Va. Maple Syrup Producers Find Profit in Remote Area

Andrew Jenner
Virginia Correspondent

BOLAR, Va. — You have to really want to get to Bolar to end up there, a half-dozen or so steep, winding mountain crossings west of the Shenandoah Valley, then south to the far end of Highland County, Virginia’s smallest, with a population under 2,300 and falling each year. The far end of Highland County seems more like the far end of nowhere.

“We’re an hour and 15 minutes from the nearest Wal-Mart (in Covington),” said Mike Puffenbarger, standing outside his sugar house, in which a giant, whirring boiler belches maple-scented steam out into the air.

As one might infer, Highland County’s also high in elevation, resulting in a cool climate that allows northern species of trees like the sugar maple to thrive. The tree represents unusual opportunity — maple syrup production — in an area otherwise challenging for agriculture, thanks to its remoteness and rough topography (crops are pretty much a no-go, with livestock sales accounting for 98 percent of Highland’s 2007 agricultural production, valued at $13.1 million). And now in late winter, the sap starts flowing, spurring Puffenbarger and the county’s other seven or eight commercial syrup producers into action.

“You see a lot of guys looking at commercial maple production to generate some income in the winter,” said Rodney Leech, an extension agent in Highland County. “It’s awfully important for those folks.”

Puffenbarger, whose family’s been making syrup for five generations, and who’s been doing it himself commercially for 30 years, has moved far beyond old fashioned iron-kettle-over-wood-fire techniques. His bus-sized boiler can boil 500 gallons of “water” (slang for the maple sap he collects from the several thousand trees he taps) and hour, burning 22 gallons of off-road diesel fuel in the process. On average, 50 gallons of sap eventually yields 1 gallon of maple syrup; Puffenbarger has the capability of making more than 1,000 gallons of it each winter. He is, he believes, the country’s southernmost large commercial maple syrup producer, hence his operation’s name: Southernmost Maple Products.

There’s a relatively narrow window in which to collect sap and boil it down to syrup, Puffenbarger says. On the extreme ends of the spectrum, sap collection in Highland County can begin the last week of January and last until the last week March, although a “tap” — the hole drilled into a maple trunk to drain the sap — runs for a maximum of six weeks. And the weather has to cooperate. The ideal conditions for good sap flow are gentle freezes at night (between 20 and 25 degrees) with sunny, calm days that warm up to around 45 degrees, plus steady barometric pressure.

Altogether, Puffenbarger has 10,000 taps in about 4,000 trees (at most, one tree can support four taps), on and near his farm in Bolar. In good years, he’s gotten as much as 16 gallons of sap from a single tap in one season, though average production is somewhere around eight to 10 gallons of sap per tap per season. Leech, the extension agent, said the county’s syrup producers usually make between 5,000 and 7,000 gallons of syrup each season. (Fun comparison: the state of Vermont produced 500,000 gallons of maple syrup in 2007, and in 2005, the Quebec maple syrup producers made 6.5 million gallons of maple syrup, according to the USDA).

All this comes to a head on the second and third weekends of March, when the Highland Maple Festival attracts tens of thousands of visitors to the county.

This year’s edition will be the 51st annual festival (Puffenbarger’s wife’s uncle was a co-founder of the original festival). When the weather cooperates, more than 50,000 people attend, according to the Highland County Chamber of Commerce; thousands of them tour the Puffenbarger farm on the festival’s two Saturdays (the Puffenbargers are closed on Sundays, because of their Beachy Amish faith).

Once the crowds head back home and the sugar season winds back down for another 10 months, though, a Highland County farmer has to be adaptable and opportunistic to earn a living in such a marginal agricultural area.

“It takes a special breed of people to exist here,” said Puffenbarger, who, in addition to making maple syrup, sells syrup-making equipment, runs a full-time catering business plus an outdoors guiding and outfitting service, grows turkeys for Cargill, keeps about 100 cows, runs a little store beside his house that sells bulk and specialty foods and hosts the occasional group of agro-tourists interested in helping collect buckets of maple sap or pressing apple cider (all this with the help of his wife and family, that is). “That’s what it takes to be called farmers (here),” he said.

The 2009 Highland Maple Festival will be held March 14-15 and March 21-22.

For more information, visit http://www.highlandcounty.org/maple.htm or call the Highland County Chamber of Commerce at (540) 468-2550.