Syrup Is as Canadian as a Maple Leaf. That Could Change With the Climate.

I'd like to see the New York Times tally the number of articles on the detrimental effects of global warming which they have published so far this year. It will rock most of us back on our consumer heels.

I was raised by my grandparents because my parents worked 6/7 days a week in their grocery store. I remember my grandmother making pancakes on her wood fired stove with a device that fit into one of the wood stove's "eye" and had the batter poured into the device. Our syrup then was made from sorghum plants which look like a corn plant without the cob. The plants were crushed by a device which had a mule walking in a circle with the juice being collected and then reduced by having a large, long steel vessel with a wood fire under it. Sorghum syrup was used by granny when she wanted some extra flavor with the sweetness. Sorghum syrup is available today but a much better tasting for my pancakes is the dark amber maple syrup offered by the world's largest wine retailer in their stores.

Be still my heart! There is nothing that can replace maple syrup on pancakes (or as a sweetener in baking) - from Vermont, of course. Having lived in Burlington for a number of years, I came to appreciate the varieties of syrup - almost like wines - and would order global warming to slow down, for this reason alone, if I could.

Not only does climate change affect Maple Syrup, it is also affecting coffee production! Will blueberries be next? What's the world coming to when my breakfast favorites are all in jeopardy? Sorry, but fake maple syrup is the worst! There is just no substitute.

Nice article, Kendra Pierre-Louis. The first time I noticed your writing was a few weeks ago when you wrote about Duluth, Minnesota. I liked that article too. A few minutes ago I clicked on your name and I see you have written quite a few environment-related articles that I would like to read. I'd let my NYT subscription lapse for a few years. Glad I re-subscribed!

Maple syrup production is one of the few cash forrest crops that does not involve logging. Vermont is a state with a whole lot of desperation amongst the poor. A lot of folks still live on the land they inherited. Keeping farms working is helped by adding to the farm economy. Milk prices are at a record low. Where is the money going to come from? The warming of the climate is only one part of the story. As the author points out, sap suitable for syrup production comes from cold nights, warm days in the spring. Climate disruption, as in warm nights, a 2 week season, etc, could simply destroy syrup production as an economic activity. The maple groves are not just going to move north. There are many stories like this one, but this is one that touches me personally as I learned sugaring from my grandfather, fifth generation from Marshfield. Will there be a 10th generation sugaring in Central Vermont? We must reduce carbon emissions.

I love “real” maple syrup and this barley is sad and alarming. But sadly I think many Americans are just fine with pouring “Pancake Syrup” ( Corn Syrup) all over their pancakes, waffles, and French Toast. It’s how they grew up and what is served in many restaurants.

The best way to cook acorn squash is to cut in half, clean out seeds, score lines into the orange squash, then pour in several tablespoons of maple syrup. People who think they hate squash beg me for the recipe. Always shocked how easy!

Maple syrup + cannabis oil= heaven! Seriously, there a bunch of new recipes using cannabis oil including classic desserts like maple sugar pies. Here, in Montreal, we are at a similar latitude as Bordeaux so instead of maple syrup,we could be producing fine wines if, and I pray it will, the climate does change for the better. We just went trough the coldest and wettest April on record.

We make maple syrup here at a wilderness park. We do it the hard, old way, in keeping with the mission of the park. In the last ten years the timing as become more erratic and the length of the productive phase less. We are getting some ice and freezing rain events now in late winter, instead of snow. Ten years is a very short time for climate to change so quickly. I had the other day that Minnesota will be the state in the lower 48 with the greatest increase in temperatures due to climate change.

There are 81 maple syrup producers registered in Ohio on the state maple association registry, plus one at a youth camp. They are in northern part of the state. We owned a country farmhouse for over 15 years when we moved to Ohio. The farmers who built the large brick Victorian house had helped build the old canal boat system when they immigrated from Germany. Those earnings were used to buy their farmland. They raised crops, were the main suppliers of Belgian work horses in the roe-tractor era for two counties, plus had an 80 acres stand of maples along the river. ( The wife also was the first seller of parakeets in the region, in a shop she ran in the basement.) About the time we sold our property and moved back to a suburb of a city, a descendant got a state grant to re-create the maple syrup tapping business. The original cabin for processing the syrup still stood.

