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Eastern Iowa maple syrup producers endure record-warm winter, drought
Changing winter conditions are forcing producers to adapt their processes and products for making maple syrup
Brittney J. Miller
Mar. 22, 2024 5:00 am, Updated: Mar. 22, 2024 10:40 am
- Iowa ranks 14th nationwide for its 8,000 gallons of maple syrup produced each year.
- Record-warm winter prompted an early start to this year's maple syrup season.
- Maple sap quantity is down — but quality is up.
- Producers are trying to adapt to increasingly variable weather patterns.
The art of maple syrup production trails through generations of Danno Potter’s family history.
His great-grandfather bought the family farm in the late 1880s and cleared the land for strawberries, clay and whiskey production. Eventually, he transitioned to making maple syrup to add to his whiskey — starting a 140-year-old tradition that has persisted through the Civil War, both World Wars, the Great Depression and more.
Danno Potter, 62, started his own maple syrup company with his wife and three daughters in 2009. Great River Maple, located in Garnavillo in Northeast Iowa, is now among the most prolific syrup producers in the state.
This year’s record-warm winter has thrown the family practice for a loop, though. The company tapped its thousands of maple trees on Jan. 22 — 22 days earlier than ever before — to endure what proved to be a challenging season.
“That's three weeks (early), which doesn't sound like a lot,” Potter said. “But when you take into account that the average season is somewhere around six-and-a-half weeks long … you're talking an incredible amount earlier.”
The legacy of maple syrup started centuries ago when Indigenous peoples first started transforming sap into syrup and sugar. Today, New England and the Midwest are the main hubs for maple syrup production in the U.S. Iowa ranks 14th in the country for gallons produced, its reported production nearly doubling from 2017 to 2022, according to the recently released U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Census of Agriculture.
But, as climate change and increasingly warmer weather hits the traditional maple syrup season, Iowa producers like the Potters must gamble on new practices to adapt their businesses.
“Experience has shown us that you're going to have to start stepping up your game,” Potter said. “It puts increasing pressure on us. We can't be wrong … It isn't like corn. Corn, if you don't get it harvested today, you go out and you get it tomorrow. Every (syrup) run you miss, it's gone forever.”
Syrup production in Iowa
Every tree has sap. Syrup producers target maple trees due to their sap’s high sugar content, especially sugar maples, silver maples and boxelder maples.
There are “oodles and oodles” of maple trees in Iowa, said Dave Asche, an Iowa Department of Natural Resources district forester covering Allamakee and Clayton counties. The state’s five native maple species make up around a third of its tree population.
Each drop of maple syrup starts with a tap. For trees at least 10 inches in diameter, producers drill a hole and tap in a spile, which drains sap from the tree. Larger trees can endure multiple taps.
The maple syrup season starts as winter winds down. When temperatures get above freezing, the heat makes trees expand and suck sap from their roots to rejuvenate their budding branches. When temperatures drop again, the trees shove their sap back down to their roots, where it is filled with nutrients and sugar.
With each upbeat and downbeat, sap travels by the taps. Internal pressure within the tree forces the liquid out for collection. Producers try to time their tapping to when trees’ “runs” are about to begin — or, just before they start producing sap for the season. This continues until the tree reaches maturity and the sap begins to thicken.
Once the sap is harvested, producers boil the water out to isolate its sugary syrup. The amount of syrup that trees can produce depends on the sugar percentage in their sap. If sap is 1 percent sugar, it takes 86 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup. If the sap is 2 percent sugar, it takes 43 gallons — and so on.
Many Iowa residents tap their maple trees to produce syrup for their own purposes. At least 87 Iowa farms commercially produced maple syrup in 2022 — up from 53 farms in 2017, according to the USDA Census of Agriculture. Between about 24,000 taps set in 2022, the state produced more than 8,000 gallons of syrup. The resulting products made $413,000, more than doubling 2017’s value of sales.
In comparison, Wisconsin — the No. 1 maple syrup producer in the Midwest and the fourth-largest producer in the country — produced about 400,000 gallons of syrup valued at $13.5 million in 2022.
Struggling syrup seasons
The season for maple syrup production varies by region. In Iowa, it typically starts around late February or early March and concludes toward the end of March.
