New York Maple Farmers Adjust to Early Sap Season as Winters Warm

It’s maple syrup season in New York — sweet, sticky, and arriving much earlier than it was once expected.

Warming winters means the sap is flowing earlier from New York’s maple trees, changing the production schedule for maple syrup farmers across the state and raising concerns over the industry’s future.

At Schoolyard Sugarbush maple farm in Newfield, operations have been in full swing since January. A web of pipes crisscross 250 acres of woods, carrying sap from 15,000 trees into the operation’s sugarhouse. There, it's boiled and processed into syrup.

Owner Daniel Weed said their season has inched earlier as winters have begun to warm. Sap only runs under certain circumstances, he explained — below freezing nights followed by warm days are usually best. Those are the kind of temperatures this area used to experience in March, but now they’ve become common much earlier in the winter.

“When I was a child, the snowbanks were head high. There was no way the sap was going to run,” Weed said. “There's just been a total change of that trend.”

Those changes have raised some concerns over the maple syrup industry’s future. New York is the second-largest producer of maple syrup in the country, behind only Vermont, and more than 2,000 maple syrup farmers rely on the industry for their livelihood.

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