Hometown Oneonta - The Otesgo-Delaware Dispatch: NY Seeks To Tap Sweet Smell Of Success

NY Seeks To Tap Sweet Smell Of Success

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Maple Task Force Discovers Only

0.5 Percent Of NY Trees Being Tapped

By JIM KEVLIN

WEST EDMESTON

3,000 taps.
Nine miles of tubing.
A $25,000 high-tech RO – for “reverse osmosis” – machine in the back room.
And a shiny, stainless steel Dominion & Grimm propane-powered evaporator that looks like a mini-version of the Starship Enterprise.
Visitors from China.
A dozen maple products from the traditional to the innovative.
Ben and Judy’s Sugarhouse is not your father’s sap bucket.
In this case, it’s Ben Benjamin’s great uncle’s sap bucket.
Ben became entranced with maple-syruping in 1950 in the Burlington Green maple grove of his great uncle, Murray Benjamin, “a pioneer in the business.” Ben’s mother, Dorothy Fassett of East Springfield, was daughter of Owen Fassett, another pioneer.
Since Judy is a Fassett, you might say that the couple was genetically inclined, if not predetermined, to build a sugarhouse – twice expanded since – when they built their modern home in 1990 on a crest overlooking Unadilla Creek.
The Beaver Creek Road property is near the Benjamins’ 100 maple trees. (Since, they’ve acquired a 3,500-tree grove down on Route 8, behind the home son-in-law and daughter Bob and Karen Zaleski. Second daughter Tracy Plows and her husband, Ken, also help out.)
At first, Ben and Judy offered free breakfasts at this time of year to attract people to their sugarhouse. Soon, they didn’t have to. For the next four Saturday mornings, cars will line each side of the road for a half mile, as pancake-and-maple-syrup lovers line up and pay $6 a head for breakfast. (The one-day record: 475 breakfasters.)
Benjamin’s syrup is for sale at Schneider’s Bakery in Cooperstown. But most is sold through places like Twin Orchards Farm, New Hartford.
This is well beyond a hobby. Ben Benjamin is a businessman: Not only do he and Judy run the sugarhouse, Ben is an equipment distributor. (Judy, her daughters, and two granddaughters are “The Benjamins,” and have performed Gospel music regularly locally and as far away as Nashville.)
And he’s a statesman for his industry in New York State, serving on the 14-member state Department of Agriculture & Markets’ Maple Task Force, which formed last March and reported back in October.
One major discovery: Almost a quarter of the maple producers in New York State have fewer than 100 taps. Less than 1 percent have more than 10,000 taps. Ben Benjamin’s 3,000 taps put in among the 8 percent bigger producers.
As you might expect, Vermont has the highest “utilization rate” of its sugar maples, a tree that’s found nowhere in the world but the northeastern U.S. (and, to a lesser degree, along the Canadian border into the Midwest.)
Maine’s rate – second – is .9 percent to Vermont’s 2.1 percent. New York’s is a distant .5 percent, even with maple syrup selling at $55 a gallon.
Doesn’t that sound like a business opportunity?
It did, of course, for Judge William Cooper, Otsego County’s founder (and founder of The Freeman’s Journal) envisioned a fortune in maple sugar, perceiving it as an American-grown substitute for the sugar that came from slave-harvested sugar cane in the West Indies.
In 1791, he got Jefferson interested in the idea, and sent a supply to a delighted President Washington, according to Alan Taylor’s “William Cooper’s Town.” Problems of steady supply, transport and preservation caused Cooper’s dream to collapse.
But what about today?
“The local food movement is stronger than it’s ever been,” said Jessica Ziehm, Ag & Markets spokesperson. “We’re seeing a lot of people interested in making maple syrup.”
In recent months, more than a dozen sugarhouses in New York State have received USDA rural-development funds to buy reverse-osmosis machines.
(As Benjamin explains it, the R-O machines remove water from the sap, raising the sugar content from 2 to 10 percent. This makes the evaporator much more efficient -- it needs five times less fuel to raise the sugar content to the optimum 67 percent.)
Plus, Ag & Markets hired an advertising firm that developed a “New York Maple” brand, with a uniform logo. Small producers have begun feeding their supplies to large bottles, who then sell them to retailers under a common brand.
“It’s pretty exciting,” said Ziehm, who was raised on a farm in Rensselaer County where her family tapped their own trees. (Her boss, Ag Commissioner Patrick Hooker, also taps trees on his farm north of Richfield Springs.)
“People have always thought there’s a greater opportunity in New York,” she continued, echoing Cooper. “We do have the opportunity to grow the numbers extensively.”
Then there are maple products beyond syrup -- candy, maple butter and the like. A agri-tourism, which the Benjamins exemplify.
Actually, Ben and Judy exemplify several of the trends Ziehm talks about.
Murray Benjamin “did everything the hard way,” said his grandnephew, who may have been turning that lesson over in his mind during the years of his career at New York Central Mutual, down the road in Edmeston.
In 1980, Ben turned those ruminations into action, buying a 25-gallon barrel hose evaporator and producing maple syrup as a hobby, primarily for his family’s use – he and Judy have two daughters, who were young then – and for gifts.
But it just grew.
In 1985, he bought a 2-by-6-foot evaporator that churned out 75 gallons a season and, in 1990, on Ben’s retirement from New York Central Mutual ... the rest is history.

NY MAPLE TASK
FORCE FINDINGS

• Provide funding for “reverse osmosis” machines to boost maple-syrup production.
• Increase number of producers. (Only 0.5 percent of in-state maples are tapped.)
• Promote, promote, promote. The state has secured the services of a marketing agency for this purpose.

Labels: 03-11-10, 03-12-10, allotsego

posted by The Freeman's Journal @ 12:00 AM

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