This year’s season started much earlier than normal for many producers in Northeast Iowa — the hub of the state’s syrup production, Asche said. He credits that change to this year’s record-warm winter: Thanks to the El Niño effect, this winter was the warmest on record for Cedar Rapids and ranked in the top-10 warmest winters for the Midwest at large.
Sap flow is typically best when daytime temperatures get above freezing and overnight temperatures stay below freezing. Without colder temperatures to stem sap flow overnight, the liquid runs faster over shorter periods of time and causes trees to mature quicker, cutting seasons shorter. And, without temperature variations needed to create more sap movement throughout the tree, less sap escapes through the taps.
Some Iowa producers tapped their trees too late this year and missed much of the syrup production; others ended up not tapping their trees at all.
“The maple syrup season’s pretty much over for some people. Normally, it's just starting to really get going,” Asche said on March 13. “The way the weather ended up happening just shrank the season down.”
The ongoing drought is also shaping syrup production. While Eastern Iowa received a few heavy snowfalls this winter, it’s still going on 200 consecutive weeks of dry or drought conditions, according to the Iowa DNR’s latest water summary update.
With less water available for maple trees to soak up, that means less overall sap flow. This winter’s warmer temperatures and relentless winds dried soils out even more. Eventually, some trees grew so stressed that they shut down and ceased production earlier.
Potter aims for 0.6 of a gallon of syrup from each tap, which he said is on par with national averages. This year, his production likely won’t reach a half gallon per tap. Altogether, he estimates each tapped tree won’t give more than 35 gallons of sap on average.
Although the quantity of sap from the trees declined, sap quality was high. When trees don’t have as much available water for their sap, they compensate by making their sap more sugar-rich. Potter’s sap was running higher than 2 percent sugar for most of the year, he said, peaking at 3 percent — a silver lining amid a difficult season.
“There's just no margin for error anymore,” Potter said. “You can't make up the difference with hard work because you can't outwork warm temperatures and you can't outwork a drought.”
Changing climate, changing business
Indian Creek Nature Center tapped its first maple tree this year according to their traditional timeline: the second week of February, when temperatures had already surpassed 40 degrees. The sap was flowing.
By March 1, though, the flow from the center’s 125 taps was trickling to a stop. The season was already over — a month earlier than last year.
“With this unseasonably warm winter that we had, we only had two weeks of really good sap collection,” said Abigail Barten, the center’s trail coordinator. “A much, much shorter season than last year, that's for sure.”
Last year, the Indian Creek Nature Center collected nearly 2,000 gallons of sap and produced 46 gallons of syrup — one of its best years on record. This year, it collected just 500 gallons of sap, enough to produce 12 gallons of syrup.
The yield was already processed and bottled weeks before the center’s 41st Annual Maple Syrup Festival this weekend, which features pancakes, sausage and the center’s syrup. Traditionally, the festival also hosts educational programming about maple syrup, including demonstrations of sap collection and the syrup production process. This year, those demonstrations will use water to illustrate the processes since the season ended early.
It’s hard to make the call if the center should start tapping its trees earlier, Barten said. Last year’s season ended in a bounty — a stark contrast to this year’s.
“I imagine we probably will, at least next year, try our same timeline to see if the weather really is becoming warm much sooner in the season,” she said. “I'm curious to see how it will be in future years. It was definitely a topic of conversation … What will this be like in the future? Will this be a norm?”
Some producers are adapting to the new seasonal norms by diversifying their products. Potter, for instance, is making commercial-grade syrups to boost his profits since overall production is down. Those syrups can be used in whiskey, beer and barbecue sauce. He’s also branched out into cinnamon-infused and vanilla-aged syrups, even a product that’s spicy.
The variable weather has altered his collection and production processes, too. He’s prepping his 400,000 feet of lines, which bring sap from the tapped trees to a storage facility, earlier in the year. He plans on tapping his trees sooner than normal and has switched over to tapping bits that can cut into frozen wood. His syrup production time also will be extremely reduced — all in the name of adapting to a changing Mother Nature.
“I drink a lot of coffee in the morning thinking how I can (adapt),” Potter said. “Thank goodness my wife and kids are 100 percent behind it … That's probably the true sweetness of the whole thing: We get to work together as a family to keep it going.”
Brittney J. Miller is the Energy & Environment Reporter for The Gazette and a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues.
Comments: (319) 398-8370; brittney.miller@thegazette.com