already drifting more to the 2026 season than the 2025 one. So why was I such a laggard? Why’d I hand in my homework so late? Let me give you my excuse. I think it’s a pretty good one.

Since we bought our farm in 2012, it has had four owners. In the spring of this year, I learned that the three other owners all wanted to sell their shares of the farm. According to our co-ownership agreement, I had six months to either buy it off of them, or the farm would be put up for sale. At the same time, my partner Abby was moving in with me and becoming a new co-owner.

Since we bought it, the farm had more than doubled in value. So I now had to, with Abby’s help, buy the farm all over again, for a much increased price, with half the number of co-owners to split it between.

Half-way through this process, two of the co-owners moved out of the basement of our house, and began renting the basement to us. We in turn began renting it – as well as other parts of the farm – to others. The basement became a mostly commercial space, with office, storage, commercial kitchen, and event space (see our Farm Rentals page if you’re interested: https://fermeetforet.ca/farm-rentals/).

So Abby’s and my summers were largely taken up with the twin projects of starting a new commercial rentals business and securing the financing to purchase the other co-owners’ shares in the farm. I don’t know if I’ve ever had such a busy summer, nor spent so much time doing computer work. I’ve never felt so much like a business owner, doing business admin stuff, and so disconnected from the actual farm labour. I don’t know what we would have done without our two excellent employees, Alex and Marianne, who did most of the real work this summer!

The good news is that the rentals business is up and running, and doing pretty well, and we’ve managed to secure the financing needed to buy out the others. We now just have a few more hoops to jump through before the farm sale is official. My workload has died down enough that I now feel I can devote a bit of time to the writing I love to do.

So I hope you enjoy the 2025 State of the Maple Report below, and stay tuned for more pieces coming soon, both on this Farmer’s Table substack, and my other substack, https://www.seanbutler.ca/, where I write about all the other stuff that interests me besides food and farming.

2025 marked the beginning of our second decade making maple syrup on a larger scale. We learned a lot in that first decade. We now know, for instance, that there is no answer to the age-old question, “How do you think this maple season will be?” other than, “Ask me when the season is over.” The trees follow their own rhythms and no human has yet figured out how to predict them. A lot rests on the temperatures we get during a crucial few weeks in March and April (or increasingly in February), when the sap run is highly dependent on the temperature (ideally a few degrees below zero at night, and in the positive single digits during the day).

And the temperatures we got this March and April seemed pretty ideal for sap flow. It was a cooler, more drawn-out spring – the kind most people, yearning for summer, find frustrating, but maple producers dream of. Everyone who asked me how our season was thought it must have been a good one. I too, had high hopes in the beginning; we’d had a record-busting 5,200 litre season last year, and I was having similar thoughts for this one. In 2024, between March 5 and March 13, we had four of my self-defined “big days”: days when we bottle more than 300 litres of syrup. This year, between March 19 and April 4, we also had four “big days”. Everything was a couple weeks later, but with still plenty of potential boils ahead of us (our maple seasons typically end around April 20), we seemed possibly on track towards 2025 levels.

Another encouraging sign was that up to that point, we had only produced golden syrup – the lightest grade. Typically, our seasons go something like this: make a little bit of golden, a lot of amber, a little bit of dark, then it’s over. The fact that we were still producing golden seemed to be a sign that we were still in the early season, with much more to come.

But then the sap just started petering out. We had one more “good day” (247 litres of syrup bottled on April 7), but then never broke even 200 litres again. Usually it’s high temperatures causing the sap to spoil that is the season killer, but this year it was simply a lack of sap. We ended our season on April 19 a bit below average, at just under 3,700 litres. (4,000 has been our average since the beginning of what I call our “modern era” – since 2019, when our upgraded equipment and experience started to really gel together.)

We had even replaced over 1,000 of our 2,800 taps over the winter in the hopes of boosting sap collection. Older taps accumulate more bacteria in the microscopic crevices of the plastic, and this bacteria signals to the tree to heal the taphole faster, resulting in less sap collected. Impossible to sterilize, many maple producers replace all their taps every year. We hadn’t done so in years, so thought maybe we should with at least some of them. Yet all those new taps didn’t seem to pay off.

The sugar content of the sap was low – around 1.8 percent – but it had been low in 2024 too, and we’d still had a record year.

Despite all these positive signs, the season was still resoundingly average, at 1.31 litres per tap. (Our “modern era” average has been 1.4 litres per tap. The average for Quebec this year was 1.34 and for the US was 1.29, so we were squarely within both our own average and the whole maple region’s average. Talk about a thrilling headline: “Syrup production pretty average!”) So what happened?

My best guess is that the trees, having given so much sap a year ago, were simply tired and needed to conserve their resources. Looking back at our syrup production records, a sawtooth pattern of boom and bust emerges, with good and bad years alternating. Indeed, two years ago had been our worst of the “modern era”, at only a little over 2,800 litres, which was then followed by our best. It fit the pattern that this year would be lacklustre.

Such is maple syrup farming – you take the good with the bad. But the good news is that even the worst years are still profitable. Our maples are truly the gift that keeps on giving.

But enough geeking out on the numbers. Enough with average! You guys want to hear some stories about the hardships we faced, the catastrophes that unfolded, the prying of victories from the jaws of defeat, right? Ok, let’s raise this narrative from the dull recitations of production figures into the realm of the epic of man’s struggle to wrestle a living from cruel, uncaring nature! Cue the howling wind!

