 Hi, everyone. Welcome. This is our third lecture in the fall series, if you can believe it. Oh, and actually fall started already. That's wonderful. I wanted to just remind you that CCTV is actually producing these webinars for us this fall. And if you want further information about them, where you could watch this lecture next week and so on. Please check the email you received yesterday from Glenn. The other thing is you've been doing a really good job of the questions. Please keep it up. For those of you who aren't quite sure how to do it. If you touch your screen, you should have a bar that says Q&A and you push that and just type in your question anytime during the lecture or even beyond up until three o'clock and we'll try to get as many of the questions in. So now I'd like to ask Beth Wood, our program chair to please introduce today's speaker Beth. Thanks Carol. Hi everyone. It's a great pleasure to welcome Mark Isselhardt as our speaker today. Mark has been involved in the maple industry for over 20 years, and he spent the last five years as the extension maple specialist at the University of Vermont. And in this role he works on original research, and he also provides outreach to maple producers and to others who are interested in learning about maple. Mark has given many, many presentations in Vermont and around the United States on a whole range of aspects of maple production, including sugar bush management, sap collection, syrup production, quality and grading, and current best practices, as well as innovative solutions to support and sustain the maple industry. It's a real pleasure to welcome Mark to our Tripoli meeting today, and welcome Mark. Thanks Beth, and thanks to everyone for tuning in and for your attention. I appreciate the invitation to speak to your group today. So, like all good presentations you have to start with an overview or some sort of introduction. And with maple, I feel like maple is one of those things that everyone knows already, but I think it's a really important to get some terminology out there so we can all be on the same page. Basically, maple syrup is a non timber forest product and that means that it's not the trees themselves that we're harvesting to make this product, it's something from the trees so the trees remain on the land, and can be productive for a long time. This is different than timber harvesting. So, an autumalgam between agriculture and forestry. You know we have forced stewardship which keeps the trees healthy, but we are harvesting a product from those trees so people is a little unique. Plus it's not as visible as other forms of agriculture like dairy farming or vegetable farming. It's also important to recognize that production of maple products predates European arrival in North America. In fact, the land in which we're producing maple today has been and continues to be started by various tribes, Native American tribes including the abnaki. And so it's important to, to make that distinction and acknowledgement as well. And that is is probably on everyone's mind is how maple is made, and we know that the processing technology how maple is converted into maple sap is converted into syrup has changed dramatically over time, and we'll get into pretty good detail on that as we move along. There are a few basics that are that are critical to understand. You can tap any species within the genus Acer, but the trees have to be dormant. In other words, you can't collect sap from the maple tree when the leaves are on. And this is anywhere from leaf drop in the fall, all the way through bud break in the spring, technically you could collect sap during those periods and in fact every once in a while you'll hear about people tapping trees in the fall, getting some sap. It's not commercially viable to do that in our, in our area. And the weather we get in the late winter early spring really provides the ideal climate for sustained sap yield so you have enough of those ideal days of temperature to promote a vibrant maple industry and we'll go into the details about that. What's important to know is that sap is a dilute solution, mostly water but a little bit of sugar, 2% on average but it can range anywhere from less than 1% all the way to three or four. In fact, some individual trees can produce sap that's five or even potentially 6% sugar. It's very, very rare, but on average it's about 2%. What I remember is that sap flow rates are dynamic and unpredictable. And by that I mean their dynamic and that the day you tap a tree, sap doesn't start flowing and doesn't come out at a steady rate until the end of the season, like a faucet, that's not how maple is collected. Obviously if you're from anywhere where maple is produced, you're familiar with this idea of a sap flow event or a run. If you're not familiar with that, this would be your time to learn that. So the dynamics of sap flow are pretty interesting and like all good weather, you really can't predict it. So in other words, we can't take data right now and say next year 2022, we'll have seven great sap flow days and two poor sap flow days. This is no way to predict it that far in advance and in fact it's very hard to predict in the short term as well. I want to share a few graphs and before I do, let me just say that I'll be sharing some graphs, really just to illustrate points. I don't expect you to digest all the information on there. But I don't want you to get overwhelmed with the numbers so much but really try to digest the general pattern. So here's an example of early season sap flow. This is some work that my colleague Dr. Tim Perkins at the Proctor Maple Research Center collected. This is over the course of a couple of days. And I just want you to see is the pattern of short periods of flow, followed by sort of a slowing down of flow over time. The y axis in this case is sort of a measure of how much sap was flowing at any given time, and then the x axis is time. So this is early on you can