The Sugar Season

by Douglas Whynott

  “Only one person can win that battle,” he said. “Why spend money trying to convince the Chinese to eat maple syrup, when eighty-five percent of the pancake syrup in this country is artificial? Others in the industry, they think everyone knows about pure maple. They try to differentiate from one another. Why not make the case for pure maple? And everyone wins.”

  We stopped briefly at a warehouse David was renting for the time being until his new building was completed. “Bruce doesn’t know I have this,” he said as we walked in. Inside, barrels upon barrels, stacked five high in long rows. It was carryover syrup, his inventory from the 2011 crop. “If it’s a short season this year, I’m going to look very smart,” he said.

  Some of the barrels were from St. Aurelie and other northern points in Maine. I noticed one from a producer in Maine named Scott Wheeler, who sugars north of Jackman in Somerset County, the only county with greater production than Franklin County. A very capable large producer, I heard, who was previously based in Vermont. “I buy almost all of his syrup. He doesn’t talk that much. There’s so much BS in the business and I get a lot of it, but when you talk to Wheeler you come to realize he knows what he is talking about.”

  Back at the plant in Morrisville, he asked if I wanted to take a tour. David had given me a tour on my first visit, and I wanted to check my memory against the present. We went through the employee lunchroom, by the area where candy is made. When we passed by the bottling lines I thought, “Now I know what Bruce means.”

  Along one part of the line they were bottling jugs for BJ’s, the large club supermarket. A little further along David lifted from a box a bottle with a label that read, “McClure’s Maple Syrup.” In another section, jugs with labels for the Big Y supermarkets in Massachusetts. Then he showed me a case of one-ounce bottles of maple syrup to be used for the restaurant trade. “We bottled some of these for Bruce last week,” he said.

  He smiled, with what I thought was the pleasure of success.

  “Why be competitors when you can be cooperators?”

  The Bascom family at the sugarhouse, 1966: Ken, Bruce, Nancy, Brad, and Judy Bascom.

  Ken and Bruce Bascom, tapping trees and hanging buckets, 1962.

  Ken Bascom and his team, hauling sap, early 1950s.

  Ken Bascom emptying buckets near Langdon Woods, early 1950s.

  Sunday morning photo shoot for advertisement for sugar parties, 1955. Ruth, Ken, Judy, Nancy, and Bruce Bascom.

  Judy and Bruce Bascom placing covers on buckets, 1962.

  Bascom’s sugarhouse when run by Eric Bascom, Bruce’s grandfather, in early 1950s.

  The Bascom sugarhouse after it was rebuilt in 1959, with Eric Bascom standing near the doorway

  In the Bascom’s cooler, barrels from Vermont sugarmaker Mark St. Pierre, open and ready for grading.

  A weekend in the 1960s, cars lined up at a Bascom sugar party.

  The Bascom sugarhouse around 1974, after Bruce returned from college.

  Bascom’s logo and sign above the entryway, 2012.

  Buckets in the west pasture, looking east to the sugarhouse, 1960s.

  The Bascom’s steam-powered evaporator, 2012.

  The entryway to Bascom’s after an early-morning ice storm, 2011.

  Peter and Deb Rhoades’s sugarhouse during boiling.

  The road into David Marvin’s sugarbush, with tubing in the woods.

  Maple trees with tubing in David Marvin’s sugarbush.

  13

  THE FORECAST

  ON MARCH 8 the temperature at Bascom’s reached the 60° mark, and Kevin made nearly 1200 gallons of syrup. Bruce had been making deals for syrup, and he told me about one, following my trip to northern Vermont, just after I arrived at the store and he was on his way out to help a customer load barrels.

  “I did real well with Mark St. Pierre,” he said as we walked. “Held my price, wouldn’t budge, said I couldn’t go any higher, and he finally said, ‘We’ll be there Friday morning.’” Bruce had talked about St. Pierre before, after he made his first trip to northern Vermont in 2011 to negotiate for his syrup, about how St. Pierre managed several dairy farms, with somewhere near 3000 cows, how he bought and sold land, and how St. Pierre got into the maple syrup business with the same sort of edge as the guys at Georgia Mountain Maples. Doug Edwards had told me that he also helped St. Pierre set up his sugaring operation. Last year, after Bruce’s trip to meet St. Pierre, a stack of 100 brand-new stainless-steel barrels appeared in the Cooler. The same happened today. The St. Pierre truck had just delivered another 100 barrels.

