I'll chime in as well....I wasn't going to respond because i'm just a backwoods mapler doing this for personal consumption. Obviously, the desire and dream of being a big producer is there but just not in the cards for me at this point. I started taping trees in my parents yard before I was a teenager and learned from books. I boiled it down on my moms cook stove and the wood stove in the house, maybe got a pint of syrup a year in those early days. I picked it back up in my late teens using a turkey fryer and whatever else I could get my hands on. Once my boys got a little older I decided we needed something to do in the spring and acquired a 2x3 flat pan and welded my own arch up and we went from a dozen taps making a couple gallons of syrup to running about 60 taps on gravity and 17 gallons of syrup.
I've taken the last couple years off and recently bought 90 acres full of Red Maple and looking to upgrade to a larger drop flu pan next for next year. The icing on the cake come yesterday when my oldest son, hes 21 now, called and asked if he could borrow the old 2x3 because him and his buddy are taping trees this year. I gave him some pointers and said have it.....The torch has been passed and my job as a father has come to fruition, so to speak. It's the little things in life that make us get out of bed every morning.