balancing sugar making with another job

Hello,

Last year was my first year producing syrup (430 taps) I'm going to be expanding to 1,000 or so taps next year (potential for up to 5,000-7,000 taps). Currently my normal day job is an accountant for my families business but I've been going back to school for a career change (masters of business administration-family business will soon be sold as well). I love sugar making and want to continue expanding my production. I was just curious how some of you who have other full time jobs balance sugar making with your line of work, and if your job/industry has flexibility if you wouldn't mind sharing what you do it'd be appreciated. My biggest drawback is that my farm is 1.5 hours from where I live.

Any advice/suggestions would be appreciated!

Kevin

I find it a lot easier to just take a month off from work to sugar.

It's a challenge, but can be done. I have around 3000 taps and am expanding. I also have a job where I'm gone from home 10 hours a day. I take 2 weeks off, but it never seems to coincide with the best sap runs. I've trained wifey to do as much as she can, but it makes for a LONG month! It catches up to you boiling until 2:00 a.m. and getting back up at 6:00 to get ready for the day job.

I take as much vacation as I am allowed. It is hard because I had to put in for spring vacation two weeks ago, or risk losing it to someone else and then running the chance of working overtime instead of having off. I always pick the last 1/2 of March and first 10 days of April and hope for the best. I set it up where when I do work, its only one day at a time most of the time. There has been instances where I've had to dump a few days of sap because of working out and/or the grade has lowered badly because of not able to get to it all. Overall theres been more pluses than not, just hoping the season isn't a month early this year or I will be screwed.

I'm lucky in my situation where my sugar house is 100 yards behind my house and all my sap comes to the sugarhouse! I work in the construction industry as a project estimator/designer so typically sugaring season is when my busy season is kicking off! No job/workplace is the same, but my job allows me to get to work early (sometimes 5:00 a.m) and leave early afternoon, or when a project is complete. I deal with deadlines all the time so I can finagle jobs around to meet those deadlines! As eagle lake sugar has, I have also taught my wife to do everything that I do. It helps that she also loves helping out with the operation! she's 5'5" 115 lbs soaking wet so it takes here more time, but she will often run the arch and i'll take over when I get there. she'll run the sap level a little higher, but at least it's evaporating! My father is retiring in a week and a half... so i'll be teaching him this year how to run the operation so I can add taps next year and he can get things going much earlier for me! Being 1.5 hours away from your operation is going to be tough. if I was in that position I'd look for all the technological advances that have been made over the years to help me! I'd imagine that eventually they'll come out with some remote control technology where you could use your cell phone to essentially pump your sap out of your tanks, into and through your R.o, then to your supply tank, so when you got there, you'd be off and boiling! I enjoy long boils, but not if I was away from home! If I was worried about time, I'd also be boiling with oil, as start up and shut down would be much quicker as well! just my $0.02

I know a guy that works construction, heavy equip operaotor, and is layed off in the winter so maple works well for him.

Our farm is an Angus Beef operation and a commercial feed mill. My wife will tell you I don't have the time but she picks up the slack during maple season and our operation is automated on collection and RO that I can leave after I get the RO fired up and the vac system starts at a preset temp. Boiling is an evening/night job except on weekends.

Our sugar house is on the farm so it is a short walk or atv ride...the 1.5hr trip would be a deal breaker for me.

Good Luck!

Ben

I also drive school bus. In fact I sold my business, then started driving bus just for the benefits, that was in '98. Then in '03 I got into maple. 2 yrs ago I requested March off but was denied. That puzzled me because drivers can get time off to vacation (cruise, hunting trip etc), but I could not get maple season off. Anyway, I fit maple in between my am and pm runs, then I boil after my PM run. I trained my wife to boil, but now she is fully busy tending her 89 yr. old mom. I had 3 hired help to tap the last 4 seasons, this year I only have 1. I might end up leaving one bush untapped for a year, but it is a lease and I'd still need to pay the lease or lose it. Without my RO It might not happen at all.

Sleep is really overrated.

I took the best approach and retired this year....lots of time for sugaring now!

Your situation is going to be difficult because of the location of your home and your farm, but as Dave said, you should consider getting an RO for your operation if you don't already have one. You may need to refrain from growing too large until you can work out the logistics to allow you to have more time to boil. Although my wife and I are retired auditors, I got a little bored three years ago and took on a part-time job delivering liquor around northern Michigan for a private firm. Part-time turned out to be 40 to 50, and as high as 65 hours per week. I too am fortunate to have a wife that isn't afraid to work and she did all the collecting the one season when we were using buckets and I was working. I have since re-retired and it has allowed us to expand our operation (and enjoy it more).
Gary

My job is the busiest during sugaring season. That's when we get all of our overtime. I agree with what others have said and won't repeat them. But what I will add is get big equipment. You don't need to be spending a lot of time boiling. Your time needs to be spent in t h e woods, that's where the money is. Once you get the sap out of the woods you want to boil it as fast as possible because you've got to get home and go to work the next day.

I have to agree with Lew on the big equipment. We went larger on the RO this year for just that reason. I want to spend more time in the woods (where I enjoy it the most). Don't want to have to spend time waiting on equipment (RO) to concentrate.

Craig

We have the same situation you describe. Both my brother and I have full-time jobs and young families. He's an hour from the sugar camp and I'm 3 hours away. Our employers are understanding that we will take up to 2 weeks off in March and April to boil. We'll each take 1 or 2 days of vacation per week to boil. There is generally a few days per week where there's not enough sap to fire up and then you normally get a longer freezeup at some point in the season that allows you to get some rest. We have a cousin who is retired and lives beside the sugar camp that does a lot of the heavy lifting for us - like starting and stopping vacuum pumps and gathering sap.

The key for us is having lots of extra tank storage. Between what we have in the camp and what's in the woods we have more than 2 gallons per tap of tank space. That generally allows us to boil every second day except during really heavy runs. The 3,000 gallon tank in the camp is often full when I get there in the morning. I'll fire up the RO and get it concentrating sap while we wash the front pans and get everything else ready to boil. Once I get a thousand gallons of space in the storage tank in the camp we can't collect sap fast enough and I'll slowly drop the level of that tank throughout the day until we have no more sap left in woods.

The other key is having the ability to process sap quickly because we are not boiling every day. 2 membranes allows us to process up to 1,000 gallons of sap an hour (depending on sap temperature and how hard we want to push the unit) and we can adjust the concentrate flow to match the evaporator's speed. We often have no more than 12" of sap in the concentrate tank that feeds the evaporator. It can get a little scary if you have to shut down the RO for a few minutes to change a filter!