Category: Country Life

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Country Life

The Godfather of Maple Syrup

Inspecting the Evaporator, Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

When I use the phrase “The Godfather of Maple Syrup” I’m being facetious. Despite the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Caper, maple syrup production is a benign industry and the people who make it happen are a big-hearted lot. How could it be otherwise? After all, they make something that brings joy and puts smiles on faces throughout the world. Instead, I want to use this post to acknowledge Howard Williams, the man who got things going at Williams Farm and set his son, John, on the path to becoming something of a maple syrup connoisseur.

True to life in small town Ontario, there are many points of intersection between my family and the Williams. By way of example: before John and I became related by marriage (by marrying sisters), we discovered that we were already related by marriage. Yup. We’re in-bred white boys. Or how about this? My great aunt Kaye taught Howard when he went to high school in St. Thomas, ON. Later, Howard took over the family business, Williams Funeral Home. In fact, both my great aunt Kaye and my grandfather were “done” at the Williams Funeral Home. However, by that time, Howard had sold the business, opting for a career in teaching.

Howard’s career change took him to Simcoe County where he and his wife Judith bought a farm property in Hillsdale and built a log home. This wasn’t a pre-fab log home; all the logs came from their woodlot, giving the farm its name: Pine House Farm. It started out as a hobby farm and it was in this time that Howard began to experiment with tapping trees and boiling sap.

Back in the day, there was an expectation that the family farm would be passed down through the generations. Nowadays, the family farm faces serious competition from large scale operations. Coupled with the fact that many farm children follow the trend of migration to urban centres and it’s easy to see why people talk about the death of the family farm. In taking over his father’s hobby farm and scaling up production, John has bucked the trend. It’s still possible to make a small farm viable in niche markets like organics and, of course, maple syrup. So Howard retired to Barrie and John took over the family farm.

In 2007, John sold the Hillsdale property and moved further along Highway 93 to Wyebridge where he had identified a property with a good woodlot which was better suited to organic practices. Since there was no longer a pine house, he changed the name to Williams Farm. Despite the various moves over time, traces of Howard’s old life can still be found at Williams Farm. One day, poking around the barn, I discovered a wooden crate that had once been used to ship bottles of embalming fluid. Curiously, the principles for managing the flow of maple sap from tree to evaporator are similar to those for managing the flow of cavity fluid from bottle to cadaver. From a certain perspective, the transition from funeral director to maple syrup producer is a natural one. You might say it runs in John’s veins.

CAVOS (Cavity Osmosis) concentrated cavity fluid
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Country Life

When Bad Things Happen to Good Maple Syrup

Today’s post features a photograph of sterilized metal barrels used for storing maple syrup before it gets transfered to bottles for retail consumption. These particular barrels are waiting for the sweet stuff in the barn at Williams Farm in Wyebridge, Ontario. When full, one of these barrels weighs roughly 200 Kg and is worth $3,640 retail (140 litres @ $26/litre). Even with today’s stratospheric prices for Brent Crude, a barrel of maple syrup is worth roughly 23 times a barrel of oil.

Given the value of the product, it should come as no surprise that somebody decided it might be lucrative to steal maple syrup. However, what does come as a surprise is that when somebody finally got around to stealing maple syrup, they did so on a scale that places them in the same company as drug kingpins and major crime bosses. From 2011 to 2012, a small coterie stole nearly 10,000 barrels of maple syrup worth more than CDN $18 million at a time when the Canadian dollar was trading above par. (Note that the FPAQ barrels are larger than the ones pictured here.)

The thieves stole the product directly from the Global Strategic Reserve. At that time, the body that managed the reserve was called the Fédération des producteurs acéricoles du Québec (FPAQ). It kept the reserve in a number of warehouses scattered throughout rural Québec. After a bumper year, it had to lease more space and perhaps was a little lax in ensuring that the additional space had proper security. The owner of the warehouse also leased space to her husband, Avik Caron, who, along with some associates, periodically transferred barrels off site where they drained them and refilled them with water. Since the product is perfectly fungible, it was easy for them to ship out of province where they sold it to unsuspecting buyers.

