Travis Reynolds, an environmental studies professor at Colby College and family producer of maple syrup in Stannard, said Vermont’s maple industry is “facing a catastrophe.”
“I think it’s entirely possible,” Reynolds said, that his son’s generation will “see the end of maple syrup production the way we currently think about (it).”
Reynolds said continuing trends toward warmer weather will shorten the state’s sugaring season and make the climate less hospitable for maple trees. That, he said, will lead either to abandonment of the industry or consolidation and industrialization that will undermine the Vermont maple syrup brand until maple is just another commodity sweetener.
“It’s also possible,” he said, “that that won’t happen,” but only if producers, consumers, and policymakers carefully analyze the challenges facing the industry and take action.
Jack Britt, a scientist and former professor of animal science at North Carolina State University, said Vermont’s dairy farms stand to profit from changes in the climate during the next 50 years.
“Vermont is sitting in, really, a strategic position,” Britt said. “If I were looking at someplace to put a dairy farm in the future, I would think about buying land in Vermont next week.”
By 2067, Britt said the growing season in Vermont is likely going to be six to eight weeks longer than it is now.
It is expected that Vermont will continue to receive adequate rainfall and not get excessively hot, Britt said, in contrast to model predictions for many states that currently have massive dairy industries, such as Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and California.
Climate models predict those states will experience serious drought conditions and become hotter than the optimal conditions for dairy cows, Britt said.
Britt said the face of the dairy industry nationally and in Vermont will change with increased automation, but there will still be a place for small and medium-sized operations if they collaborate and share resources like farm equipment and facilities in new ways.
The same changes in Vermont’s climate that Britt thinks will give the state an opportunity to expand its dairy industry concern Reynolds.
Whereas dairy farms benefit from longer growing seasons allowing them to harvest more feed crops, Reynolds said warmer weather poses a clear danger to producing maple syrup.
Reynolds said that, in recent years, Vermont’s maple season has been starting a week earlier than it did historically — but, on the other hand, it has been ending 10 days early.
“Three days of the sugaring season, on average in Vermont, are gone,” Reynolds said.
The change in average temperatures over the past decades has already eliminated the sugaring seasons in some areas farther south than Vermont, Reynolds added.
“There are parts of Massachusetts where that overlap (the three lost days) is the entire sugaring season,” Reynolds said. “Their sugaring season is gone. It doesn’t come. There is never a period of sufficient freezing and and sufficient thawing for the sap to run. There’s a whole bunch of maple trees that are still there and will be there for 50 years, for a hundred years, but nobody can get the sap out of them. Sugaring is done.”
Reynolds said he was also concerned by projected increases in maple tree mortality and decreases in the rate at which new trees will take their place.
Those projections, he said, show that pest species such as forest tent caterpillar, emerald ash borer, Asian longhorned beetle, and some microorganisms that inhabit sap holes will thrive in the new climate. Tree species that prefer warmer temperatures will also compete more vigorously with maples, he said.
Mark Isselhardt, a maple specialist at the University of Vermont’s Proctor Maple Research Center, said that he thinks the most middle-of-road projections of Vermont’s maple future are more optimistic than those Reynolds presented.
In particular, Isselhardt said he thought that Reynolds overestimated how many Vermont maple trees will die off over the next 50 years.
“My take from (Reynold’s presentation) was that there will be very little (numbers of maple trees) in the next 50 to a hundred years and I think that’s unrealistic, Isselhardt said. “I think there will continue to be maples here.”
Isselhardt said the projections Reynolds showed estimate changes in which tree species will grow best in Vermont in 2067, not changes in which trees will actually be on the ground then.
The composition of forests at different latitudes arises “from many, many millennia of generations of individuals,” Isselhardt said. “In a changing climate, it’s really hard to say what the shuffling of the deck is going to be like — it’s not necessarily just that they’re moving that deck up in latitude.”
Isselhardt said he believes Reynolds is likely exaggerating the rate at which warmer-climate tree species like hickory and oak will spread into Vermont and compete with maples. But he said he didn’t want to be a Pollyanna.
“There are definitely challenges, there are definitely things that are going to impact (maple) producers’ bottom line going forward,” Isselhardt said, “but I think there is some hope for optimism — maybe a little bit more than what we saw with (Reynolds’s) presentation.”
Reynolds also warned that changes in how maple products are made as a response to climate change and increasing market pressures — chiefly the increasing industrialization and consolidation of production — might damage Vermont’s maple brand.
That brand, Reynolds said, has traditionally been associated with an image of pastoral, small-scale production.
“A lot of what we are selling to consumers is that romantic image of a small-scale producer on a hilltop tapping trees in the woods and bringing it back to a sugarhouse with a woodpile to be boiled down,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds said that if consumers start to associate maple products with the same industrial agricultural processes of commodity sweeteners like sugar cane, sugar beet, and corn, the value of Vermont maple syrup will decline dramatically.
“The future of Vermont maple syrup is, I think in a very real way, at a crossroads,” Reynolds said.
Currently, Reynolds said, the majority of maple syrup produced in Vermont still comes from small and medium-scale operations and “it is still very possible to make a good livelihood as a small and medium-scale sugarmaker.”
But, Reynolds added, “that way of producing, that scale of producing, is already becoming increasingly difficult in an increasingly competitive market context,” one which he said will only grow more competitive in coming decades.
Reynolds suggested that Vermont can learn from reforms made in the Canadian maple industry over the past several decades.
Those reforms, he said, involved the establishment of quotas, price controls, and a centralized, government-controlled stockpile called the ‘global strategic maple syrup reserve’ which helps smooth out year-to-year fluctuations in production.
“It’s a very, very interventionist system,” Reynolds said, “but it’s a system that has allowed production to be stable, that has kept Canadian sugarmakers in business for a very long time, very lucratively.”
Reynolds said the controlled production and careful brand management of wine from the Champagne region of France might also serve as a model for Vermont maple syrup.