see trees are producing some sap, but later in the season when trees thaw out more ideal weather shows up, it can actually be dramatically more sap. So over the course of the whole season, depending on how many of these ideal sap flow days occur, will largely determine how good or considered poor the sugaring season will be. This is based on not just work done at UVM, but in many other institutions this dynamic has been well documented. It's a very complex process the sap flow mechanism is quite complex even though people have been looking at it for well over 100 years. It involves a physical model. So the anatomy of maple wood plays a role. There's also a an osmotic component whereby sugar molecules and their interaction with some membranes help generate the pressure to allow for sap flow. complicated fascinating process we're just not going to go too deep into it today. Another basic is sugar makers, the those that are in the business of collecting sap to turn into maple syrup, they have to drill new holes each year. This is sort of an odd angle to look at a drill bit but this is from inside a tree looking new holes every year. And this is a zoomed in picture a highly magnified picture of some sugar maple wood, basically looking top down if you were cut a tree off the stump and had very, very high magnification, you would look. The wood would look like this. So you should realize that those light or white circles you're seeing are actually just a cross section of what we call a xylem vessel. These are the relatively large pipes that during the growing season conduct water from the ground up through the leaves as part of photosynthesis. These are the same conducting pipes that we drill into in each spring to collect sap. The yellow cells in this case are the fibers that give tree strength, and the dark lines are not growth rings, those are actually the the radial prank in the cells that is where the tree grows, it's starch and sugar zooming out a little bit, you can see something you perhaps a little bit more familiar with across section of the tree, and there's an old taphole there. And what's important to note is trees, living trees add new wood every year. They're the natural process of the trees growth. And it's a good thing because a tree is able to wall off and compartmentalize old wounds, not always tapholes that could just be a broken branch or something they got dinged up with a with a skitter or some other natural disturbance of the tree stem. In this case, we're looking at a cross section directly through an old taphole, and you can see on the left side of the picture, the tree has grown for several years and covered over that, that old papal. This process of compartmentalization is very strong and sugar maple it's quite good at walling off that wound and preventing systemic infection. And that's one of the reasons why sugar makers are able to tap trees for many, many years without negatively impacting the trees health. Incidentally, we're working on a long term project at UVM looking at the impacts of modern sugaring, and we'll get into the details but we're looking at a long term project to see is modern sugaring as sustainable as we suspect more traditional methods are. And this picture just shows again a chunk of sugar maple wood that has been tapped for many years, and the tree has internally walled off those, those wounds and continues to grow a few more basics just to cover. There's a very strong linear relationship between tree size and the amount of SAP and or syrup you can collect. We've known this for a long time, but the pattern holds up with both gravity and vacuum. The difference is with gravity SAP collection and by that I mean a traditional system where you drill a hole and connect the bucket to that spout. Overall production is quite a bit less. So we know with the advent of vacuum SAP collection and plastic tubing, we've been able to double even better than double the yields on a per tap basis. So where maple is produced largely tracks where maple grows. This map here gives you sort of a bird's eye view of where the greatest amount of sugar maple is growing in the eastern United States. No surprise, the darker the color the more density of sugar maple there is, you can see in Vermont there's there's quite a bit. It's not the only place with sugar maple and your eye might be drawn towards Wisconsin and parts of Michigan have pretty high densities upstate New York, northern Pennsylvania those all have very dense areas where sugar maple competes quite well. So you have to have the resource. And by that I mean the trees, you have to have the climate to, and that's where we start seeing some differentiation where maple syrup is produced. But if you don't have the ideal weather to stimulate good amounts of SAP flow. It's hard to have a thriving industry. And lastly, you have to have the tradition we don't have to but it's, it's strongly correlated with with how big the industry will be in Vermont has a very strong tradition of making maple syrup. It's no surprise that Vermont leads leads the US and in production. Like I said earlier, maple has been produced in North America even before the arrival of Europeans. Many of you will have first hand experience with producing maple either with your own homes and farms or perhaps a family member or a neighbor. For many, many generations, this is sort of the style of production had fairly modest equipment, you had buckets hanging on trees, some means of collecting that SAP either with horses or oxen or perhaps later with mechanized equipment. And then there was the process of boiling it down since raw SAP is 2% sugar and syrup is 67% sugar. All that water has to go somewhere. And the picture on the right shows a sugar house actually up in Westmore, the Skinner property. And it's a pretty typical setup where you have an evaporator, which is a large pan, you have an arch below that, which is essentially a large firebox. And you have a couple