  Bruce didn’t like to tell anyone how much he paid or would pay for syrup, but he was talking a lot about price lately, almost every time we had a conversation. His major concern now was about the going price in the bulk market and what others would be paying. So I asked him what he paid Mark St. Pierre. With a little smile he said, “You’ve been traveling around talking about prices.” When we reached the truck the customer, a sugarmaker, also asked about the price, not what Bruce had paid St. Pierre but what he would be paying producers like him this season. Bruce didn’t give him an answer.

  Afterward he wanted to walk up to the new building to see if the jug line was up and running for the first time, and he told me to come along. We stopped by the door, and Bruce looked in through the window to where two workers were packing jugs for a natural food chain in the Midwest. But Bruce had second thoughts about going in because there were no hairnets in the bin or white jackets for us to put on. “We better not,” he said. “The other day Lisa told me I was setting a terrible example for the employees by going in there without a hairnet.” Lisa Mancussi, he meant, the person in charge of quality control.

  So instead we went to the tank room, and Bruce showed me the touchscreen used to move syrup from the silos to the tanks and to the bottling units or used to blend syrup to the desired proportions or grades. On the way out we stopped to look at the boxes that were part of the shipment of granulated sugar going to Gold Coast. Two women were working full time to pack those bags, but now with this new order and the new reality it represented, Bruce had to buy a packing machine. It would cost $68,000. “Scheez,” he said of this. The boxes were sealed and he couldn’t open one, but there were some empty bags. The bag design had that same appealing art nouveau forest motif as the Gold Coast jugs.

  Outdoors I saw one of the sap trucks speeding by, Greg Bascom heading out to pick up another load, and then I saw George Hodskins arriving, moving with greater exertion due to the twelve tons of liquid he was carrying. Greg and George worked fourteen-hour days during the sap run, starting at 7:00 and finishing around 9:00, but sometimes they worked until midnight. I had traveled with both of them on the sap trucks, which could be a grueling ride with a full load of sap sloshing in the tank and jerking the truck side to side while moving over the frost heaves and buckled pavement. While George was unloading I asked him about the sap flow.

  “It’s not supported after the weekend. After Sunday we’ve got a whole string of fifty-degree days with no end in sight. The trees like it when it’s twenty-five to forty-five. When it’s sixty they don’t like it. It heats up the bark, even early on when the trees have been frozen for a long time. If there are a couple days of sixty degrees, they don’t run.”

  “You used the word like. You said the trees don’t like something.”

  “They’re alive,” George said.

  In the store I met a man named Bill Cole from Pomfret, Vermont. I saw a truck outside with lettering that read “Ox Hill Farm” and asked Bill if it was his. He said it was and that he was an oxen trainer, that he went to about fifteen fairs a year and had gone to the Cornish Fair last year. I must have seen him there, I said, because I usually attended the Cornish Fair with a friend who was an oxen trainer and whose oxen I fed during the first two winters I lived in New Hampshire. I enjoyed opening up hay bales for them and breaking the ice in the brook where they drank. I had my first taste of the reality of farm life, however,
when the two giant oxen went to Washington, DC, to participate in a Smithsonian exhibition and were led by Vice President Al Gore, with my friend following close behind. This played in the papers in New Hampshire. Unfortunately the big oxen had to pay for the trip to DC and must have fed a lot of people, and I must have flinched when my friend told me. But I didn’t tell Bill Cole that tender part.

  Cole had 2500 taps in his sugarbush and said that when he increased his tap count he had to buy a larger evaporator, but then he harvested so much sap he had to buy an R.O. to reduce boiling time. Now he had to increase his tap count to keep up with the R.O. He had come to Bascom’s to buy barrels, which he now needed more of too. When Liz told him what he owed, he said to put it on his account, that he would pay when he brought his syrup in.

