This story is his product Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Deskan independent reporting network based in University of Missouri in cooperation with Report on Americawith major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.
The art of making maple syrup flows through generations of Dan Potter family history.
His great-grandfather bought the family farm in rural Iowa in the late 1880s and cleared the land for strawberry, clay and whiskey production. Eventually, he made maple syrup to add to his whiskey. This began a 140-year tradition that continued through the Civil War, the Great Depression and both World Wars.
Potter opened his own maple syrup company with his wife and three daughters in 2009. Great River Maple, in Garnavillo, Iowa, is now among the state's most prolific syrup producers.
This year's record-warm winter caused the sap to flow early, bringing challenges for the family-owned company. They tapped their first trees on January 22 — more than three weeks earlier than ever before.
“When you consider that the average season is somewhere around six and a half weeks,” Potter said, “you're talking incredibly early.”
This year's maple season started early for many producers in the Upper Midwestern states, who experienced shorter seasons. Some credit these changes to the year record-warm winter. Thanks to the El Niño phenomenonthe season ranked among the 10 hottest.
But indigenous and non-indigenous experts say human-caused climate change is also having varied and unpredictable effects on the maple harvest. Farmers and indigenous communities whose ancestors have accepted trees since time immemorial are changing their practices and planning for an unstable future.
“It seems like year after year, the season gets a little earlier,” said Theresa Baroun, executive director of the Wisconsin Syrup Producers Association. “But nothing, nothing, nothing like this year. If you talk to a lot of the bigger producers, they've never seen anything like this before. This is just a different, weird year here in Wisconsin.”
Climate impacts
Even amid increasingly earlier seasons, this year stood out, said Justin Cain, director of operations for Cashton, Wis.-based Maple Valley Cooperative, whose members include more than 40 farmers from Wisconsin, Michigan, New York and Vermont.
Geoff Stellfox / The Gazette
“Most of my farmers were trying to get all their faucets on and fix their vacuum cleaners,” he said. “Usually, you don't even think about these things until late February.”
As of mid-March, co-op president and maple farmer Cecil Wright and his two business partners had harvested about 90 percent of a normal crop — about 100,000 gallons of maple. Wright boiled his first barrel of syrup in early February, about three weeks earlier than normal.
“The weather conditions we're seeing are typical of maple-producing areas in more southern areas like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana,” Wright said.
In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the Indian Creek Nature Center tapped its first maple tree in the second week of February, when temperatures had already topped 40 degrees. The juice was flowing. By March 1st, however, their taps stopped. The season was already over — a month earlier than 2023.
Last year, the center harvested nearly 2,000 gallons of sap and produced 46 gallons of syrup, one of the best years on record. This year, he collected 500 gallons, enough to make 12.
Juice production depends on temperature and microclimates, where just a few degrees of difference can make or break a harvest. The flow depends on freeze-thaw cycles, which create the pressure to push the liquid up and down the maple trunk. As daylight increases and if the weather warms up too quickly, tree buds open, ending the season.
“We are all limited to what nature gives us,” Cain said. “The trees kind of do their thing.”
New England and the Midwest dominate maple syrup production in the United States. Wisconsin — the nation's fourth-largest producer — raised about 400,000 gallons of syrup worth $13.5 million in 2022.
Because temperature changes drive sap production, increased variability can actually increase harvest in the Upper Midwest.
Wright said the increasing sophistication of weather forecasting makes it easier to plan ahead. But striking too early presents its own dangers. Equipment and vacuum piping, which can be used instead of buckets on maple farms, can freeze during an unexpected cold snap, and faucet holes opened early will close over time.
“We have to recognize that humans affect our environment and we don't fully understand everything that's going on,” Wright said.
In Wisconsin, confectioners reside in the northern and western parts of the state. Experts expect the trees to persist as the climate warms, but the sap is likely to contain less sugar. Experts also expect an earlier harvest, but the timing, which has always been different, is becoming more and more unpredictable.
In addition, lack of snow, spread of non-native species and long periods of drought mixed with heavy rainfall events, can stress or damage maple trees to the detriment of future harvest.
Indigenous communities are already preparing.
Preserving lifestyles in the future
The production of maple syrup began thousands of years ago, when indigenous peoples began turning the sap into syrup and sugar.
Geoff Stellfox / The Gazette
Ojibwe bands did so in the Upper Midwest, but in the mid-1800s, the federal government forcibly acquired their lands and waters through a succession of treaties. Bands maintained hunting, gathering and fishing rights in what is now called the Concession Territory: millions of acres spread across northwestern Michigan and its Upper Peninsula, northern Wisconsin, and northeastern Minnesota.
For Wisconsin tribes, tapping maple trees is a traditional way of life, or bimaadiziwin in the Ojibwe language. In addition to exercising treaty rights, promoting food sovereignty, and strengthening community bonds, the Ojibwe people harvest from the wild as an act of stewardship. If they do not, the Creator will cease to provide these beings.
Climate change threatens these ways of life and in turn identity.
Some tribes have developed climate adaptation plans to manage natural resources in a way that protects cultural practices and treaty rights, including maple harvesting.
Some options include hitting sugar eaters in multiple locations instead of one concentrated gathering. Tree planting efforts could use non-native seedlings from sources better adapted to future climate conditions or even related species such as red maple.
A bountiful harvest
In Garnavillo, Great River Maple Potter expected to harvest less sap this year, but in some sugar bushes in northern Wisconsin, it flowed relatively freely.
The Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, in northern Wisconsin, started about two weeks early this year, and even though the season felt condensed, the trees gave generously. The youth collected 900 gallons of sap during the first two weeks of March, of which they produced nearly 20 gallons of maple syrup, or Anishinaabe-zhiiwaagamizigan.
Maria Nevala, of Ontana, Wisconsin, and her partner, JD Lemieux, helped the program.
The two also have their own sugar bush, which they named Ozaawaa Goon, or “yellow snow.”
“We have a lot of little kids running around and every time they say, 'I have to go to the bathroom!' and I say, “Go ahead,” Nevala said.
At Ozaawaa Goon, which he has used for about 13 years, they started collecting sap in March, about 10 days earlier. The weather was so warm, Nevala didn't have to wear snowshoes.
The two use their syrup at community events, turning it into sugar and candies and donating much of the rest.
“It's a really expensive hobby for us,” Lemieux said, joking.
As of mid-March, the maple's buds had not opened and had collected the same amount of sap as in previous years, if not a little more.
“What will next year be like?” Nevala said. “It's unknown. And that can be good or bad. Let's hope it's good.”