of some means of getting that water to, to leave the building. And, and that's how it was done for many, many generations and that technology, technology still works and it works as good as it always has. And people interested in getting into maple, you don't have to tap hundreds of trees you can just tap a few and get a sense of how it works. And, and it's a lot of it's a lot of work, even if you only tap a few trees, SAP is heavy, I carry it around, but it's an exciting time to be to be involved. Like I said, this is the essentially the standard of production for a long time, we actually look at the numbers that were some early reporting in early 1800s that that really highlighted how important maple was to the to the farm economy. And that report we saw that it was estimated that two thirds of Vermont families were making maple not just for home use, but actually more than they could use and actually selling some, and it was pretty clear that that extra cash was important for farm viability on term. In that report they talked that most operations probably produced between 200 and 300 pounds. And at that point it was sugar, we were not producing syrup in those early 1800s was hard sugar. But even then it was recognized that the equipment was generally crude and the quality of the product was was somewhat variable. Jump forward 100 years and Vermont is is leading the way in the US with 30% of the overall crop. 100 years beyond that Vermont we produce 50% of the US crop, and we're going to get into the dynamics of how Vermont got to be such a key player and show that pattern over time, but it is important to recognize that many states in the US produced syrup. Some produced quite a bit historically, but as patterns of land use have changed, they have, they have dropped off in their production. And speaking of dropping off in production. Here's here's a graph that you will want to pay some attention to the, maybe not in absolute numbers but again the pattern. I think you can probably see that there are three distinct eras in depicted in this graph, you have that period from 1900 and 1940, where there was a precipitous drop in the amount of maple syrup production. And that coincides that drop coincides with a tremendous rate of farm abandonment and a transition away from farming economy that we saw not just in Vermont but but across the US. Early on in that period, we saw that there were more than 87,000 farms in the US, the average farm that had maple production averaged about 200 or over 200 taps per farm. Fast forward to to just a few years ago. There was almost 9500 farms in the US reporting some level of maple production on that on average, that number was was almost 1500 taps per farm so number of farms have decreased dramatically, but the number of taps per farm have gone up. And a lot of that is only can be explained by the change in technology of being able to tap more trees with fewer people. The middle period that you see that's relatively flat production. That is sort of what I call the true believers and the folks who were making maple before, and they weren't going to give it up no matter what. And it's a multi generational farms I'm sure we can all name a few in Vermont or elsewhere, but have done it generation after generation it's just part of who they are and part of how they run their, their farm. The last period that 20 years from around year 2000 on we're going to highlight that a little bit but just put kind of put a pin in that and we'll get back to that that rise in production. In a little bit. The other significant change not just the reduction in numbers of farms but there's a dramatic shift in where maple was produced. And here we got to two graphs or to two depictions of where maple was produced in North America, not only the US but also in Canada in their about 1860 or so, and then in the early 2000s and you can see production in that that around the Civil War period was pretty very strong and fairly evenly distributed across the Northeast and Midwest of the US. There was produce production, Canada, both Ontario and Quebec for sure. But when we fast forward to those early 2000s we can see production those mid Midwest states as well as some of the Northeast is really reduced and, and that a lot of it shows a change in land use. Different farming methods different crops. Land values, you know it's, it's land is expensive. But I also want to highlight the impact that Canadian governmental subsidies have had in the growth of Canadian industry. Right now, Canada produces about 70% of the entire crop global sir production crop. And that has come about, not by accident but by intention and there's some good reasons for that. Some of it is tied to dairy policy and trying to encourage dairy farmers to diversify their, their products. The other interesting thing that has changed over that period is what sweeteners were being used. Early in the 1800s, cane sugar believe it or not was the luxury item, it was expensive it was produced mostly in the Caribbean with slave labor, and it was quite expensive, both to production as well as transportation costs. So in that early period, maple sugar actually was quite a bit cheaper than, than cane sugar. I think we can all agree that that that pattern is not held pace and maple is now deservedly more expensive, because it is a unique product, single ingredient, and the cost of production is quite a bit higher than, than cane sugar. So some cities, you know, dairy, not dairy but ag policy has really encouraged cane sugar and other sugar production, but not so with maple sugar. So today, if you're going to go out and buy, buy some, some cane sugar you might pay $1.50 a pound for it, whereas it, you know, it's over $10 a pound for pure maple sugar. But that, that flip flop has occurred and is not going back. So with that as sort of a introduction to the history of maple production, where, how we got to where we are now. I want to take some time and