Maine looks for higher profile for maple syrup industry
Some state officials, tribal leaders and maple syrup producers say the answer is yes, but that it will take a lot of work and a lot of planning to sweeten Maine’s syrup industry so it becomes the national leader that Gov. Paul LePage believes it could be.“He’s right, in a way,” Kathryn Hopkins, a maple products specialist with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, said Friday morning. “We have the trees. If we decide to get organized, get more young people and develop the market … Maine could do anything it wants.”
Last year, Maine’s licensed producers boiled millions of gallons of clear sap into 450,000 gallons of syrup. That product is worth $24 million, and is enough to place the state third in the country in syrup production behind Vermont and New York. Vermont maple harvesters produced 1.3 million gallons, making it the dominant leader in the United States.
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According to Hopkins, the industry already has been growing in Maine in recent years. Three years ago, there were just 380 or so licensed maple producers, but in January, there were 452. She said that lots of factors may contribute to the rise in interest, including the local, natural and organic food movements and the recent fall from grace of high-fructose corn syrup.
Kevin Brannen of Spring Break Maple and Honey of Smyrna, the vice president of the Maine Maple Producers Association, said that Maine already is a national leader in syrup production, and often trades places with New York for second place. He said that while Maine has the maple trees, access to those trees is not easy, because a lot of the state’s northern tier is held by large landowners. Another question on his mind is how the $20 million set aside for maple expansion in the new national Farm Bill will be distributed.
“Hopefully that will help to develop more farms in the state and more sugar bushes,” he said. “It’s an exciting time to be in the maple business. There’s a lot of technological advances. It’s just a fun time to be in it. There’s a lot of innovation and a lot of networking going on to get more sap per tap.”
Hopkins said there’s lots of room to grow the maple market, with North Americans eating, on average, just 3 ounces of maple syrup per person annually. In contrast, the average American consumed about 35.7 pounds of high-fructose corn syrup a year, according to a 2009 report from the Illinois Farm Bureau. Continue reading
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