For companies using a great deal of maple syrup, predicting maple syrup pricing can be critical to ensure a consistent supply. Below are two PDF documents with 1- a maple syrup price check study done to compare real-world retail prices with USDA and other data and 2- a piece on methods for predicting maple syrup price dynamics in the market, both on the supply and demand sides.

Price Check for Maple Syrup

Buying Maple Syrup, Price Predicting

If time allows, both will be updated prior to the next season. That will provide interesting longitudinal price data.

This week we’re going to pack another three barrels of maple syrup – about 165 gallons. This will last us into the beginning of the holiday season, when lots of folks buy maple syrup. We like to pack every quarter or so, so that our maple syrup stays very fresh in the containers. We’ve had a spate of sales recently that cleaned us out of the pre-packaged containers. Had to order another couple thousand labels too.

This’ll be a two-day process of refiltering the maple syrup, heating it up in the finishing pan and transferring it in batches into our packing unit. We’ll be dealing with three different maple syrup grades from three different barrels, putting it into containers ranging from five gallons to 50 ml maple leafs. That should set us up to be ready for demand in the next few months, as we expect to have less time available with the coming baby.

I usually find a good excuse to be late with my line cleaning, but this year’s is a good one. Ellie and I will be having our first child in early September. Preparations for that have been soaking up what would otherwise have surely been very productive procrastination from cleaning my lines and packing maple syrup.

As it is, I spent some time up in our main bush today, cleaning lines and making sure things look pretty for the seasonal neighbor who comes in August. This is how I discovered that a couple weeks ago there must have been an enormous wind event. I found about 20 or 30 big maples twisted up and toppled in a fairly small area. The trees were pushed over, pivoting on uprooted root balls in a northeasterly direction, which is odd. These trees are sheltered from northeasterlies from Cooks Hill behind them. These are precisely the trees I would have expected would be protected from winds from that direction.

It’s pretty much a mess that’ll take something close to a man-week to clear out – not what your expecting wife wants to hear at T-minus 30. I’ll be taking a trip up there with the big Jonsered saw tomorrow, perhaps make a dent in it.

I don’t think I’ve seen this in the maple syrup literature, so I figured I’d just put it out there to see if others have noticed this vacuum effect.

We found that we were losing vacuum on our mainlines in our major bush. This happened steadily over a period of about a week in the middle of the maple syrup season. That’s not so unusual. It could be squirrels or any number of things happening to loosen lines and create vacuum leaks. But then it rained, and our vacuum maxed out without us doing any line repair at all.

After this, we started observing the vacuum levels relative to the precipitation and found that after three or four days without moisture, our vacuum level started a similar decline. Perhaps 5 percent per day. In every instance, a rain event of more than a few minutes brought us back up to normal.

We concluded that our tap holes were shrinking away from the spiles during the dry periods. This sounds like a pretty simple explanation, but I hadn’t heard others making mention of it. If true, I’ve wasted a lot of line fixing time running around trying to tighten a system whose trees were merely parched. It may also be that this is peculiar to the type of spile used (Lapierre). Would be curious if other maple syrup makers have noticed anything similar.

Our friend Chris Rimmer and some friends of his took a walk in the sugarbush to look for birds several months after the maple syrup season. They found 40 species:
Hooded Merganser
Virginia Rail
Barred Owl
Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
Hairy Woodpecker
Eastern Wood-Pewee
Alder Flycatcher
Least Flycatcher
Eastern Phoebe
Eastern Kingbird
Blue-headed Vireo
Red-eyed Vireo
Blue Jay
Black-capped Chickadee
Red-breasted Nuthatch
Winter Wren
Hermit Thrush
American Robin
Nashville Warbler
Chestnut-sided Warbler
Magnolia Warbler
Black-throated Blue Warbler
Yellow-rumped Warbler (Myrtle)
Black-throated Green Warbler
Blackburnian Warbler
Black-and-white Warbler
American Redstart
Ovenbird
Mourning Warbler
Common Yellowthroat
Canada Warbler
Scarlet Tanager
Song Sparrow
Swamp Sparrow
White-throated Sparrow
Dark-eyed Junco (Slate-colored)
Rose-breasted Grosbeak
Red-winged Blackbird
Common Grackle
Purple Finch