talk a little bit about where maple production is now, where it's headed, and, and try to give you some sense because I think most people are familiar at least a little bit with maple. Maple has changed the technology has changed quite a bit, especially in the last 20 or 30 years, but maple is not so visible. I mean you might notice driving around, oh, there wasn't tubing there a few years ago now there is, but the scale of how much the industry has grown is largely invisible unless you're involved. So I think some of this will be will be interesting. When we talk modern maple, we're talking tubing and vacuum, and the reason why sugar makers and the maple industry started looking at tubing and later adding vacuum to that tubing system was really a labor saving device. The sap is heavy, you have to move it from the tree to some collection point, then you have to boil it, and all of that takes people, and it's hard to hire someone for six or eight week period of time to hold sap around. Mostly it would be a family or friends, but as as population dynamics have changed we have smaller families and less people around to carry sap. So the tubing innovation was very important some really fascinating work being done by a historian is actually lives in San Francisco but he's very very involved in the maple industry and he's done a presentation I can share the link with anyone who wants to know, but all about the life of maple tubing and how it came to be in Vermont was right before front of that that really period it's quite fascinating story. But the important thing for you to know is that assuming you have a good tubing setup and it's well installed and there are no leaks, you can expect to see about a 5 to 7% increase for every inch of vacuum and inch of Mercury is the unit that the maple industry uses to dictate the sort of the intensity or magnitude of vacuum, and you can increase vacuum, theoretically, up until the point of the bare metric pressure of that day. So in general we like to say, if you have a really good system very tight, good vacuum pump, you might get close to 28 or 29 inches vacuum or inches of Mercury vacuum, which can translate into a doubling or even more the amount of SAP you would get if you didn't use that technology and so big, big increase in the amount of SAP produce. The other significant change in how maple is produced is the advent in the adoption of RO or reverse osmosis technology. So this technology, you can think of as a, as a filter, a very highly engineered filter, but it uses this technology to remove water before that boiling step. Atmospheric boiling in an evaporator even the most fancy one is a fairly inefficient process. RO technology allows for very dramatic decreasing the amount of fuel you need to boil the SAP and the syrup. This is a picture of one of the membranes that is used in reverse osmosis. It's a little abstract I'm not going to go into a huge amount of detail about how it works. But if you look at the picture on the left, I want you to focus in on the fact that it looks a little bit like the end of a roll of paper towels. It's all spiraled together. Between those spirals is a very highly engineered membrane that allows water molecules to fit through, but not the larger sugar molecules. It doesn't do it voluntarily. It really would rather not go through the membrane, but with enough high pressure and equipment designed to handle it, you can force that water to go through that membrane. And by using that technology, you can dramatically reduce and take perhaps 80% of the water out of the SAP before you have to boil it. This slightly fuzzy graph again is really meant to illustrate the pattern, not so much that you hung up on the numbers, but I think everyone can see that on the left part of the graph. The y axis is depicting how many gallons of SAP you need to make a gallon of syrup. And then the x axis is showing you the, sorry, go back up here. Sorry. Okay, so the x axis is showing you the essentially the sugar content of the SAP coming out of the RO. So if raw SAP is about 2%, that's where you get to hear you hear quite often it's about 40 to one 40 gallons to make a gallon of syrup. So if you were to take that SAP and go down and concentrate it to just 5% sugar from 2%, it would really only take you about 15 gallons of SAP to make a gallon of syrup so tremendous gains and efficiency. And you can see it levels off. So the gains are smaller and smaller as you get higher and closer to serve density. So let's jump back real quick and remember that period of time I was focused in on the end of the, that long period of relatively stagnant production in the US. So here we're looking at a period from 1990 to 2020. There's been more than three and a half time time growth of us maple production, a lot of that is focused in Vermont by the way. That growth has a lot of explanations of why it's happened but it's happened quite dramatically and largely out of folks view because again it's happening in the woods. It's not like pastures being converted to hemp farms or Christmas trees or some other form of agriculture that's quite visible from the road. It's a lot of it's happening happening in the woods. In this period of time we've seen a dramatic increase in the number of operations maple operations that are relatively large, and that's a term that isn't well defined what is a large maple operation. To some having a few thousand taps is a large operation to some having 10 or 20,000 taps is a large operation. We have operations in the 8090 to 100,000 taps. In fact there's even one that's getting close to half a million taps so it's not a well defined number. But we do know that there has been tremendous growth in that largest operation size. The reason that that's happened has a lot of there are a lot of reasons. The technology has certainly helped it. The fact and I'll get into it, the price of syrup has been stabilized, maple is notoriously variable based on a good year