As the scheme continued, the thieves grew lazy or perhaps cocky. They stopped refilling the barrels with water and started returning them empty to the Reserve. In July 2012, an FPAQ representative came to the site to conduct an annual inventory and almost knocked over one of the barrels. If it had been full, the barrel wouldn’t have budged. From there, forensic investigators took over and discovered the extent of the theft.

You can read more about the heist on the History 101 web site or you can watch Dirty Money on Netflix, Season 1, Episode 5 “The Maple Syrup Heist.” Apparently, Sony optioned the story in 2013, but nothing has happened since then. This isn’t the only time people have tried to steal maple syrup. In 2016, someone intercepted a 20,000 litre shipment bound for Japan worth $150,000. As far as I can tell, the thieves got away with the crime.

Things are a little different at Williams Farm. As an Ontario farm, it falls outside the purview of the FPAQ (now the PPAQ). From a Québec point of view, you might say that Ontario product is part of the black market. Since Ontario producers don’t funnel their product through the PPAQ, most of it passes relatively quickly into the hands (or mouths) of consumers. That means there just aren’t the same opportunities in Ontario to commit large scale maple syrup capers.

The band, Trent Severn, celebrates the heist with a song called Stealin’ Syrup:

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Country Life

Global Maple Syrup Supplies Carefully Managed by the PPAQ

Maple Syrup pours from a faucet after going through the evaporator.

The Province of Québec is to maple syrup as Saudi Arabia is to oil. Instead of OPEC, Quebec has the PPAQ or Producteurs et productrices acéricoles du Québec. The PPAQ administers all maple syrup production within the province and, since the province accounts for more than 70% of all maple syrup production in the world, it is a force to be reckoned with.

Among other things, the PPAQ sets quotas. If, in a given year, a producer exceeds its quota, it stores the surplus in sterilized barrels that hold 170 litres of syrup and, when filled, weigh 270 Kg. These barrels end up in the Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve and, since maple syrup isn’t a perishable food, the barrels can be warehoused indefinitely. Like OPEC, PPAQ (QMSP in English) uses its reserve to guarantee supply at a stable price. So, for example, at the end of 2021, the PPAQ announced that it would gradually release a little over half its reserve. Two factors have adversely affected global maple syrup supply:

Firstly, last year’s production run was less than stellar. As with any agricultural product, some years are just better than others. 2021 wasn’t a great year.

Secondly, demand has gone up during the pandemic. With more people living in lockdown, there has been a renewed interest in baking, especially in baking the sort of comfort foods that use maple syrup as a primary ingredient.

PPAQ has reassured the public that its recent move should not be interpreted as signalling that there is a threat to maple syrup supplies. Fluctuations in production and demand are common. But to be on the safe side, it has approved a 14% increase in taps for the 2022 season.

It goes without saying that in a world that has, in recent years, skewed ideologically to neoliberalism and free trade, the PPAQ is an outlier. Many producers resent the iron grip the PPAQ has on maple syrup production and, especially in a high-demand time like this, those producers have a strong incentive to sell on the black market. But more about that in tomorrow’s post.

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Country Life

Maple Syrup Production Takes a lot of Concentration

Once upon a time, maple syrup producers would have collected their sap and, one way or another, delivered it straight to the evaporator. Not any more. As with most areas of life, maple syrup production has leveraged technology to make the process more efficient. In this instance, that technology is reverse osmosis. Most modern producers have introduced reverse osmosis as an intermediate step along the way.

The primary object of maple syrup production is to take tree sap with a low concentration of sugar and turn it into syrup with a high concentration of sugar. As with wine, the sugar concentration is measured as degrees Brix (ºBx). Because I was never any good at high school chemistry and don’t understand the technical explanation of what this means, I prefer to use the rule of thumb that 1 degree Brix represents a 1% solution of sugar. Sap straight out of the tree has a concentration of between 1.5% and 3.5% sugar depending on a variety of factors like the health of the trees and the number of leaves in the crown. To qualify as maple syrup, a producer has to up the concentration to 66 Brix or 66% sugar by volume. Traditionally, that meant running the sap through an evaporator to boil off most of the water. Now, reverse osmosis gives the evaporator a head start.

