Winter Mead processes his maple syrup from start to finish. |
'TIS THE SEASON
...TO MAKE MAPLE SYRUP
A Profile of Mead Maple Syrup Farm
by Claudia Ricci, Co-op Member
The farm road winding up the snowy hillside is as pretty as a painting. A ridge of blue mountains is on the horizon. Alongside the road stand hundreds and hundreds of stately sugar maples, their bark as grey as an elephant’s hide. Running between the trees is endless green tubing that looks like ribbon tying the forest all together.
At Mead’s Maple Syrup farm, in Canaan, CT, the sugarbush goes on for miles. One man, Winter Mead, handles the whole operation himself, and has been for nearly three decades. Last year, Winter generated some 450 gallons of syrup (much of which landed on the Berkshire Co-op’s shelves) out of 2,800 tapholes. This year, he’s bumping the number of tapholes up to 3,000, which makes his operation one of the largest in the Berkshires.
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Standing outdoors on a clear winter day, he wears a full-body suit and stretch He’ll fire up the evaporator in the sugarhouse and start the long, tedious process of boiling the sap down into syrup. Typically, it takes a whopping 40 gallons of sap to generate just one gallon of that lovely amber syrup you pour over your pancakes and French toast. They don’t call it liquid gold for nothing.
In recent years, Winter has made the process a lot more efficient by relying on a “reverse osmosis” device that concentrates the sap by removing water. “Instead of having to boil 1,000 gallons of sap, you only have to boil 500,” he explains. By removing 50 to 75 percent of the water from the sap, far less firewood is consumed in the evaporator.
Making maple syrup may sound romantic, but it also happens to be mighty labor-intensive. Consider the fact that Winter hand-drilled each and every one of those tapholes himself. Consider also that he ran all those miles and miles of tubing on his (and a neighbor’s) land. Every winter, before sugaring, he goes out to check every inch of that tubing, and has to repair it where necessary. As the sugaring season progresses, he frequently checks the tubes to make sure there are no blockages and that the sap is running freely.
Even when the season ends, sometime in April, his work isn’t over. As we drive up the hillside among the gorgeous stands of maples, Winter explains the laborious process he uses to disinfect and clean the tapholes. It’s a wet and messy operation that often finds him knee deep in mud, and drenched in ice cold water by the end of the day.
So I ask him, is sugaring a labor of love? “Love might be too strong a word,” he says. “I enjoy the process but it is a hard job to make maple syrup. But one that I will continue because of the market.” To be sure, there is money to be made in maple syrup. With health-conscious consumers increasingly turning away from processed sugars and opting instead for natural sweeteners, demand for syrup is growing. Winter says world consumption is increasing roughly ten-percent a year.
“More people want syrup, and more people want darker grades of syrup,” he says. And that means, Winter Mead has his work cut out for him out there amidst those beautiful maples.
Visit Mead Maple Syrup Farm on Sunday, March 16th 10:30 am-Noon.
Tour the sugar house and see how they make that delicious syrup and then
sample the syrup on fresh pancakes! To sign up for this tour, stop by the
Customer Service Desk or call 413.528.9697 x10.
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LOCAL FARMER SELLS MILK THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY: RAW
If you mention to Paul Paisley that what he is doing is amazing, he is most likely to respond in his lovely English accent by saying that it is the cows that are the real stars. Here is a farmer who clearly loves his animals; one look at them and the way he moves around them is enough to see that there is something special going on. Paul grew up in northeast England and as a lad worked on a local dairy just three miles up the river from his home village.
Paul is licensed to sell Raw Cow’s Milk by the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources, and has been supplying cheese-maker Michael Miller of Berkshire Blue with the milk for that product. However, there is still a surplus of milk so Paul decided it was time to start a Raw Milk Club in order to make his milk more widely available. A similar “Farm Direct Buying Club” serves the following towns and seems to be a huge success: Belmont, Brookline, Cambridge, Hamilton, Manchester-by-the-Sea, Newton, Revere, Rockport, Roxbury and Swampscott.
The two things that Paul is the most passionate about are that his milk remains in the community, and that it remains un-pasteurized. If you ask Paul what his niche is, the answer is local, for local products are the freshest, the least fuel-intensive, and keep the community thriving. Ninety percent of his dairy herd’s diet is from the beautiful pastures that they graze in, nestled in the heart of the tranquil Alford valley, a far nicer place than most humans ever experience. The hay that he feeds the herd is grown and cut in Alford, and the fresh aromatic grain that he feeds them is grown on the Wirtes Farm in Lanesborough.
Paul will tell you in a heartbeat, that if one of his animals were sick, he would administer antibiotics as needed. But the animals are so clean, so well fed, and milked so lovingly, that he has never had an animal that needed drugs. And of course adding the hormone rBST is out of the question. In addition to the dairy herd, Paul raises pigs and a few beef cattle. The meat gets sold to Route 7 Grill in Great Barrington. There are also two new kittens in the barn, who actively keep an eye on everything.
The Milk House Raw Milk Club is now open for membership. If you’d like to drink fresh milk from cows that all have a name and a story and support a local farmer- then this is for you! Information on raw milk and inquiries about becoming a member should be directed to: Raya @ 413.528.3341 or
raya_ariella@yahoo.com.
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Berkshire Co-op Market
42 Bridge Street, Great Barrington, MA 01230
(413) 528-9697 tel (413) 528-6565 fax
Email Us
Monday - Saturday 8am-8pm, Sunday 10am-6pm
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