or bad year. And that has been allowed to be stabilized some, and there's also just increasing demand consumers are interested in pure products, simple ingredient products. They're driven demand, not just in the US or in North America, but with global and so I mentioned stabilizing the bulk price and the system that they have organized in the province of Quebec, which produces huge amount of the world's maple syrup. It's not sanctioned entity. It's something that is completely legal, but through legislation and rulemaking, they have organized themselves in an organization that takes them the whole crop from Quebec essentially, and manages it with a supply type system, management type system, and can control both the supply but also the price given the high amount of market share. The graph here showing the variability and bulk price, and you can see up until when they instituted the marketing tools, just after the year 2000, the price could fluctuate dramatically. It's hard to grow an industry and sell products, not just to consumers but to larger food manufacturers. It's very hard to keep those accounts if the project if the price can fluctuate all over the place. You know they might buy it for a few years and make a formulation of a new product, but they're not going to stick with it, if all of a sudden one of their ingredients doubles or triples in price. So, after those prices were stabilized, they also instituted what's called a strategic reserve. So, maple syrup is something that can be stored for a period of time on multiple years without losing quality. And so they are allowed through part of this organization to hold a reserve so if there's a poor year they can sell some out of the reserve that allows for prices to be stabilized. What's interesting and helps explain some of the dramatic growth outside of Quebec is that there are no quotas on your production outside the province within the province of Quebec. You are paid for up until you're allotted quota of production. If you want to grow your quota there are ways of doing that, but it doesn't happen overnight. Outside the province, there is no quota. So, you, there's an incentive to increase production, assuming that the price is favorable based on your business and your cost of production. Other things that can can factor into the variability of whether or not an operation is is sustainable or not is the number of taps breaker trees are not evenly distributed across the landscape. Some properties will have a good density of trees, others, not so much. So, producers investing in land that have a good density of trees and are careful stewards and keep their crop trees healthy and do good forestry over the long term will be by and large profitable over the long term ones that have marginal sites are not well suited to growing sugar maple or perhaps red maple might struggle even with best practices and in better technology. Another thing that we've seen change over the relatively recent period is how serve is marketed. We've all picked a dozen places to go by syrup just within a mile or so of where we live or at least 10 miles of where we live. There's a lot of maple around in Vermont and the market can be somewhat saturated. But we're in a very small segment of the world, and there are a lot of people in the world. What we've seen with as production is grown, it's grown in the largest producing size classes. So has the increase in the amount of syrup sold in the bulk market, which means a producer produces syrup, probably puts it into a barrel and then sells it to another business, which we commonly refer to as a packer, and they buy syrup many different farms and many different producers, and then they sell to other either price club like Costco or Sam's Club or large grocery chains, really anywhere. So they're the ones doing taking that wholesale account and selling it. A lot of these very large operations just don't have the capacity to sell direct to consumer and it takes a lot of time and expertise, and they'd rather focus on making the best product and making their yields as best they could. So, what's interesting in Vermont, we've seen a change from about in a very short period of time 20 years, about little less than half the crop sold to the bulk market with the balance of that crop being sold and either wholesale or retail to 90% just last two years ago, I guess I should say so close to 90% of all the syrup in Vermont is sold in the bulk market. And I think I've highlighted some of the reasons why that is, but certainly that there is a cost to marketing directly to consumer, especially in a modern era with the internet and lots of choices for people's attention. It can be challenging to reach out and deal directly to consumers. Another big change that we've seen in the last 20 years is the rise of organic maple syrup, and anyone who's been involved in maple production for any amount of time or lived in an area where maple is produced might have a bit of skepticism about, you know, what is organic maple syrup. And it's true, there are not a lot of synthetic chemicals or other practices in making maple syrup. And it is to be able to market your syrup certified organic you need a third party certifier. So you can have the most organic product, then let's a third party certified certified certified is that your product is organic meets the standards, then you can't use that label. And as consumer demand for organic products of all types, not just maple syrup, but as that demand has grown. So is the demand for organic maple syrup. And so producers are doing the work to get certified. So having inspector come, look at your production records, look at your forest management plan make sure you're using the appropriate materials and opening up your books essentially on on your practices every year. And for that producers are paid a premium. So it is worth their worth the time and work in order to get certified. So growth in in demand, not just