I do treasure the maple syrup I stock up on each year at Alp's Farm, a family owned place in Ephratah, NY, just outside of the Adirondack Park boundary. A really small place, doing the work the old way. What this reminds me of is that I suspect most all of our trees are in danger and unable to "relocate " themselves in sufficient time to meet the new challenges of weather extremes and unpredictable seasons. in addition to weather, the pests which attack them: emerald ash borers, gypsy moths, Asian long-horned beetles, bark beetles and tent caterpillars, through direct attack, and also through the diseases they spread. Unlike in a huge floor or hurricane or fire, the constant degradation of many trees doesn't even register to most of the public.

I hope we don't have to start using the fake stuff--there's nothing like real maple syrup.

1. When will headlines start to read "That WILL change with the climate"? 2. Amazing/depressing to see the commenters who mention planting further north. This suggestion is made because at some point the effects of climate change will level off, even though our emissions continue to rise? Or the planet will just give us a break?

I hope that Canadians are planting maple trees farther north! New York and New England producers have fewer options...

Wall Street will be promoting maple syrup futures soon...but will there be pushback from the pancake industry? A sticky situation?

Will Quebec get warmer than Vermont?

. Climate Disruption should be the description now. . Climate change has been obsoleted by events -- . its euphemistic and obfuscatory at this point .

The maple leaf in the Canadian flag shall be replaced by what killed it : an ugly tar sands smudge.

As small commercial maple producers in Vermont for the past 40 years, all of this report rings true to my family and me but also, Vermont maple production has become hugely factory-driven, with most of today's Vermont Maple Syrup being produced by huge producers with completely mechanized sugar houses. Vacuum, oil evaporators, Reverse Osmosis machines.... I will miss making syrup in our own sugar house over a wood fired evaporator with our grandkids, partially because the climate will move northward and our trees will die off but also because there are too many gallons of syrup being produced, bringing the prices down, making it harder for small producers to keep making syrup in the older labor-intensive way.... I suppose things change, and I am glad to have been along for the ride during some of the glory years of maple in Vermont.....

Before we get too excited about climate change, it should be noted that wine was a staple of Britain during the Roman era. Not coincidentally, wine production has returned. The same is true to Canada. Assuming continued warming, British Columbia will one day be a significant player in that industry.

When I was a student at Amherst College four decades ago, some of us would go maple sugaring, tapping trees and hanging metal buckets on the maples in the college's Wildlife Sanctuary. I recall the very slightly sweet sap that would fill the buckets (sometimes with insects that would need to be strained out), and the much thicker and sweeter - and delicious - syrup that would result. If maple syrup becomes a rare commodity or disappears altogether, that will be a sad testament to our priorities in the early part of the 21st century.

I wonder about possible northward migration. There is a large region of fertile farmland spanning the border of Quebec and Ontario further north in the Abitibi region. Currently I think the forest there is mostly softwood but I'd guess that some forward thinkers need to be trying to introduce sugar maple. We'd be saps not to try.

This is actually a story about the alarming endangerment of a key tree species, with critical ramifications for an entire ecosystem. Whether or not it sweetens my pancakes is pretty far down the list for me.

I make maple syrup as a hobbyist. The land where my trees are is at about the same latitude as Pakenham, Ontario. I have experienced a couple of low-volume years. What seems even more prominent climate-wise is only what I can call…weirdness. As one mentioned in the article, March 15 is about when I also expect to tap. In 2017 it was so much warmer I tapped a full month earlier: Valentine’s Day. It also seems there is not a gradual tapering off of the season anymore. One day the high is 45 degrees and the low is 30, perfect conditions. Next day it’s 65, low of 50, and you’re shutting down and throwing out spoiled sap. A normal season is 6 to 8 weeks long. This year I had 4 weeks. That may not sound like much but that’s a 25%-35% shorter season. It’s not a big deal to me as a hobbyist, but it’s a very big deal to commercial operators who have that much less product to sell. Also worth mentioning: Maple syruping is unusual in that it’s a perennial use of mature trees. There aren’t many productive agricultural uses for mixed hardwood forests. What will happen when making syrup is no longer viable? There is plenty of demand for land, so those trees will be logged and sold for timber and the land will be converted to commodity crops or pasture.

