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Mega Maple Operation

Jeffersonville, Vermont - March 26, 2004

Big things are happening at Windridge Farms Sugarhouse and its owner hopes they'll get much bigger.

The Jeffersonville producer has been ramping up over the past couple of years, with an eye toward more production.

"What we're doing is we're building a, as modern as can be for this day and age, sugarhouse. What we do is we tap a little over 13,000 this year. We will be maxing out right around 18-20,000 next summer," says Beckner Bryan of Windridge Farms Sugarhouse.

That would make this one of the largest maple sugar operations in the state.

Bryan has invested in a new, spacious sugarhouse and state of the art technology to produce more syrup efficiently.

"These here each are 20,000 gallon old Molson Brewery tanks, they are steel, glass lined tanks."

The sap that is stored in those tanks then passes through a reverse osmosis machine which takes some of the water out, and increases sugar content in the remaining sap.

"Out of the back lot our sap over the past week has been testing at around 2.5 percent sugar content. By running it through here, what this enables us to do is we crank the sugar content up to about 9-percent or 10-percent."

That makes production more efficient, as the gas-powered evaporator now has less water to boil off before the syrup is ready. All that equipment is not cheap. Using the best of everything can cost around $100,000.

Windridge is not the only producer in Vermont with this technology, nor is it the largest. But it is the latest to turn maple syrup from a hobby to a business.

"Probably around twenty producers produce about 80-percent of the maple syrup in Vermont. And we're seeing more expansion in maple, the larger producers are adding more taps. And we're seeing some new people come into the business too," says Henry Marckres of the Vermont Agency of Agriculture.

Beckner Bryan hopes his new business can eventually produce about 10,000 gallons a year. But even with his state-of-the art system, success will still depend on mother nature.

Mark Bosma - Channel 3 News