production, but demand of organic syrup as well. And I would expect this trend to continue. So right now we think it's somewhere in the 60 to 75% range I bet that would continue to go to go upwards. I also ask, you know, how much syrup can be produced, you know what what what is their left to tap, and this is some work that was done by a person out of Ohio State, looking at what, what amount of utilization occurs currently. And again, I don't expect you to digest everything about this graph, just recognize that the red color represents the potential taps that are out there. And then under that are some numbers that talk about what percent of those potential taps are currently being tapped. It may not come as a surprise but Vermont leads the, the nation in utilization at just under 12%. So that means, based on some predetermined metrics, you know, accessibility and size and various things, 12% of all the maples sugar maples that could be tapped in Vermont are being tapped. But even that's misleading because within the state there are pockets that have more and pockets that have less. And generally speaking, you'll see a higher rate of utilization where there's more maple producers. So for instance, in Vermont, Franklin County has roughly it's estimated that about 50% of the tappable trees in Franklin County are being tapped. And now anyone who is from Franklin County or if you're no sugar maker, they probably want to know where the other 50% are because it seems like every tap every tree is tapped in Franklin County. But in fact, there are more to be more to be tapped in other parts of the state, the number is quite low, you know, a single percentage or, or low teens. And that really has to do with land use patterns, land ownership costs and various things. And that's Vermont that leads the country, you have other states where, if you remember from early on in the presentation I showed some pretty high densities in Wisconsin and Michigan. They have a very low percentage of utilization 2% or in Michigan's case, you know, less than 1%. And this I think it's at, you know, choices about how to manage the land what crops to to to manage the land for in those states, especially in the northern part of those states. The focus tends to be more on northern hardwoods forestry and forest products and less so unable, although it is growing. We do know that there is increased demand and that will likely involve conversion of stands that were managed historically for timber products to sugar and we're seeing that in Vermont. And what's interesting about that is that there can be a bit of tension between those that that focus primarily on northern hardwoods forestry issues, and those that are focused more on production. And in my work, I'm trying to do a little bit of discussion and coming, you know, building some consensus on best practices for management of northern hardwoods for maple production, because it is a alternative land use, and things have changed so dramatically that people are certainly seeing those changes, especially if they're in the business of managing forests. So that's a lot to a lot to digest. I do want to leave you with a couple, a couple of quick points. We've talked about demand is grown by 20%, both in the US and similar rates globally. Part of that has to do with COVID we had a lot of people being home more cooking more at home trying new things. And although we heard from maple producers who relied on in person sales either through a gift shop that touched their production or some other, perhaps a wholesale to a restaurant. We did hear about those operations suffering from the lack of opportunities to sell their product due to COVID. We also heard dramatic increases in demand of online purchases and and just from the large packers selling a lot of the syrup globally. The sales are up 20%, which is a huge number if you think about it. We don't necessarily think that pace will continue, but we do think it will be strong going forward because a lot of people, it might be there have been their first time trying real maple and once they do. And in the case that they'll go back to purchase the real thing, if they're accustomed to corn syrup and artificial sweeteners. And then you also have the issue of totally new uses of maple. And what we have right here shows the new product launches in the United Kingdom. And it's, it's pretty interesting, just in that, in that five year period between 2012 2016, just in the UK, there were 184 new product launches. And they weren't all a bottle of syrup, you know, it could have been some sort of snack, it could have been something flavoring for a piece of meat. All sorts of new products coming online, and people, people enjoying them, and potentially buy more and more. So the industry feels pretty good about where things are headed. There's still a lot of education outreach needed to get folks aware of what maple is, how it can be used to try to break people out of that. And the idea that that maple syrup is only up for pancakes or French toast and that's it. By and large, you know, pandemic, not withstanding the people's meal choices and how they, how they have changed and there's not as much sit down large breakfasts happening around the world as perhaps they're used to be. There are, there are some bright spots and there's a lot of syrup being made, and now we're, we're just in the middle of the end of September but the new maple season is coming up. And it certainly looks like they're going to be headed into the year looking to produce more and more we've had reports of quite a bit of purchase of new tubing and taps so we think the industry is continuing to expand, especially with that increased demand for the finished product. And with that, I recognize we are just about out of time until our question and answer period, and I appreciate your, your attention, it's a lot to cover relatively short period of time. And before we get into the details of the Q&A