This has been a problem for several decades, although the creep toward earlier tapping of the trees and lower sap production was coming along so slowly, people could not accurately define a trend. Was it just a bad year for sap or were there really climate changes that were causing the issue? I’ve always thought it was climate change even if some naysayers claim there is no such thing. A Vermont writer spent a year back in the late 1980s with a Vermont farm family before writing a book about a year on the farm. The year he spent with the family was a bad one for maple syrup with a dry winter, a warmer end to winter, and an early start — and early end — to the family’s sugaring operation. They didn’t even make their expenses back. The family wrote it off to an early spring. We hadn’t heard too much about climate change in the late 1980s. I think the book was called “Cutting Hill Farm” or something like that. In chronicling the life of that farm family for a year, the author dwelled on the potential loss of family farms and the impact of a warming climate.

Unfortunately, Americans have tended to treat maple syrup as a commodity -- along with other gifts from the woods. Frequently, we assume eternal abundance and fail to appreciate the joys of seasonality and risks of scarcity. Maybe it's time that maple syrup producers take lessons from foods where we appreciate transience. Recognizing highest quality maple syrup as specialty products might might lead to prices that better reflect the variations in sweetness, leafiness, and other flavors that change during a single winter. With climate change, more variations between years create an opportunity for marking vintages to help us appreciate the way in which maple syrup reflects the weather and captures the memory of a specific winter. Over the years, I've enjoyed the variations between maple syrups I've purchased from various family operations and farmers markets. As with wine, smaller production and unique character command higher prices than bulk products. If supporting smaller, family producers seems too costly for your pancakes, one can always turn to high fructose corn syrup and add to your carbon footprint through the agrichemical industry.

I'm curious as to whether they believe that planting new trees farther north would renew the crop in a generation or so.

Perhaps maples can be planted now to the north of their current range so that in 40 years they are in the right place for future harvests?

Now that the voters in Ontario have chosen Doug Ford as their premier, their admittedly local attempts to get carbon emissions under control are now in the hands of someone who opposes a "job killing" carbon tax. Apparently "job killing" climate change is just fine with him. I guess you reap what you sow, or maybe in this case it's 'tap'.

At least we'll still have the wonderful Christinne Muschi photos, as long as digital files survive...

I'm going to start hoarding maple syrup now.

Living in New England has convinced me that there is no substitute for real maple syrup. When heading Europe, it makes the sweetest gift.

My sixth-grade Marcus Whitman ECO students study maple sugaring because it offers a unique window into technological change and adaptation in its pursuit of producing a product more efficiently and with higher quality. Sugaring's change is easy for a lay person to understand and appreciate from the pre-European arrival to present day. Sugaring is also a pursuit that can be embraced and executed at many levels of investment from a few dollars to millions of dollars depending upon scale. Sugaring's technological change has been delivered for many years by "tinkering" farmers hoping to save time and fuel while producing a high quality product steeped in pride. Future time will tell the story of more maple change just as it has for several hundreds of years. In the meantime support your local maple producer(s)! Enjoy syrup and know its quality. I proudly produce MacKenzie Family Maple Syrup, the sweet flavor of Italy Valley, NY!

The only syrup I use on pancakes and waffles is maple. While I have to keep down my consumption of sweet stuff for health reasons, I will not stint on the maple. I remember early weekend mornings going to a sugaring house in western Massachusetts, small and unassuming and filled to capacity, and enjoying a proper breakfast with all the maple syrup I wanted. It was heavenly.