  I went to the Cooler with Bill to get his barrels. Dave St. Aubin was occupied at the scale, weighing and grading syrup from a sugarhouse in Shrewsbury, near Rutland. The man who brought the syrup in said they were clearing out the sugarhouse to ready for the weekend. His syrup was in plastic barrels, and one was still hot to the touch. He too wanted to buy some fifty-five-gallon drums, and when Dave finished grading we all walked into the New Cooler where the new barrels were stored.

  Along the way we passed by some new and bright stainless-steel drums, a stack two high, five wide, and ten deep. The lids were embossed with the name Mark St. Pierre, ensuring their return to the owner. The barrels were a significant investment at $240 each, $24,000 in all, merely as containers for the syrup. They were the preferred containers presently, in a year when the state of Vermont had banned the use of galvanized barrels. As for the value of the syrup, if you went by the 2011 average bulk price in New Hampshire according to the USDA, which was $2.80, and multiplied that by the 4000 gallons in the drums, the return would be $123,200. For Bruce that was just one block in the New Cooler, just one hundred of the thousands.

  ON MARCH 11 the forecast for Acworth for the next ten days predicted daytime temperatures in the fifties and sixties, with nighttime temperatures in the midthirties and low forties. The warmest day in the forecast was March 16, when temperatures would range from 43° to 69°. In Burlington, Vermont, the nighttime temperature would be 49°, higher than the average daytime temperature. If the forecast proved true, there would be 240 consecutive hours without a freeze during the final ten days of winter in the most northern regions of the Northeast.

  Kevin didn’t boil on Sunday, but the sap trucks were running all day. He came in on Sunday night and built up a supply of 18,000 gallons of sap at ten percent sugar. He slept a few hours, then returned to the sugarhouse at 4:30 and boosted the concentrate to eighteen percent. He began boiling at 7:30, and by 11:30 that morning had made 825 gallons. Kevin kept running fresh sap through the R.O. all day long as it arrived from the lots.

  At 11:30 Bruce emerged from his office, pulled on a hairnet, and said, “This is the worst forecast I’ve ever seen for maple syrup. You can be sure by this forecast that the crop obviously will be down.”

  As for what that meant for him, he said, “With a poor crop everybody’s evaporator will be big enough. Sales of syrup will be down. With a crop of ten million pounds less, that will be twenty-five million dollars less in the maple industry. Farmers pay their mortgages and loans with that money, and buy equipment.”

  He continued, “Last year’s crop was ten million more than the year before. The increase was all in the bulk market. If you cut off ten million pounds, Marvin, people like me, we’ll be out there cleaning up everything we can.”

  Bruce went to the chart, to the section with bar graphs that marked the yearly crops. He looked at the tall red columns that rose far above all previous others, at the bars representing crops from 2008 to 2011, crops of 22,000 to 24,000 gallons. He put a finger on a line representing 17,000 gallons.

  “I’ll take ten-to-one odds we’re below that level,” said this taker of risks.

  “That last five thousand gallons is a hundred thousand dollars we don’t make,” he said of the shortfall. He thought for a moment and multiplied last year’s crop—rounded off at 24,000 gallons—by eleven pounds per gallon and by $2.70 per pound, his average price in 2011.

  “Last year’s crop was worth seven hundred thousand dollars. It will be awfully easy to lose some of that now.”

  Bruce had barrels scattered all over the Northeast ready to be filled. “But some producers will hold on to their syrup to see what the market will bring,” he said. “I can understand that. If I were a big producer, I would never sell in the spring.”

  He was expecting a truckload of syrup coming in from Georgia Mountain Maples, but said he needed much more Vermont syrup. “I need fifteen to twenty trailer loads of Vermont to fill orders.”

  He had gotten a call that morning from a Canadian supplier who wanted to sell him some trailer loads at $2.60 a pound. “I have to decide,” he said. “Do I buy last year’s syrup at a low price, or do I wait for the new? The guy said to me, ‘You can buy it cheap. Do you want to buy now?’”

  Bruce was concerned about the bulk price and was wondering where David Marvin would set his. He figured Marvin was probably wondering about him too. “Marvin thinks I’m controlling things and setting the price, and I think he is.”

