Next days are crucial for Quebec’s maple syrup crop
Maple farmers will be keeping an eye on the mercury for the coming days, because the warm weather forecast could spell problems for their maple crops.
The temperature climbed to 15 C on Friday and will stay positive over the weekend, which could spell trouble for sap production.
“There’s a dome of hot air in the U.S. If it moves 100 miles further north, it could screw it up faster than anything,” David Hall, the president of Montérégie East for Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, said of syrup production. “Twenty degrees is no good. That’s too hot. It doesn’t look like it’s a lasting thing, but you never know what can happen.”
After a cooler than normal beginning to the spring, farmers began reaping the rewards of their patience this week, as the weather warmed up just enough for the sap in the trees to start running.
“The maple season has been weird,” Pierre Faucher, the co-owner of Sucrerie de la Montagne in Rigaud, told The Gazette. “We made our first batch on March 11, and now we’re beginning again. I think it’s going to be a very strong crop this week and the week after, and we will be working day and night making syrup.
“You need freezing nights and thawing days, and up to now, we just had freezing temperatures,” he said. “Usually we are making syrup until the third week of April.”
In addition to making syrup, Faucher and his son, co-owner Stefan, welcome thousands of visitors each spring to their dining rooms to sample the traditional cuisine.
Faucher, who grew up in Montreal’s West Island, moved to Rigaud 48 years ago to start his maple farm, and his eyes still light up when he thinks about the season, and reuniting with old friends, some of whom have returned each year since the sugar shack was built.
“What a gift of life I have received,” Faucher said with a smile. “My favourite part of the season is the first time we light up the fire to start cooking the sap. We always take a family photo at that time.
“As we go along in the season, I see the change in the forest. First the snow melts, then you see the ice puddles, then the bright blue crocuses coming through the ice, and then it’s over for another year.”
Faucher’s son Stefan is now a co-owner, and he enjoys laying out a fresh batch of snow for people to roll Popsicle sticks with maple taffy, better known in the French translation tire d’érable.
“It was my first job when I was 12 years old,” Stefan said. “And I loved it because I could have one for every 10 sticks.”
He estimates that he has poured several hundred thousand sticks of tire over his 48 years of life, and eaten about 10,000 in that time. These days, he no longer sticks to the rule of eating one stick per 10 pours, but he still eats two to three per day.
“And that’s already a lot,” he said as he poured out some tire from a transparent plastic pitcher. “I have to taste it when I’m stationed here. I really like it.”
Wearing a red lumberjack jacket and black-rimmed glasses with a bushy salt and pepper beard, Stefan Faucher explained that he still gets a thrill out of managing the maple farm and greeting visitors.
“I fell in the barrel of maple water when I was a boy. That’s why I grew up tall and bearded like my father,” he said.
Visiting this week, Chicago resident Cicely Babb said while she has visited sugar shacks in Vermont and Maine, she loved the traditional meal and the unique Quebec experience.
“It was like nothing we ever did before,” she said. “We had a fantastic lunch. I just love drizzling maple syrup on anything. We also had live music and got to talk to (Pierre Faucher) and he had a lot of stories to tell.”
Hall said the sugar content in the sap coming from trees this year appears to be higher than normal, which means that farmers can yield far more syrup from the same amount of sap. He’s hoping that this year’s crop will be just as good as the yields from the last two years, which saw record amounts of syrup produced.
“As long as we have a normal season, we should be all right this year, with the price that the buyers set for this coming year,” he said.
He said maple farmers are slaves to Mother Nature, but the biggest producers buy crop insurance to mitigate bad years.
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