I just want to make sure folks are aware that although I primarily work with maple producers or people looking to get into maple production, I am available. If you have maple questions, feel free to reach out to me. Thank you, Mark. And we do have a lot of questions on a variety of different angles. One is, does the taste of maple syrup vary with the type and variety of soil? That's the classic terroir question that we've, we have not studied extensively. Anytime I get a question about maple flavor, I typically come right back with flavors weird, you know, flavor is an odd thing. It's, it's the chemistry of the thing you're consuming. It's also your upbringing and what flavors you're used to and which ones you like. And if you have a cold and we're just so many factors that go into it. There has been some work done to look at the teasing out subtle differences and geology and other things. It's just difficult to say for sure. Other factors like if you have a job and you only boil every other day rather than boiling every day, you know, all these things can impact flavor. So that's kind of a long way of saying there is potentially an impact on flavor based on where those trees are growing. It's not the only thing that can impact flavor. And if you're interested in marketing your particular syrup against others based on your unique geology. It's probably going to be a steep climb to get your consumers dialed into that it's probably. Again, business of marketing is not my specialty but you might have a more winning strategy by just educating consumers about maple and differentiating it with artificial sweeteners, rather than trying to split, you know, one little region of maple production from another. Okay. Which US states are currently, well I think you've already answered this the leading customers. No, we haven't answered this particular angle I don't think are there certain US states that are currently the leading customers, and are there certain four countries that are the leading customers of Vermont maple products. Yeah, so. Obviously, we sell quite a bit of syrup in Vermont, but there are, there's pretty strong demand in the Midwest. We get some man from the Southwest. It varies a bit. A lot of times if you have an area where folks perhaps have a connection to the Northeast but now live elsewhere, you'll see increased demand. There has been some recent work done I would probably want to review to before I start ranking, you know where each state falls probably refer to that before giving you an answer. In terms of international consumption. We see quite a bit of demand in the UK, Germany, Japan. There's a big ones right now. They're trying to explore a few other places, but it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a conundrum do you start from zero in a place where people have no connection, and you have to start and educate them all about the process or do you try to increase demand in areas where it's already known and just try to boost their consumption. So, we'll leave that the marketing, marketing experts. Okay. Another question. A few years ago, there was news of at least one large scale industrial maple production company coming to Vermont. As this actually occurred. Right, so I touched on this a little bit when we were talking about utilization and what parts of the state. I'd be referring to an operation up in Essex County in Island pond. That's a very large operation they have. It's a little hard to tell but they're in the hundreds of thousands of taps. So that place exists. It came online, essentially from zero. What's interesting though is now that they've gotten so big. If you look back at the, the records, there was actually more growth in other places like Franklin County. Over that same period of time, but it was in an area where there already was quite a bit of maple operations. So, it's very dramatic to go from zero to 200,000 or 300,000 taps, but there was even more taps added in areas where we just associate with maple production. So, yes, there are large operations in Vermont. And I would imagine they'll be continued to be some, although that one is a pretty unique. Franklin County hit both historically and currently such a big producer of maple syrup. Well, I go back to that graph or the slide I had where they have the resource, they have the climate, and they have the tradition, and I would say Franklin County is a strong agricultural county to begin with. And maple was an important part of the farm economy. And so as Franklin County has remained strong in farming, so has their footprint in maple. So you have new operations in Franklin County, but you also have multi-generation operations that continue to grow. So, I think you probably the best answer is, Franklin County is very strong. Not the only farming county in Vermont by any means, but very strong and they continue to hold that. So that leads us into another question is, are there young people going into the maple industry these days? Absolutely. Yep, we do. And there are people who are starting from zero. There are people who have never tapped a tree before but get hooked on it. So there's the next in the line of generations getting into it. So it really is all types. I've been really happy to be involved in the regional tech centers. Many tech centers in Vermont have a maple program associated with their diversified agriculture classes. And we've been able to work with them to develop teaching materials that bring in the newest research and the best understanding of how maple is produced, but not only best quality but also most sustainable. And we've actually incorporated that into what's called a CDE, a career development event, just essentially a competition between schools who do maple education. And they're not flying to see these high schoolers who maybe they have their own small operation, or maybe they're looking to start one when they graduate. There's a lot of interest for sure. That's encouraging. On