The big advantage of reverse osmosis is that it reduces the boiling time in the evaporator. If you double the concentration of sap from 2% to 4%, you halve the boiling time. In a process which is time sensitive, that saving can make all the difference.

There is an ongoing debate about flavour. Detractors suggest that reverse osmosis makes the syrup taste “processed.” In fairness, that criticism applies to high-Brix sap i.e. reverse osmosis that produces a high sugar concentration so that it only takes a few minutes in the evaporator to produce the syrup. For those who go more gently, the results are virtually indistinguishable. Some argue that the key to true maple syrup flavour is exposure to wood smoke; as long as the sap is in the evaporator for a reasonable length of time, it won’t matter that it arrived there via reverse osmosis. It reminds me of the debate around Islay single malt whisky and the origin of its peaty flavour. In the end, you have to let your taste buds be your guide. That, at least, is my humble opinion.

In the image above, we see two 10,000 litre tanks for holding sap. In the image below, we see John Williams installing a reverse osmosis machine. He is drilling a hole through the ceiling directly underneath the two 10,000 litre tanks.

John Williams drills a hole in the ceiling so that sap can flow into a reverse osmosis machine.
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Country Life

When the sap runs, maple syrup producers run too

In a previous post, I noted how maple sap flows through tubes into a large tank for holding until it can be pumped into a mobile tank for transport to the evaporator. The same holds true of trees tapped off site. Williams Farm taps trees on neighbouring properties like the Sugar Ridge Retreat Centre which has a good woodlot.

Five years ago, I had the privilege of accompanying John and a buddy of his on a midnight run to Sugar Ridge. For a couple weeks in March, you are the sap’s bitch. If a tank is full, you empty it immediately because you can’t collect any more sap while the tank is full. If it’s midnight, you do it at midnight.

John and his buddy drove out on the tractor. I followed behind in their pickup truck. I’m a city boy, so what do I know about pickup trucks? It felt to me like I was in that opening scene from Jurassic Park, the one where they take delivery of the velociraptors. The site was pitch dark except for the lights from the tractor and the pickup truck. There was a lot of noise from the idling engine and from the pump transferring sap into the mobile tank. The ground was beginning to thaw and it was muddy in places. In fact, I nearly got the pickup truck stuck in the mud and worried I might replay the scene where Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) tries to winch his way out of a jam and ends up getting poisonous spit in his eyes.

Referring to my notes about the evening, I see that I had to work fast. I barely had time to set up my tripod and get off a few exposures before they were done. A testament to their efficiency, I suppose. We went back to the farm and, parking alongside the barn, pumped the sap into a tank that sits above the evaporator. Unlike Jurassic Park, nothing snatched us into the tank and devoured our arm. Maple syrup production doesn’t come with those kinds of risks.

Pumping maple sap into the evaporator.
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Country Life

When it comes to maple syrup you can’t just go with the flow

Installment #4 of my March series on Ontario maple syrup production:

In a previous post, I mentioned that, at Williams Farm, syrup collection relies on a combination of gravity and vacuum pumps. In other words, everything flows down to the lowest point on the property where it gets collected in a large tank. Unfortunately, the evaporator is in the barn and the barn is situated at the highest point on the property. That means whenever the tank is full, they have to pump the sap into a mobile tank and haul it uphill by tractor to the other end of the property where they empty it into another tank beside the barn.

This illustrates a couple important considerations. First, is the reliance on pumps which means that before each maple syrup season begins, it’s important to make sure all your pumps are in good working order. Second, it’s helpful if you know something about the movement of fluid through hoses and pipes, the kind of practical knowledge you’d need if you were a plumber. As you can see from the image below, we’re not talking about the sort of trickle you get through a garden hose; we’re talking about the sort of gusher you get when you’re filling a swimming pool.

