Checking what VT sugar makers are doing

[wiam]

Tasted a little off while boiling this morning so emptied back pan to front and boiled it down with permeate in back. What we finished this evening tasted fine. Just dark. Ended with 952 off 2100 taps. Best year so far.

[GiddingsHill]

Thank you, Dr. Perkins.
Im not surprised that the production is lower, and 10% lower does seem to be in keeping with what i suspect we'll be at this season.
I bought the 1/4" spouts in anticipation of tapping the new woodlot i described in my prior post, but ultimately ended up not adding any new taps this year so i used them on the existing setup which has larger trees and has only been tapped for 7 years, so finding good wood isn't much of an issue here yet. But i do like the idea of minimizing the size of the tap hole wound. Yes i do tap below the lateral, but not very often, i probably should more. I think what I'll probably use in future years is a more targeted approach using a combination of 1/4" and 5/16" spouts in different areas depending on tree health and diameter.

[WestfordSugarworks]

They are just touted as producing nearly the same amount of syrup but producing a smaller wound.

I'd be curious to see differences in stain column area between 1/4" and 5/16" spouts. If 1/4" spouts produce 10-11% less stained wood than 5/16", then I would see that as a reasonable alternative to 5/16" spouts. Not sure if studies have been done on this.

[WestfordSugarworks]

We had our last boil in Westford last night. Ended up at .42 gpt.. the sap had pretty much stopped flowing a week ago. Meanwhile in Jericho, where we started tapping on January 1 and finished tapping somewhere around January 15, we are still going alright. Got a little freeze last night. .3 gpt of sap today or so. Sap buyer will keep coming until the sap is bad. This was our first year of stopping production due to sap ceasing to flow. Reassuring to see others had the same reason for shutting down. We made some great tasting DR last night.

[tcross]

threw in the towel last night. the steam started to get a hint of an odd taste and sugar content had been hanging at 1.2 for 3-4 days. syrup still tasted good however. think some of my soft maples are budding. hit 24 here last night. probably could untap all my reds and keep going but im about out of wood and it's time to move on! good luck to all those who are still keepin at it!

[Ultimatetreehugger]

Sap is still good here and running strong. Getting about a gallon per tap each day. Sugar content is between 1 and 1.2. Going to continue until my buyer says stop.

[DrTimPerkins]

I'd be curious to see differences in stain column area between 1/4" and 5/16" spouts. If 1/4" spouts produce 10-11% less stained wood than 5/16", then I would see that as a reasonable alternative to 5/16" spouts. Not sure if studies have been done on this.

Not on the tips of my fingers, but I can probably dig this out later. Send me an email to remind me if you don't see it within a month or so. LOTS of data to look at right now, so this isn't at the top of the list.

[n8hutch]

I'd be curious to see differences in stain column area between 1/4" and 5/16" spouts. If 1/4" spouts produce 10-11% less stained wood than 5/16", then I would see that as a reasonable alternative to 5/16" spouts. Not sure if studies have been done on this.

There is a good article in this years LaPierre Maple Catalog on the subject. If you haven't seen it already. It relates to 1/4 inch tap wounds vs 5/16 and how tapping too close to an old tap wound creates a larger wound in area than 2 taps placed a proper distance apart. I found it to be good info.

[DrTimPerkins]

I believe what you're referring to is an article by Stéphane Guay that is on pages 28-29 of the Lapierre 2020 catalog. He was formerly a researcher at Centre Acer before he was "let go." The only real reference to 1/4" taps in that article is that it would allow (in his tapping model) a reduction in taphole spacing from 16" (with 5/16" spouts) to 15" (with 14" spouts), or a 6.7% reduction in taphole spacing. Stéphane advocates a novel taphole spacing approach that hasn't really received much attention outside his sphere of influence, so I can't really comment on it. I'm not a big advocate of pattern tapping -- others are. Keep in mind...the growth rate of trees in Quebec tends to be a good bit lower, so wounding and how to deal with it can be more of a problem in parts of that Province.

If you want to see what alternative approaches (taphole size, dropline length, tree size, etc.) have on sustainability of tapping, you might want check out Dr. Abby's tapping zone model at: https://mapleresearch.org/pub/tapzonemodel-2-2/ and the accompanying Excel spreadsheet at: https://mapleresearch.org/pub/tzspreadsheet/ It can provide some insights into how small changes you can make in your tapping approach could influence wounding over the long-term. It is a major reason we (at UVM PMRC) went to tapping below the lateral line in some of the older, historically heavily-tapped with 7/16" spout sections of our woods with huge success. Just by changing one thing...tapping below the lateral line, we went from hitting stain 4.7% of the time to less than 1% of the time. We will have an article and a video coming out soon about how hitting stained wood impacts your sap yield and net profit. The results were quite shocking to us when we first crunched the numbers, but in short, for each 1% of the time you hit stained wood when tapping, your sap yield goes DOWN by an average of 1/2%. So if you're hitting stained wood 5% of the time (which is not hard to get to), you're leaving 2.5% of your total sap in the woods. MANY people hit stain WAY more than 5%. When we did a survey several years ago, the majority of producers thought hitting stain 10% of the time was acceptable.

An example from Abby's TZM (a slightly modified version from what you can download) comparing 5/16" spouts and 1/4" spouts is below.

TZM 5-16 vs 1-4 spouts.jpg

In this example, starting with an 8" diameter tree and 30" droplines, after about 30 yrs your chances of hitting stained wood are around 10.5% with 5/16" spouts, but only about 6.5% with 1/4" spouts. You can see pretty quickly that doubling the size of the tapping band (via tapping below the lateral) has the greatest positive impact on reducing the probability of hitting stained wood. NOTE: This is all based upon measurements of average maple growth rates (in a range of diameter classes) in Vermont.

[n8hutch]

If I remember correctly, and I dont have it in front of me he was advocating for 1 tap per tree. Regardless of size ? My Orchard Tends to grow really slowly so it was interesting to me.