 So our next presenters are Eric Dupuy and Nikki Crow who together submitted a grant for a project about managing a sugar bush in a more environmentally friendly way and more efficient. And so they have some great details for us. And I think for many of us who didn't know will learn what a sugar bush is. So Nikki and Eric, go ahead. Thanks Wayne. So today we're going to talk about the sugar bush and how we use the Minnesota ser to address and reduce fuel usage and increase the potential of value added maple syrup products. The first question to answer is what is a sugar bush and how do you go about tapping trees for maple syrup products. Eric is our expert in everything sugar bush I learned a lot from him. So I'll let him tell you more about his operation. So my name is Eric Dupuy. I'm a sugar producer from Sawyer, Minnesota on the Pondulac Reservation. I grew up watching my grandpa do this, do it, and I don't know about 15 years ago or so, maybe a little longer. Me and my dad started to make our own maple syrup. A sugar bush is just like an apple or a tree where it's just a bunch of maple trees in an area that makes it convenient to collect sap from. Yeah, the sugar maples is what we tap normally as the sugar maple has a higher percentage of sugar than the reds or box holders or silvers. So we try to stick to just tap them, the sugar maples. Anybody that's not familiar with it, you take the sap from the tree and boil it down into syrup or into sugar if you want to boil it down even further. So Eric and I met about five years ago when I was asking around for somebody who could help with a workshop. We had an evaporator that we purchased through our tribal college extension program, but I had no idea how to use an evaporator. So I was introduced to Eric through his dad who works at resource management and that's where I started learning more about tapping the trees and boiling down the sap. Eric helped with the workshops and the events. He would start out with the winter tree identification, tapping trees and tubing, boiling the sap, canning and bottling. In our culture, in the Anishinaabe culture, Ojibwe culture, the maple camps would happen with families and communities. And this is kind of what we set up in our workshops and events where we would provide taps and bake holders to the community and we would go out to a piece of county land on the Fond du Lac Reservation where we could all tap the trees. And Eric would come out there with us to help us identify those trees. And then show us how to boil the sap and can and finish and bottle the syrup. One of the needs that I found in talking to Eric was about finishing the syrup and we wouldn't be able to complete that task without a better evaporator on his part or on our part at extension and a better filter. What I knew from working with Wayne Martin through Sarah and having him come to the community and talk about the Sarah programs. He's been to several events that we have over at Fond du Lac that there was this funding available so I brought that to Eric and I said what I don't know is how to explain what it is that you need. So he told me about his trouble with not having a filter press to really clean the maple syrup. So this picture here is of Eric I hand drew this one. Eric taking his syrup out to another producer's farm having to reheat it and then filter it and then take it home. It was a really timely process for him. Well, one of the problems that I had with trying to grow my operation was that the filter press I would have to think she said I'd have to take it to another friend of mine or another producer but when you take it off the evaporator and then you got to put it into a container and then I'd have to take it out to his place which means I got to reheat the syrup. Well before that we used to filter through cheesecloth and you leave a lot of sediment impurities, sugar sand stuff that has been sucked through the roots of the maple tree, and that would come out. And once your bottles had settled you would see that on the bottom of the jar which wasn't good for commercial for sale. So, we decided that a filter press would be needed to have a good product and it would also solve the fact that I would use less fuel to reheat and that would be more convenient to save time. And the evaporator, the evaporator I had, it worked but you used quite a bit of wood. It was taken probably, I don't know, half a quart to get a couple gallons of syrup and it also takes a lot longer when you don't, well it takes about 40 gallons of sap to equal a gallon of syrup. So, it takes a while to boil it down. My old evaporator I would get to boil around, I don't know, 35 to 40 gallons an hour. And I haven't got to use the new one yet but I'm told that it can boil off 90 to 100 gallons an hour or more. So it'll definitely be more efficient and I will use a lot less wood. So it's a little better on the environment as well. One of the things that, the favorite things that Eric would do when we were having the workshops and events was making the maple sugar. It's one of my favorite, and I call it a very valuable value added product out of the maple sugar and the candy. Some of the other things that you can make value added products are maple cream, maple butter, maple vinegar. But saving time now also gives Eric time to work on these other products as well. Some of the challenge you run across running the sugar bush is whether you're waiting for the right temperatures to tap the trees. You don't want it to warm up too much or it can end your season. The snowfall amount out in the woods can definitely be a challenge, especially before the tubing where I had to try to haul the sap out of the woods with four-wheelers or whatnot. So that made it very difficult. Now that we've got the tubing in the woods, it's a lot simpler. The COVID this year, that was a big challenge. I had to file an extension this year due to the fact that with the social distancing and quarantining, it made it tough for family and friends with the social distancing to actually do the full sugar bush this past year. So that is also an opportunity that Minnesota SARE has in their grant program is extending the grant period. It's a no-cost extension and lots of USDA grants have this option and other programs will have that option as well. So in order to, this project to end February of this year, we'll be able to go until February of next year and get some of those things done that we set in the grant for next year. One of the opportunities is hopefully Eric is willing to apply for more grants and yet he has applied for other grants and then networking with new customers with new products. Through the SARE grant, as far as the funding was concerned, he was able to upgrade his evaporator and the pans that go