Atlantic Forestry March 2022

Sweet and sour

The day after a bad ice storm in the first week of February, I went to check out the damage at Chris and Anna Hutchinson’s sugar bush in Lake Paul, N.S. – which is kind of in my backyard, rurally speaking. Along the Aylesford Road, going north from Lunenburg County into King’s County, there were many places where heavily glazed trees were bent down to the pavement on one side or the other – so it was effectively just one lane, and traffic had to slalom back and forth carefully, with the tips of branches occasionally whipping against our side mirrors. I soon realized I should have thrown a chainsaw in the truck. Fortunately, larger trees had already been cut and dragged away by earlier travellers.

The sugar bush was a surreal scene of beautiful devastation, with the winter sun dazzling on bent and broken trees. Small twigs were encased in ice as big around as your finger, so it wasn’t hard to imagine the incredible weight borne by a full crown. Fallen branches littered the ground, but nearly as many remained hung up, splintered, and hanging precariously. 

“You can’t even get in the woods right now,” said Chris, noting that limbs were still crashing down every now and then. He said he hadn’t seen anything like it since the Quebec ice storm of 1998, which he and Anna witnessed because at that time they were on the road running a trucking business, before they started this maple operation.

Once the ice melted, it would be time to start cleaning up the sugar bush – first with a crew on snowshoes using handsaws, then a few skilled powersaw operators to deal with bigger branches and fallen trees, which would be hazardous. The sap lines are supported by high-tensile wire, explained Hutchinson, and that tension could cause a bolt of wood to be flung in the air once freed. Finally, there would be the dreaded repair work. “The sheer effort it’s going to take to bring it back – because all those lines are graded,” he said. “We’re over half tapped in. Now we have to go completely back over it. I don’t even know if you could muster enough manpower to do it in a season.”

But ice damage wasn’t the only thing Hutchinson had on his mind. He had been following developments in New Brunswick, where the question of access to Crown hardwood forests has devolved into a bit of a shoving match between sugar bush operators and the timber sector. For some time, the New Brunswick Maple Syrup Association has been requesting more leases. A few years ago, the province offered up a 4,400-hectare increase, bringing the total to about 14,500 hectares. Now the group has gone public, urging citizens to sign a petition demanding that the government allocate an additional 12,000 hectares for sugar bush development – which, the maple industry points out, would still give them less than one percent of Crown forests. Forest NB, representing the timber licensees, has countered that any land taken out of their wood basket will strain fibre supply for the mills.

Hutchinson said the same tension exists in Nova Scotia, except the syrup industry is smaller and less advanced. He’s a major player in the province, with 50,000-60,000 taps on about 360 hectares, more than half of which is Crown land. “I was the first one in the province to get a lease for a sugar bush. I’m thinking it was 14 years ago.”

He produces 250,000-300,000 pounds per year, which accounts for about 30 percent of the provincial total – and despite this year’s challenges, he would like to produce more, because the market is red hot. The Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers recently released half of its reserves – a staggering 50 million pounds – which was soon slurped up by global demand. So it pains him to see Crown maple stands – part of the WestFor lease – being harvested in his community.

“They have approximately 75,000 acres around us. It’s a piece of woods that I’ve lived around and known about for years,” he said. “Back in the early 1960s we started building woods roads in there, so you saw it sort of being cut, but now what they’ve been doing in the last 20 years is way beyond its capacity to reproduce. There’s less than 20 percent in there that would make a good sugar bush – mature sugar bush – and that’s where their priorities are, to cut those, and they’re cutting them down every day, and it hasn’t stopped.”

Hutchinson is bewildered by the fact that government policy seems to favour the lumber industry. “They might produce a few hundred dollars, on average, per acre per year,” he said.

“Right now, we’re up to a barrel of maple syrup per acre … and when it’s put in a bottle, and that truck backs into our dock, it’s worth $3,000. That’s $3,000 going into this economy each and every year. You would think they’d want to leave the trees standing, especially with everything that’s going on in our climate right now.”

Back in 2013, when several Nova Scotia Crown maple parcels were put up for tender, there wasn’t much uptake – which Hutchinson considered entirely predictable, because the industry doesn’t have the critical mass, or the track record of profitability, to allow producers to secure financing for sugar bush development. He and Anna were only able to do it because they had their trucking business as collateral. The sector as a whole needs support, he said – to adopt new technology, and to tailor production methods to Nova Scotia’s unique conditions. With producers averaging about a pound of syrup per tap per year, the economics don’t work. That’s why Hutchinson Acres ended up hiring a consultant from Quebec.

“He basically changed everything we did here. It was kind of a costly affair – but every year we did it, we saw an increase in our production, to the point where we were about six pounds per tap.”

It’s a combination of things, said Hutchinson, but one of the big factors is keeping the whole system under vacuum, and using fusion pipe – which is welded rather than connected with leak-prone hose clamps, and light-coloured rather than sun-loving black. This keeps bacteria out of the lines, and out of the trees. Manipulating the vacuum can also increase sap flow, even eking out some production when temperatures are marginal. Remote monitoring technology also has a role to play, as well as reverse osmosis equipment specifically designed to address the relatively low brix levels of sap in Nova Scotia.

Hutchinson believes the maple industry would have better success making this transition if it were not under the same jurisdiction as forestry. “My wife and I both have farming backgrounds, so to us it’s logical – you know, if you’re growing and producing something each and every year, it would be agriculture. I think that’s where the division should be. The land should be taken out and put under agriculture.”

He does not seem like a guy who relishes this type of adversarial situation. “It’s a shame we have to compete for the same piece of woods, but that’s what we’re basically doing,” he said. “Our business model is we need the trees standing, because that’s what’s going to pay our bills each and every year. And they, rightly so, are in the lumber industry, and they want that stick of wood.... Once it’s down, it takes a minimum 30 years to grow a maple tree big enough to put a tap in it.”  

With Canada enjoying strong markets for both maple syrup and building materials, there should be a good-news story to tell here. However, there are difficult trade-offs, and nagging questions about how, and by whom, our public land should be managed. DL