  Bruce left for lunch.

  Kevin was at the evaporator, which was frothing furiously. I asked what he thought of the conditions outdoors. “If it doesn’t freeze, the sap run will slow right down,” he yelled to me over the mixed sounds. “It takes about a day and a half. Without a freeze we’ll keep running because we have vacuum, but people with buckets and gravity will shut right down.”

  On that day, March 11, Kevin boiled for twelve hours. By 8:00 that night he had made 2023 gallons, breaking the record he set last year. The sugar content of the sap Greg and George gathered ranged from 1.4 to 2.1 percent, averaging about 1.6 percent. Multiplying that out by the Rule of 86, Kevin used 54.75 gallons of sap to make each gallon of syrup.

  Multiplying further, he processed 108,736 gallons of sap to make that day’s record crop.

  14

  AREN’T YOU AFRAID, MR. BUREAU?

  ONE OF THE FIRST STORIES Bruce told me about buying was when he stopped by Mr. Bureau’s house for lunch one summer.

  His name is Real Bureau, but Bruce always referred to him as Mr. Bureau. Mr. Bureau was a maple syrup trader, still is as of this writing actually. He had served as the mayor of St. Evariste, Quebec, and as a math teacher at the local parochial school, and was an accountant. Very good with figures. When Bruce told his story he often mentioned how Mr. Bureau got up early every morning to review his ledger books, written in immaculate penmanship. Mr. Bureau was the person who sold the maple syrup for a lot of producers in his area of Quebec, which is Beauce County in the southeast, their most productive maple syrup region.

  When Bruce went to Quebec on a business trip he usually stopped by Mr. Bureau’s and would sometimes stay for lunch. On this day, the one Bruce told about in his story, while he was having lunch, “One farm family after another stopped by to get paid for their syrup, and Mr. Bureau wrote out one check after another for hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

  “Tens of thousands of dollars?” I asked.

  “Hundreds of thousands.”

  Mr. Bureau was Bruce’s mentor in the game of buying and selling maple syrup. He had “cleaned my clock” many a time, Bruce said, but that was all part of the game and fair play in Bruce’s mind.

  Bruce was in his late twenties when he met Mr. Bureau. He and his partner stopped at Bascom’s on a trip to New Hampshire and Vermont to promote sales of their syrup. They left St. Evariste at 3:00 A.M. in his Lincoln Continental and made stops at American Maple in Newport, Vermont, McClure’s Maple in Littleton, New Hampshire, the Springtree Company in Brattleboro, Vermont, and Bascom’s. They were selling bulk syrup on the Canadian dollar. Ken Bascom and Bruce bought a trailer load.

  Mr. Bureau was the brain behind Jacques & Bureau. He started his ac
counting business in the late 1950s in St. Evariste by knocking on doors. Like many of his countrymen he had a passion for maple syrup and ran a small sugarbush. Mr. Bureau bought the first available R.O. in 1974 for $30,000. His neighbors came to look at it and marveled at what it could do. As they grew to know Mr. Bureau, some of the maple syrup producing families around St. Evariste asked if he could sell their syrup for them. He decided to do it. He organized the collection of syrup from his neighbors in the Beauce, and in 1975 he filled seven leased tractor-trailers with barrels of syrup that set off for Vermont. Mr. Bureau was so afraid that something would happen to the syrup that he followed behind the trucks in his car. He sold all seven loads to the American Maple Company in Newport.

  Mr. Bureau became what was known as a “barrel-roller” in the days before the Federation and their sales agreement. This meant he contracted with producers, advanced them money or lent them money, sometimes paid interest on syrup that he held for months before he sold it, and, ultimately, paid the families what they were due when the syrup was finally delivered, after deducting his commission. This is what Bruce witnessed when he stopped by for lunch on that summer day.

  Mr. Bureau and his methods fascinated Bruce. He had his business degree and enough acumen to believe he could do something similar himself. Older people in the maple business told Bruce he ought to consider getting into the bulk syrup trade. One was the president of American Maple, who gave Bruce a piece of advice that Bruce remembered. He should learn how to let syrup pass him by—other syrup would always be coming his way.