Author: Mark Urycki

Maple Syrup Flows With Tradition

  • A demonstration of making syrup without modern tools. Hot rocks are placed into a hollowed out log to boil the sap. (Photo courtesy of the Geauga Park District)

April is the month for the highest maple syrup production in North America – and a time when many towns and villages in the Great Lakes states hold pancake breakfasts. The practice of tapping trees for syrup or sugar goes back centuries, long before European settlement. But as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Urycki reports, the methods used to make syrup have changed only a little with time and technology:

Transcript

April is the month for the highest maple syrup production in North America – and a time when
many towns and villages in the Great Lakes States hold pancake breakfasts. The practice of
tapping trees for syrup or sugar goes back centuries, long before European settlement. But as the
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Urycki reports, the methods used to make syrup have
changed only a little with time and technology:


In a world where sugar is infused in almost every processed food we eat, it’s hard to imagine a
world without it. But before Europeans introduced honey bees to North America, most native
Americans could only turn to the trees. In a grove of sugar maples, called a sugar bush, Park
naturalist, Dan Best, illustrates the painstaking way Indians boiled down the sap without metal
utensils. It starts with pouring the gathered sap into a hollow log.


“I’m taking this fire-heated rock that’s absorbed a lot of heat from the fire and placing the sap
in the hollow log here. All day and all night for days at a time to get any quantity of sugar made.


Later, white settlers brought cast iron cauldrons. And a bigger improvement in maple sugar
production came with the invention of tin sheet metal. That allowed farmers to pound metal
tubes, or spiles, into the trees and then hang lightweight buckets.


“Tin buckets, like I say, have been used for since the 1860’s. Some places, smaller sugaring
operations, today still find it feasible to use buckets. It’s mounted on a hole under the rim of the
bucket right on the metal spile, so you can keep it, you pivot it right on the spile and empty it into
a gathering pail and today most people use 5-gallon plastic buckets for gathering pails.”


Doesn’t this harm the tree to some degree to be losing sap?


“Not really, if you tap according to the guidelines roughly speaking for every foot of diameter
that you have you can have a bucket. You have to have a good 12 to 18 inch tree to be able to put
on a single bucket. You get up 24 inches so you can put two buckets on and so on but these days
you don’t put any more than three buckets on the trees – too many stresses these days on maple
trees. Between air pollution and the drought we’re having, and so fourth, that we really look
closer. Today’s producers look very close at the health of individual trees.”


(sound of horse team)


Traditionally, the buckets were emptied into a large holding tank. Draft horses like these pulled
the tank on a sled through the forest to a sugar house. Viola Skinner remembers her parents using
a team.


“The tank that we had in our sugar bush had a rail on it and it was drawn by horses on a sled and
with the rail on it we could all jump up and hang on to the rail and go for a ride and we thought it
was fun and games. We didn’t realize we were working dumping into the gathering tank, so
that’s how we did it.”


Amish farmers are still using that method. Fourteen states from New England along the Great
Lakes to Minnesota and Canada produce maple syrup. A common method today is to run plastic
tubing from one tree to another. Sap usually runs by gravity down to a holding tank, saving work
and lessening erosion caused by driving on steep slopes. The tanks of sap are then boiled down
in a sugar house – 40 gallons of sap to get one gallon of syrup. Hans Geiss looks over one
evaporator, which, like most, are fired by wood.


“Probably about 85 to 90-percent are still wood fired.”


So what degree of sweetness do you want here?


“If you take it up from an average of 2 % sugar to about 67 % sugar.


What happens if you’re a little too sweet or a little under sweet?


“If you’re very much below 66% sugar the syrup won’t keep, it will ferment. If it’s much over
67% it will crystallize in the can; it’s like rock candy on the bottom. So you got to be pretty
much right on.”


Maple candy has been the specialty of Debbie Richards’ family. Her grandparents built a sugar
house in 1910 and it’s been the family’s only business ever since.


Richards buys syrup from area Amish farmers to make candy. The sap runs when daytime
temperatures rise above freezing and nighttime temperatures drop below.


Did you have a later season this year?


Yes, quite a bit later. The last three years the season has started earlier than usual. The season
most commonly starts between Valentine’s Day and President’s day. Wasn’t until March that
most people tapped.


Simply because the weather was so cold?


“Right.”


Are there fewer people doing this as maple forests get cut?


“I wouldn’t say there’s fewer people doing it, but the size of the operations are smaller. With
developments going in and roads being widened a lot of the sizes of the farms are being cut
down.”


Although the season started late, Richards says this was a good year, with the sap having a high
sugar content. Sweet news for the maple syrup industry.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Mark Urycki.

Study: Kids Eating Organics Have Lower Pesticide Exposure

A new study published in the Journal of the National Institutes of Environmental Health Science finds that children who eat organically grown fruits and vegetables appear to have less exposure to pesticides. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Urycki has details:

Transcript

A new study published in the Journal of the National Institutes of Environmental Health
Science finds that children who eat organically grown fruits and vegetables appear to
have less exposure to pesticides. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Urycki has
details:


Researchers at the University of Washington compared urine samples from children who
ate conventional produce to those from a group who ate mostly organic fruits and
vegetables. They looked for a residue of pesticides. What they found was that children
who ate conventional produce had about six times higher concentration of the chemicals
than those who ate organic food.


And that, wrote the authors, suggests that children can reduce their exposure to pesticides
from above the U.S. EPA guidelines to below, by switching to organic foods. But the
authors could not determine the toxicity of the pesticides. And officials from the
pesticide industry noted that the study could not determine whether the children had eaten
the full strength chemical or merely the by-product after the pesticide had already broken
down.


A few years ago, Consumer Reports magazine tested food and found that conventional
produce did contain more pesticides than organic fruits and vegetables but even the
organics had some pesticides. The magazine suggested the easiest way to reduce
pesticide exposure in food: wash it, with soap and water.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Mark Urycki.

Kids Using More Prescription Drugs

Environmentalists and health officials often worry about the widespread use of antibiotics in cattle. But a recent report points to another concern: the rising use of such drugs in children. Researchers found a jump in the number of children taking prescription drugs. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Urycki reports:

Transcript

Environmentalists and health officials often worry about the widespread use of antibiotics in
cattle. But a recent report points to another concern: the rising use of such drugs in children.
Researchers found a jump in the number of children taking prescription drugs. The Great Lake
Radio Consortium’s Mark Urycki reports:


The survey was conducted by MEDCO, a pharmacy benefit management firm, and a division of
drug maker Merck. It found that prescription drug-use in children under 19 increased 85% over
the last five years. Although children still take fewer drugs than adults, MEDCO researchers say
it was the first time usage increased faster for kids than all other age groups.


The top drug use was antibiotics, with more than a third of the surveyed patients receiving such a
prescription each year. Health officials have expressed concern that the overuse of such drugs
could lead to drug-resistant bacteria.


A MEDCO researcher said the good news is that antibiotic use has at least flattened out. The
increased incidence of allergies, though, has not and the use of prescription allergy medicine
doubled from about 6% in 1997 to nearly 12% last year. Health officials suspect nearly twice as
many children today have allergies than 25 years ago.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Mark Urycki.