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Local sugar producers: Good season due to early warm weather, newer tech By KATY SAVAGE ksavage@eagletimes.com 14 hrs ago 0 CLAREMONT — This season’s warm February weather and long spring made it an ideal season for local sugar makers. “I had the best year of my entire life,” said A-J Maranville III, who owns Sugar Bee Farm in Claremont. Maranville has made maple syrup the past 22 years. He made about 67 gallons this year from his 700 taps and he could have made more, he said. Maranville attributed the good sap flow to the warm weather early in the season. “You had the perfect run and that’s why everyone had a pretty good season,” said Maranville. Demand for maple syrup and maple products is growing and is expected to grow by at least 6 percent through 2023, according to industry experts. While Canada leads the world in maple sugar production, Vermont leads the nation. Vermont produced 1.98 million gallons of maple syrup last year, according to the United States Department of Agriculture — that’s triple what it was 10 years ago when Vermonters produced about 640,000 gallons of syrup. Maple sugar makers say new technology, such as vacuum pumps that connect to maple trees and reverse osmosis machines, has made it easier to collect sap and has made production more efficient. The better efficiencies in production has changed the maple industry from what was once an industry of hobbyists who enjoyed boiling sap part time to an industry of big businesses that have set up hundreds of thousands of taps. That has changed the business for locals like Maranville, who still make maple syrup on a small scale. Mark Mitchell, the owner of Mitch’s Maples in Chester, Vermont, has been boiling sap for about 40 years. He remembers trudging through the woods at age 3 and learning the industry from his relatives. He now has about 9,900 taps that stretch 10 miles between Chester, Grafton and Rockingham. “A lot of the evaporation process is a lot faster than it used to be,” said Mitchell, who made about 4,000 gallons of syrup this year — an average year for him. advertisement “A lot of February was March weather and a lot of March was February weather,” he said. Maple Knoll Farm owner Victor Jarvis in Springfield, Vermont, also makes maple syrup as a hobby — a labor of love that started 10 years ago. Like Mitchell, Jarvis remembers learning about the industry when he was a young child from his grandfather. Jarvis, 71, works at his farm more than 12 hours a day. He has cut back on his maple syrup production this year, but said he still made the same amount of syrup. For him, like Mitchell, making maple syrup is still just a hobby. “If you worked as hard as we worked in another job you’d probably be rich,” he said. “It’s strictly the love of doing it — not the big profit.”
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