with it and the filter press with the $9,000 Farmer Rancher grant. What was important was that Eric knew what he needed and I had the experience of writing grants. So what I told him was I needed to know what he needed and I could put it in a grant language that SARE would understand what he needed. And I called up Wayne and Kate or emailed and just let them know here's an idea of what I have working with one of our local producers and they said that's a good idea. And, you know, I know Wayne gave his phone number and Kate's phone number and they're always quick to get back to you even when they're working from home and during the COVID. So that's always helpful when you're going for grants. It's just to give those folks calls. Their numbers are on there for a reason. Run your ideas by them if you're not experienced in writing grants or finding somebody from an organization who is and asking for their help. That's what provided the opportunities for us over at Fond du Lac to have somebody that could show us more just by being able to upgrade their equipment with some necessary funding. And we just want to say me glitch or thank you. This is Eric's email and my email if you have any questions. I can answer any questions about the sugar bush and I can maybe answer some questions about funding sources. There have been a couple of questions that have come in. First of all, why, why does the SAP harvest stop with warm weather? Why is it stopped by warm weather? Doesn't the SAP run all summer long? What you can do with the pressure like the barometric pressure and then when it's cold and when you get the cold nights like below freezing nights in the warm days creates a positive and negative pressure in the tree. And also the fact that is when you start getting warmer weather, the tree senses that wound because you drill a hole into the tree. When you drill that hole that tree senses that that hole is there and it can feel that there's there's bacteria entering that hole. So the tree will start to encapsulate that hole and start to shut the SAP flow off. So the hotter the weather, the more bacteria and the quicker the tree shuts down. Question two about how climate change is affecting syruping. Are you noticing an impact from climate change? It seems to be. We're not getting nearly as much snow on the ground. It seems as we used to. It's definitely seems to be warming up sooner. Our season seems to be sharpening I think. Where we live right here right now is kind of odd anyway. We're so close to Lake Superior. There's Lake Superior, I think it warms up down when you're right next to the lake a little bit sooner. But we don't quite get that effect here. So it's cold here earlier in the season, but yet we get that warm up a little sooner. I think it's affecting us. Has it affected the total amount of production? Has it reduced your harvest? Yes, it does reduce the harvest. Like I say, when it shortens the season, when you're not getting those, like I say, we get those really unusually warm days earlier in the year. And like I say, that introduces the bacteria into the tree and it starts to slow your production down. How much time does it take to break down the evaporator? And how often do you have to clean it? It's usually, unless it's really, you get a lot of niter and stuff in there, you don't necessarily have to clean inside the evaporator. Because when you heat it up, you're killing any bacteria anyway. It's usually beginning to end of the year, but if it gets real bad in the middle of the year, we can break it down. And my size, this new pan here will take a little bit longer to break down. It'd probably take a couple hours to break it down and clean it. But it's not terrible. The pan's pretty much just set on there. A couple more questions have come in. Did translating indigenous or traditional cultural protocol become a challenge in the grant writing process? No, I don't think we had to put that into the grant at all. It is something that we talk about. Eric and I will tell the story about how we first had an abundance of sap available to us. And then how it got taken away from us and it was harder to receive the sap because we were lazy and greedy people. That's a short, really short, short version of the story about Nana Bajou and maple sap and why we tap the trees the way we do now. We all feast the trees in our own ways with our families or our friends before and after. And that wasn't anything that we felt like we needed to write into the grant. Maybe to stand out a little bit, but it wasn't really that necessary. And then there's a general question about, are you in touch with Joe Dan Rosu, another Ashtonami man with a sugar bush? I don't know that. I know his name from Over at White Earth. My friend gave me his name to purchase some syrup. And he's also got rice for sale, too, if anyone's looking. So if you're over at White Earth, get in touch with Joe Dan. I don't know him personally, but my good friend of mine does. The whole question is, how do you protect your seeds and knowledge from being taken over by other people, researched or mass produced? And they don't know if there is a way to do that, just wondering. I don't think there's anything you can do as far as other people taking the idea of selling syrup. I mean, as far as that goes, it's crowned maple and all these big, big business out of it already. But as far as our heritage and everything like that, I think most of us are happy to share our history and heritage and tell stories that's kind of part of our education program. We encourage it. I think it helps educate people on more than just the process of maple syrup, but on natives as a whole and the history and their beliefs of being willing to share. Nikki, any thoughts? This overall is knowing where you're buying your seeds from. I'm not buying my seeds from Amazon. If I really needed to grow that hand, Shodi, I would ask Kona in a respectable way to learn from him about the seed. I would research where I'm purchasing the seeds from. We just learned recently about One Seed Company. I would just won't be purchasing from them anymore because they are taking over and profiting off of small producers and those stories and that source. That's not how you gain your food like that. And then knowing where your food is coming from. Knowing where your food is coming from, not using high fructose corn syrup and maple syrup products and advocating for others. If it's just policy, if it's at your favorite restaurant or just buying local, or when we're going to these big meetings like this one we can meet in person, is bringing seeds and bringing food and trading for those and having those conversations. With that, I know you all want to raffle. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you guys.