Is climate change jeopardizing New Brunswick’s maple industry?

If you’re from Canada, you’re probably familiar with the term “sugar bush.” Maybe the phrase brings back childhood memories of eating maple syrup taffy from the snow, looking into the metal buckets collecting the syrup from trees, or even just the sweet smell.

New Brunswick maple farmers work hard preparing and tapping their trees from the first of March to the beginning of April. At Dumfries Maples farm, the sugar bush is their busiest time of the year. It has been owned and operated since 1998 by brother and sister, Nathan and Jane Scott. They tap over 5500 trees, some by hand and others by modern pipeline systems.

The first thing you see on their property is a log cabin where they serve pancake breakfasts and sell maple treats. On Saturdays all the parking spaces are filled and the line of waiting people spills out the door. Jane Scott describes a typical weekend as “very, very busy.”

Despite the business they’ve been receiving, Scott said they had a rough tapping season last year due to harsh weather. This is a trend that other maple farmers have been noticing as well.

Louise Comeau, Director of Environment and Sustainable Development Research Centre, hand taps over fifty trees on her property. Maple trees with silver buckets line her long driveway and hang on the trees across the road. She demonstrates how the tapping process works and how the sap is then boiled down in her yard. She lives sustainably, growing her own vegetables, collecting her own eggs, and even making her own yogurt.

Over the last ten years, Comeau says she’s been preparing for earlier tapping seasons and expecting less frost due to the changing climate. Maple trees go through complex freezing and thawing cycles in order for quality sap to be produced. In recent years the earlier season has meant more rapid thaws, which cause the trees to begin to use their sap for spring and summer budding. This also puts stress on the trees, leading to less sap production and a decline in the overall health of the tree.

To understand exactly why the weather is affecting maple trees, Comeau explained several aspects of climate change. She says it is a cascade of factors such as: burning oil for energy, changing our land through clear cutting or agriculture, and increased carbon from the burning of fossil fuels. The carbon we are putting into the air gets trapped in the atmosphere causing it to get warmer. Naturally when we have healthy trees and oceans, they absorb carbon. However, balance is no longer sustainable as the health of forests decline and as oceans are at their limits for carbon absorption. We have too much carbon going into the atmosphere, while simultaneously undermining processes which absorb it.

Comeau says that each year we increase the amount of fuels in the atmosphere by fifty percent. This is a big deal when you realize that the carbon from one litre of gas can stay in the atmosphere for one hundred years. She says if we continue on this path we can see an overall temperature increase of 2-3 degrees. Currently, scientists are pushing for under 2 degrees warming.

As for the future of the maple tree, she says it’s all about shifting and adapting.

“Even from year to year we see big changes, so you just have to be adaptable.”

Although she taps her trees for personal use, she says more extreme weather conditions could cut the sugar bush season and profits short. You need forty litres of sap to produce just one litre of syrup, so trees yielding less sap is a cause for concern.

“If you had a short season with less volume then your impact, in terms of your income, would clearly be there because you would have less syrup to sell.”

Canada produces 71% of the worlds syrup and New Brunswick ranks third globally in production. Last year alone the maple industry brought $33 million to New Brunswick. It also provides thousands of jobs annually, causing an economic concern for the effects climate change brings.

So, could Canada lose its liquid gold?

Comeau says we need to think of climate’s effect on the maple industry from a placed based perspective. The places that will be more greatly impacted is Southern New Brunswick and Southern provinces such as Ontario. She says there’s even a possibility for growth in central New Brunswick if we plan smartly and plant with intention.

“We could likely grow our capacity for maple syrup if we moved our silviculture to support maple and other hard woods.”

If New Brunswick begins to plant more hardwood trees purposefully, we could avoid the effects of climate the south faces.

For maple farms like Dumfries Maples and many others, business is still booming. They’re hoping for more ideal tapping seasons and plan on celebrating Canada’s sugar bush tradition for years to come.