the other side of the coin, how do you envision that climate change in Vermont might affect the maple supply and industry. Sure. Climate change is a big topic we could spend an hour just covering all the variables so I don't want to, I want to respect the complexity of the issue, but say that climate change is already impacting maple producers we're seeing tapping earlier and before we're seeing season and earlier before, and we're seeing an overall contraction and the number of days that have ideal SAP flow. This, at the same time we're seeing yields go up. And a lot of those that increase in yields can be explained by adoption of best practices, modern tubing and vacuum. So, you know, that's, that's one thing. When we talk about climate change. I want to talk about the timeframe to mean there are short term risks. There's sort of middle term risks, and then there's long term risks. And each one has an amount of uncertainty associated with it. A short term risk, I would say is similar to the situation we saw in 2000, just this past spring, but also maybe more so 2012. In March, we had five days in the 70s some people even gotten into the 80s. And that had a dramatic impact on SAP flow SAP quality turned. And the SAP flow really was reduced as a result of those warm temperatures. We saw a little bit of that in 2021, but not quite as dramatically. That's the biggest short term risk. Midterm, I would say, risks of invasive species, really dramatic flood events that hurt infrastructure, wind events, ice storms, those sort of things that hurt the resource. And long term, it, and by long time I mean 100 years or more, I think we're really talking about where to sugar maple fall, is it remain as competitive in the landscape as it was before. There's some argument to be made that it's not going to be as competitive in the future, and that we might see more red maple become more, more dominant, the tree being tapped. So, try to keep that as short as possible but it's a trick, it's a big overview. It's a pretty dense topic. That was really helpful. Do maple trees, are they subject to disease and infestations and if so, are they able to heal. Yeah, well, that's also a big topic. Sugar maple has been called the Goldilocks tree, you know, it likes it a little bit wet, not too wet, likes it cold, not too cold. So, it tends to be a little less competitive on a wide range of ecological niches so you're not going to see as many pure stands of sugar maple just naturally, as you might see for other other species. And there are sugar maple specific pests, there's their pests, insects and diseases that are more generalists that can impact sugar maple. All those things are an issue. If you have prolonged periods of drought or dry conditions that can also hurt sugar maples health. We're coming off of a summer with relatively low moisture so it is a bit of a concern, not full on drought conditions but it can be an issue. And defoliation from things like forest tent caterpillar can be can be a stress. So when you add those together, it can certainly be be a concern. But natural systems have a way of adapting and adopt it. The week don't survive and sugar maple has been around for a very long time as a species so, you know, there is a natural mortality every year, but that's some of those ones that are pre pre stressed might might not make it but in general, in the short term I think we're okay. However, there's always the unknown, you know the introduction of an invasive insect or some other pest. Elm trees had saw a dramatic impact of the introduction of Dutch Elm disease so I'm not saying that there isn't something that could be introduced but right now things like Asian longhorn beetle, which is a real concern because it favors maples. Those tend to be able to be contained, as opposed to something like emerald ash borer, which doesn't feed on maples, but that one they've got a lot of hard time containing. Okay, I think we have time for one more question. Could you talk a bit about some of the research that has been done, or is being done at UVM or at your research center regarding maple. Oh that's that's a big question to. Boy, I'd love to have you highlights. Yeah. Just a little bit the long term study we're doing, looking at modern levels of SAP extraction high vacuum, comparing that in the same stand and the same growing conditions with more traditional SAP collection the gravity and no tapping. A study that people ask all the time. And, although I call it sort of our coolest boring study because at any given year, we report, but you really need to have that long period of data collection for it to be significant. So I'm excited about that project we're nine years into a long term study but people tap trees for more than nine years we have to continue that study. I'm encouraged by the diversity of questions that we get to ask means everything from tree health, sugar bush health climate change all the way to why does syrup taste the way it does and then my new chemistry involved in one serve versus the next and we have some pretty fantastic facilities at UVM to do those questions, just so you know the proctor maple research center is part of UVM or plant biology department. We have, for instance, building with two evaporators commercial sized evaporators that we can try to answer some questions about the chemistry and flavor of syrup at a scale that's relevant. So we're not doing in beakers we're not doing it, you know, one, one time, one day another way another day. It's very controlled. And it allows us to ask some of these questions like the ones that have been asked already, but you know, in a scale that's relevant to sugar makers, which I think they really appreciate. So I'm pretty excited about that. Yes, Mark, thank you. What an interesting talk on a treasure of Vermont. Thanks for having me. Well, of course we love having you. Thank you everyone and we hope to see you all next week. Have a good week everyone.