Climate Change and New Brunswick’s Maple Industry

Every spring Eastern Canadians make a trip to the sugar bush to eat a stack of steaming hot pancakes, homemade biscuits and all sorts of maple treats. My family and I are no exception. When the snow begins to melt we put on pour rubber boots and brave the mud to get a taste of “liquid gold.”

Trips to the “cabane à sucre” are some of my favorite childhood memories. Walking along the muddy trail that would lead us to Trites Maples where we’d eat unlimited amounts of taffy on the snow.  The spring activity is a popular one. But the continuous decline of our planet’s well-being is and will, continue to have impacts on our beloved maple industry.

Once temperatures begin getting milder during the day but stay below zero at night. The sap is used to feed the tree, so it can eventually bud and be ready to enjoy summer life. The change in climate creates a change in pressure within the tree, pushing the sap to its roots. If the tree is tapped, the collected sap will be boiled down to create the heavenly syrup. The environmental impacts brought on by climate change, like the decline of healthy trees, unpredictable climate and, extreme weather events are all factors that affect a maple farmers harvest for the year.  It takes 40 gallons of sap to create one gallon of maple syrup. If we continue to harm our environment, we could be looking at less maple syrup to enjoy on pancakes or on fresh snow.

Louise Comeau, Research Associate at the forestry and environment management faculty at the University of New Brunswick and her partner, Tom Beckley, are small-scale maple farmers.

The two don’t rely on the season to make a buck. But for those who do, a bad harvest can lead to a bad financial year for farmers in the province. “If you have a spring that comes hard, where it warms up quickly that means you’ll have a very short season. Unless in that short period you have lots of volume you might not see any impacts at all. But if you have a short season with less volume, then your impact in terms of income would be there because you have less syrup to sell,” Comeau said.

 

Less sap to produce maple syrup can affect local businesses like Dumfries Maples.  A sibling owned and operated sugar bush located about 30 minutes outside of Fredericton. Nathan, a forestry graduate who started tapping trees as a hobby, and his sister Jane Scott, opened the doors to their sugar bush to the public in 2010. The Scotts have 5, 500 trees tapped this year, all done by hand. They need a lot of trees to keep up with the amount of maple syrup they serve at pancake breakfasts, on snow, as butter, and as other maple treats. Everything is done on location.

When signs of spring start showing, maple farmers have had to adapt to tapping their trees earlier or by tapping healthier trees. Comeau and Beckley have noticed that they are tapping their trees three weeks earlier than before. They’ve also noticed that larger trees aren’t producing as well as smaller ones.

How is climate change impacting New Brunswick’s maple industry? “We have hotter temperatures, drier conditions in the summer, we can have more extreme weather events. All of those things put stress on the trees […] things are being affected by the overall average temperature, the extreme events that it might be facing as well as the timing of spring. So, you may end up in a situation where a tree is stressed so they’re producing less,” says Comeau.

 

The next time you pour maple syrup on your pancakes or spread maple butter on a hot biscuit. Think of where it all comes from. By making small changes in our day to day lives we can help save our planet, but most importantly our maple syrup!