Photo: For David Hall of Lac Brome, president for the Montérégie-Est syndicate of Quebec’s maple syrup producers federation, the key to taking advantage of great maple syrup harvests is to be ready early: “If you’re in the business, you should be ready by Feb. 10th, and able to keep going until around April 15th.”
Andrew McClelland
The Advocate
It looks like the 2024 maple syrup season will be a record-breaking one for Quebec producers, as early warm weather started the sap flowing in February and luckily kept it going into the spring months.
“We were done by March 17th, but we had more than enough made,” said Walter Last, a cow-calf, lamb and maple syrup producer from Poltimore in the Outaouais region.
The trend of an early-but-bountiful harvest was repeated throughout Quebec, as surprisingly early warm weather started most taps flowing around Feb. 10. While some producers were caught unprepared, and all worried that the early season wouldn’t last, early predictions agree that the 2024 season will likely be the most productive on record.
“We could end up with a production equivalent of a season and a half — maybe even the volume equivalent of two (average seasons),” said Joël Vaudeville, communications director at Producteurs et productrices acéricoles du Québec (PPAQ).
The provincial maple syrup producers federation only tabulates final production data by May, typically making that information public by June. But already, the quantity of syrup harvested in 2024 has surpassed the 35.5 million litres collected across Quebec last year.
MAPLE: 2024 season could set new record
And that’s welcome news for the province’s maple industry. The lacklustre 2023 season, which brought in only 124 million pounds, resulted in Quebec’s “Global Strategic Reserve,” the federation’s reserve of surplus syrup kept in storage to insure against poor harvests, being reduced to 6.9 million pounds.
This 2024 bumper crop will allow the province’s maple syrup industry to replenish the reserve to its comfort level of around 100 million pounds — if not more.
Global warming, global reserve
For David Hall of Hallacres Farm in Lac Brome, the fantastic 2024 season is both a result of good weather conditions and improvements in the industry.
“What surprised us most is that the sap ran early and it ran hard,” said Hall, who also serves as president for the Montérégie-Est syndicate of the PPAQ. “We had a good February, a great March and finished just yesterday,” he told the Advocate in an April 9th interview.
Hall recalls the previous record-breaking season of 2022, when each of his taps averaged a 5.75-pound output. This year, the average per tap on his 22,000-tap operation is 6.3 pounds.
“The difference is that we as an industry are ready for it now,” said Hall, explaining the number of record-breaking harvests recently enjoyed by Quebec’s maple producers.
“If you’re in the business, you should be ready by Feb. 10th, and able to keep going until around April 15th. That’s the reality now.”
Hall has been involved with maple syrup production his whole life, representing the fifth generation of his family to farm the ancestral land he owns. He’s seen weather trends change and production techniques improve to harvest a lot more than the family business did during his childhood.
“When we still used buckets, we used to start sugaring the 15th of March,” he said. “But buckets dry out, and you’d get dirty spouts that were hard to clean even with a good cleaning regime. Now, vacuum tubes have changed things, and sugar houses have heating in them. So there are a lot of factors at play in our infrastructure that have improved harvests.”
The province’s overall production will further improve over the next few years due to the fact that the Quebec industry will welcome 739 new maple syrup businesses, due to the issuance of 7 million new taps under the supply-managed system.
Those new businesses will enjoy good harvests provided they can be adaptable and at-the-ready when the sap flows. For producers like Hall and Last, each harvest season is a new ball game, where farmers are left guessing when the sap will start flowing from one year to the next.
“In 2023, we had stopped collecting by the date we hadn’t even started the year before,” Last said. “So you never know what kind of season you’re going to get till it comes.”