Imagine swimming in a pool full of maple sap! It reminds me a bit of Homer Simpson swimming in a vat of Duff Beer. Well, not quite. Maple sap is diluted. Even so, some people tout the health benefits of drinking maple water and have packaged and branded it. Personally, I’d rather wait for the stuff that comes out the other end of the evaporator. I might not get enough to fill a swimming pool, but I should have enough to fill a hot tub. I’m sure soaking in maple syrup is good for the skin.

Maple sap pours from a hose into a tank before going to the evaporator.
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Country Life

Inspecting the sap lines at Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

In the image above, John Williams inspects sap lines as they approach the lowest point on his farm. I hope John forgives me, but I like to compare him to the Lorax, the Dr. Seuss character who speaks for the trees. Yes, the maple trees yield up something wonderful, but this isn’t a one-sided relationship. If he doesn’t do things for the trees in return, then in the long run they produce less sap. John is something of a tree whisperer whose aim is to strike a balance that ensures the long-term health of the sugar bush.

To that end, John adheres to a number of best practices that promote the health of individual trees and the overall health of the bush. For example, tap holes are, in effect, an injury to the tree in the same way that an injection site is an injury to a person’s skin. Neither is a serious injury, but in both cases you have to take care all the same.

It turns out, the best way to heal a tap hole is not to plug it with something, but to leave it be. Use a sharp bit when drilling the hole. That avoids splitting the inner bark and minimizing the size of the wound. Drill at a slight upward angle so that moisture drains out; otherwise, when residual moisture refreezes, it expands and can potentially split the bark. And remove weak and damaged trees to promote the overall health of the remaining trees, making it easier for them to heal.

Removing a branch that has fallen on a sap line.
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Country Life

Tapping Trees in the Sugar Bush: Ontario Maple Syrup

Maple Syrup Lines, Wyebridge, Ontario

I remember childhood picture books of a stereotypical Canadian winter from long ago. It was the sort of winter that maybe les habitants experienced in the olden days, or that you learned about on a school trip to Black Creek Pioneer Village. It was the sort of winter where frost bitten settlers trudged through the snow with a yoke across the back carrying two pails of sap. They would pour the sap into a cauldron and boil it down until all that remained was thimble of syrup. At a 40 to 1 ratio, it took a lot of trips back and forth with the yoke, and a lot of waiting by the boiling cauldron, before you had enough syrup to keep the family’s 15 children from clamouring for more on their breakfast flapjacks. Even today, you can go on outings where they make maple syrup the old-fashioned way.

However, if you want to make enough maple syrup to keep up with demand, you have to forego the buckets and yoke and scale up your production. That means that when you tap a tree, the sap doesn’t flow directly into a bucket. Instead, it flows into a tube which flows into a bigger tube which flows into an even bigger tube and, with a little help from gravity, it all drains into a big tank. For the health of the trees, the general rule of thumb is: one tap in a maple tree with a trunk one foot in diameter, and an additional tap for every six inches in diameter after that.

The image above shows a network of tubes running through the sugar bush at Williams Farm in Wyebridge, Ontario. Below is a macro image of a single tap. Modern production may lack the romance of les habitants, but then again modern maple syrup producers don’t lose fingers to frostbite. So there’s that.

Tapping a maple tree for sap.
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Country Life

Liquid Gold: Ontario Maple Syrup

John Williams inspects sap lines in the sugar bush

This past month, we Canucks witnessed some dubious patriotism as people descended on the nation’s capital, honking horns and draping themselves in the flag. One morning, while eating my breakfast, it occurred to me that there must be less contentious ways to share with one another the Canadian experience. I gazed down at my plate of flapjacks slathered in pure maple syrup and said to myself: “I know just the thing!” I’ve never met a person who doesn’t love maple syrup. If we can’t set aside our differences to gather around an evaporator boiling 10,000 litres of sap while we draw the beautiful smell of wood smoke into our lungs, then there’s no hope for us.

And so, for the month of March, I share images that celebrate the joy of maple syrup. Given that Canada is responsible for more than 70% of the world’s maple syrup production, I think it’s fair to say that, even more so than hockey, this is a quintessentially Canadian experience.