It had been a real winter. Not the pansy winters we had become accustomed to of late in this age of warming climate, but a real winter, like I remembered from my childhood (heck, even from my thirties), with towering snowbanks and unrelenting cold. The kind of winter that robs even your memory of what it’s like to be in a bathing suit by a lake in the sun and feel so hot that you want to jump in and cool off. Such thoughts are inconceivable in the depths of a real winter, when all your body can think about is how to stay warm, how to stay alive in this cold that wants to suck the life out of you.

No warm winds had lapped up from the south, causing the snow to melt, rain to fall instead of snow, and then refreeze in the next snap of Winter’s bony fingers. As someone who likes to ski through powder or skate on a frozen lake, I generally hate these mid-winter thaws that have become commonplace lately. But as someone who, come February, must strap on snowshoes and hump up and down hills, tapping maple trees, I have come to appreciate the positive effect that at least one of these thaw/refreezes can have on the walkability of the snowpack. Yet in the winter just past, we had none of these crust-forming episodes, and so it was fluffy powder, all the way to the hard ground, some three feet down.

Here’s where I learned a lesson about snowshoes: in previous deep powdered winters, I had found that my snowshoes were more trouble than they were worth. They did virtually nothing to keep me on top of the snow, and were more effort when I lifted my foot with each step. I would just take them off and wade through the thigh-high snow. This winter, however, our employee, Cameron, brought his extra-long snowshoes; they were about three feet, compared to my two-foot ones. And his actually did what a snowshoe is supposed to do! When it comes to snowshoes, size does matter.

Here’s where I rant about modern snowshoes: “Snowshoeing”, rather than being a mode of transport, has, like so much else, become a sport. People buy the specialized gear, and head out to the approved snowshoeing paths, where a hundred other people have already trampled down the snow, and “snowshoe” on this packed down snow. Besides the spikes on the bottom of them giving more grip, they might as well just be in boots. Just pull on some cleats if you want grip, and skip the awkward duck walk of “snowshoeing”.

Fortunately, although hard to find, some snowshoes are still made to serve their intended purpose: to keep you from sinking too much into deep snow. I’ll definitely be looking into trading my pair for some real working snowshoes before the next maple season rolls around.

Unfortunately, we lost Cameron, who was a great employee in more ways than his snowshoes, to the NCC that spring – although he did devote a couple of weekends of his free time to helping us with tapping. I used to do all the tapping myself, and it would take me two to three weeks. As I inch into my 50’s, though, I’m finding it a steeper and steeper mountain to climb each spring, and really appreciate some help. Genevieve stepped into the breach this year for the first time, and did a good job. It also helped that we did get a thaw/refreeze cycle partway through the tapping process, and after that the walking was much easier. I’m looking forward to our son, who is 13, getting old enough to start tapping; it’s definitely a job for youthful energy. How young is too young to send him out to the woods?

When we learned that Cameron wasn’t going to be available much for the maple season, we started casting around for someone to help with the bottling. Through Juniper Farm, we connected with a past employee of theirs, Marie-Eve, who lives right down the road from us. She turned out to be an excellent bottler (which requires a skill set and personality not everyone has), an enjoyable person to spend many long days with, and a fan of intriguing podcasts about the nature of life. When you’re filling thousands of bottles with maple syrup, you have a lot of time to think about big ideas!

A big question for maple producers is when to start tapping, especially now that our climate has become more erratic. The goal is to be finished tapping right before the first run of sap. Tap too soon, and the tree will initiate its taphole healing process before you start collecting sap, shortening your season. Tap too late, and you could miss the first few runs. In our experience, we can get a first run anytime between mid-February and the end of March.

This year, with the cold winter we were having, I figured the sap would start at the later end of what’s typical. We watched the two week forecast like hawks. One advantage of having more people than just me tapping is that we can get the job done faster, allowing us to wait a bit longer, until we can see a clear warming trend in the forecast. By mid-February we saw it coming early March and got our drills out. 13 days of work later the job was done, just in time to catch the first drops of sweet sap leaking from the trees.

Once the sap run begins, we start running, looking for leaks in the sap collection tubing. We’re not looking for sap running out so much as air leaking in. Like nearly all maple producers, we use vacuum to increase our intake of sap. Having good vacuum – as close to possible to 30 Hg – can increase sap yields by 100%. We use an unusual hybrid of natural vacuum in small diameter tubing and two small diaphragm pumps, and the two together generally gives us an Hg of over 25.

When we turned on our pumps at the beginning of the first run, our Hg was at only 2.5 – not unusual for the beginning. Genevieve is our leak-fixing specialist, and she spent an entire day hiking through the still deep snow, fixing little leaks, but without any satisfying payoff in higher vacuum levels. Then, while driving the truck out to the sugar shack, I parked along the road for some reason, and noticed a tap leaking. A common problem we had this year was the plastic taps splitting when we hammered them in, perhaps because they were getting brittle with age. It was nearly impossible to notice this splitting, though, until after the vacuum pumps were turned on, when you would hear them hissing. This is what I heard on the side of the road. I replaced the tap, and the vacuum level quickly rose to 12. The leak had been so close to the sugar shack that it had been having an outsized effect on our levels. I’d had way more effect on our vacuum doing work a couple steps from the truck than Genevieve had had walking the woods all day. You can bet that I rubbed this in with her afterwards.

I think that’s a good place to end this State of the Maple report. Thanks for reading! I’ll try to get the next one done much sooner after next spring’s season (which will be rolling around again in just three short months – yikes)!