I'll bet Fulton's Pancake House is a fun place. It's a tragedy that most Americans don't realize that trees are the source of real maple syrup and authentic flavor. For the same reason, they don't realize that they are a major source of the problem of climate change. They are disconnected from the earth through artificiality of consumerism.

Florida residents don't pay any state taxes. Their tourist trade is very lucrative - but when people begin to catch on that the rashes they've brought back from their vacation are from sea mites and that they can no longer enjoy the water without being bitten, it's not going to be pretty.

So there was one warmer year in 2012 that was bad for syrup production. This then proves climate change will doom the industry forever? What about the seven years of production since 2012? How were those? This data would be very enlightening, yet it was strangely not mentioned.

I predict a US invasion of Canada by 2050 (it will be called an annexation) By then the US Midwest will be too hot and dry to support its crops. The Ogallalla aquifer will be depleted. Eyes will look toward the cooler north - tanks will roll. I do hope I'm wrong.

Kendra.....not boasting.....I think Canada produces about 80-85% of the world's Maple Syrup. The Province of Quebec produces about 85% of the previous figure....with Ontario and New Brunswick being the significant 'other' producers....with Ontario increasing in volume gradually and steadily. Regards and well done.

There will be winners and losers in the climate change occurring. Thanks for this article: Why did you not focus this article on the Vermont Maple Syrup makers? Vermont makes and sells much more Syrup, per capita, than Canada and will be the first area negatively affected by this climate change.

Don't get me wrong - I'm a big maple syrup fan. But this article perpetuates a journalistic and social wrong on the part of those who advocate for interdicting climate change. Perhaps a decade ago -- I can't place the time exactly -- a major U.S. government report prognosticating climate change and its portents positioned prominently, in its executive summary, the potential loss of New England maple syruping/sugaring. It didn't belong there -- not even a mention. With due respect to the hard-working folk who produce this still labor-intensive commodity, in the big picture, maple products mean little. Why was it there? Obviously, it was PR spin put on climate science and its determinants, intended to help win over the polity's and public's hearts and minds, with a special focus, forgive the word, on the yuppie types who revel in special high-end things culturally, from food to travel to child-rearing to spiritual practice. No different from cute polar bears. That one phony bit -- we'll lose our maple syrup -- tended to make me distrust the entirety of the report. I knew the science and economics were "bent" so as to increase emotional appeal. So it is with this article. It ill serves the importance of the real issue -- that climate change likely will cause such wide-scale economic disruption, and interfere with social planning activities so vastly, as to threaten vast swaths of humanity with hunger, homelessness, destabilization of society, and outright war.

From Mid March to late January for tapping maple syrup. Yep. Just like the crocus' flowers in my yard. 25 years ago when I bought the house you could set the calendar to the first week of March. That was always the time of the season I saw the first yellow bloom push up through the ground. Now? Late January.

I understand why climate change would negatively affect current maple syrup production. I don't understand why climate change would not move the optimal production area to the north. It seems that any production that would be lost on the southern end of the production area would be gained on the (expanding) northern end.

Back in the 80's in a summer camp in Vermont we tapped some sugar maple on the first day of camp and ground our own flour. by the second week we were having pancakes with maple syrup. Being Vermont is further south, I suspect they will be even more affected. Which is a shame, because that was one of the highlights of the whole experience.

I haven't paid for maple syrup since I met my (now) husband in 2001. I married into a French-Canadian family that has proudly produced maple syrup (not commercially, for friends and family only) since 1905. This is the first year where there will be a drastic reduction in volume, due to the new-normal weather changes. There are a thousand small and not-so-small ways climate change is affecting us all. If only we, as humans, would pay attention.

It is just a likely that the small changes will be transitory and that the modest warming will EXPAND the acreage able to be harvested. What about the bumper crop of wild blueberries in Canada that they are now selling? Maine has been, until recently, the largest supplier of berries and now Ontario has taken a substantial stake in this market. Not all is doom and gloom, rather it is an opportunity for even greater prosperity.