I have an in at Williams Farm. My sister-in-law, Suzanne, and her husband, John, own a farm with a sugar bush in Wyebridge, Ontario. Every spring, they tap their sugar bush and neighbouring woodlots, and from that sap they produce somewhere north of 4,000 litres of maple syrup. Every spring, I show up with my camera to catch them working what to my eyes (and taste buds) seems a small miracle. It’s worth noting that, in addition to producing maple syrup, John is the executive director of the Ontario Maple Syrup Producers’ Association, helping advocate for the industry.

Join me, then, for the month of March as I share images that capture something of the process that turns tree sap into one of the most delicious foods ever invented. In the first two images of this series, we see John Williams inspecting sap lines to ensure their integrity and making repairs where needed.

Follow Williams Farm on Instagram.

Inspecting sap lines in the sugar bush.
Categories
Country Life Landscape Photography

Fence in Foggy Field

Fence Post in Fog, Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

The chief merit of this post is the alliteration in the title: three “F” words in a row is irresistible. I could have added a fourth, but then I’d be giving up my family friendly rating. But enough about rhetoric.

This is a variation on the theme of Kanso, which I’ve previously mentioned here and here, creating a scene of calming simplicity by removing elements from the image one by one until only the essential remains. Although photography in the real world often makes it impossible to remove elements from a scene (Photoshop notwithstanding), nature itself sometimes steps in and lends a hand.

In previous posts, I’ve shown how a backdrop of pure snow can render an utterly simple photo. In this instance, I turn to fog as my natural assistant. It isn’t perfect, but it helps. The fog softens the background just enough that it doesn’t distract us from the foreground, a single fence post. We can trace the line of fence posts that recedes across the field and disappears into the foggy distance.

I shot this on New Year’s Day, 2022 at Williams Farm in Wyebridge, Ontario. The scene arrived like a gift and, although I wouldn’t call myself a superstitious person, I took it as a portent of the year to come. At least as far as photographs go, I expect 2022 will be an excellent year.

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Country Life

A walk in the woods

Looking up at the trees, winter in Wye Marsh

We went for a walk along a trail near the Wye marsh. I had to answer nature’s call and when I was done and had turned around, everyone else was looking, though not at me. They were looking up into the trees. I don’t know what they were looking at. For all I know, they might have been suffering from a shared delusion and thought the tree people were calling them. That’s not as far-fetched as it sounds.

In a sense, this forest is haunted. Since the glaciers receded after the last ice age, this land has been continuously inhabited by the people we’ve come to know as the Wendat. They’ve been passing through these forests for nearly 10,000 years. If you pause and listen, especially in the stillness that a layer of snow settles upon the place, you can feel their presence.

I believe in ghosts. Maybe not the ghosts of campfire stories but ghosts all the same. Our landscapes are haunted by people and animals that have gone before. We need only look and listen.

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Country Life Still Life

Minimal Winter Photos

One of the things I love about photographing in the wintertime is that if you angle your camera downward against a rising slope, you can isolate the subject and produce an absolutely simple shot. Call it what you like—minimal, clean, uncluttered, Zen—the effect is the same: an image that calms the spirit and settles the senses.

I wonder if Marie Kondo gives photography workshops. Declutter your images. Leave in only those parts that give you joy. It’s not surprising that a contemporary “influencer” of the uncluttered space should happen to be Japanese. Traditional Japanese aesthetics lists seven principles necessary to achieve Wabi-Sabi which is a state of mind that emerges in the presence of beauty. One of those principles is Kanso which means simplicity or clarity. Kanso might also be understood as a process to the extent that it engages us in the practice of removing things from the frame until only the necessary remains.

Snow helps in this process by removing clutter in the background. In the case of the photograph above, that clutter includes dirt, grass, and shriveled wildflowers. In the case of the photograph below, that clutter includes a pond and the line of the far shore, all of which has turned to ice and been covered by a deep layer of snow.

