Looks to me like Mountainvan has hit on some kind of "happy medium." Can't see the picture too well, but it looks to me like he cut off one thumb-sized limb of maybe a 3-inch-trunk tree. So you plant your "maple orchard," and do this limb-tapping on some alternating fraction of the trees each year as they mature, and then take the conventional route once your orchard is suitably grown-up. So you're re-couping something while on the path to a perfectly-layed-out block of tappable maples. And you've scored "enviropoints" for having planted a whole bunch of trees.