Cattails
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Country Life

Snow-covered railway tracks in Thunder Bay

Rail marshalling yard, Hardisty Street, Thunder Bay, Ontario

In Thunder Bay, the railway tracks come up alongside Hardisty Street North which is where I was standing when I made this shot. I was struck by the high contrast of white ground, dark rails running to the horizon, and dark utility pole set off against a gloomy sky. When I was done making the shot, I collapsed my tripod, strapped it to my pack, and walked over to Simpson Street. I was heading down to the Fort William side of town.

Because of the light, I made a lot of good photos that morning. Perhaps the most memorable photo was nothing special, at least not from a photographic point of view. I saw what I took to be a small derelict theatre and, without looking too closely, assumed that somebody had bought the building and converted it into a retail space. It wasn’t until after I made my shot that I noticed it was the local Hells Angels club house. I quickened my pace and hoped nobody had been watching me. I worried that if they saw my camera, they might think I was from a law enforcement agency. I’d vanish and people would later find my body in a boxcar off Hardisty Street.

As happens to so many buildings in Thunder Bay, somebody torched the Hells Angels club house almost exactly two years after I made this shot. The CBC article says the cause of the fire was unknown, but come on. This is the Hells Angels we’re talking about.

When I heard about the fire, my lawyer brain immediately wondered if the Hells Angels had insured the place. Given their efforts in recent years to carry on legitimate business enterprises, I don’t see why not. Even so, I tried to imagine the first time an insurance broker met with a Hells Angels rep to discuss insuring their place of business. How would an actuary even begin to go about evaluating potential risk?

Finally, I note that the street address is a fractional number, like the platform where aspiring wizards catch the train to Hogwarts. It seems that fractional numbers lead us into magical realms where we can alter our reality by eating gillyweed or shooting heroin.

Hells Angels Club House, Thunder Bay, ON
636 1/2 Simpson Street, Thunder Bay, ON
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Country Life

Winter Scenes: Snowmobiling in Rural Ontario

Elliiott Side Road, Wybridge, ON

This is a recent photograph, shot while walking on a Sunday morning along Elliott Side Road near Midland, ON. It’s in Tay Township which got its name exactly 200 years ago when Lady Sarah Maitland, wife of then Governor General of Upper Canada, General Sir Peregrine Maitland, thought it would be cute to name some towns after her pet dogs. Now, besides Tay, people race their snowmobiles through Tiny and Flos. Before the English, it was the French who laid claim to the region. Like most colonizing enterprises, it was the Bible that led the way. In 1639, Jesuits established a mission that lasted all of 10 years when Iroquois decided they’d had enough and killed them all. Before the Jesuits, the land had been occupied for nearly 10,000 years by the Wendat-Huron people.

The first time I rode on a snowmobile, I was all of four or five. My grandfather had sold his farm south of London, retaining just enough land that he could make a good run from the road to the woods and back on what I presume was an expression of his midlife crisis. Why else would a man in his mid-fifties buy a snowmobile? When I visited in the wintertime, he’d take me for a little spin. My parents raised me as a city boy, so I’ve had little contact with snowmobiles since then. Whatever crisis my grandfather had suffered quickly subsided and his snowmobile gathered dust under a tarp for a few years until he sold it to a neighbour.

Except for indigenous people who live in remote communities, I don’t understand why anyone would need a snowmobile. Every year, we hear fresh stories of people decapitated running under fence wires or sinking through the ice as they make their last run of the season out to the fishing hut. People answer that they’re perfectly safe if you drive them sensibly. But the whole point of a snowmobile is to drive fast; nobody in a midlife crisis wants to drive sensibly. The fact that my grandfather survived his midlife crisis is more a case of god playing dice with the universe than sound planning on my grandfather’s part.

So there I am, a city boy out for a walk with my camera, when several groupings of snowmobiles come roaring down the road in quick succession. My brother-in-law, who lives there, explains that they pay a $300 fee for a permit. Among other things, that permit gets them nicely groomed trails and, implicitly, the assurance that there are no low wires hanging across those trails.