‘Tapping into Ky’s untapped resource.’ Lots of maple trees means lots of maple syrup.
Seth and Sheryl Long live on a farm in Letcher County with the requisite barns, some chickens, the stalky remains of winter kale planted in rows.
But the biggest crop rises far above the narrow hollow outside of Whitesburg, stretching hundreds of feet on former mine lands behind their house. And it’s about time for the harvest, sent down from some 200 maple trees through thousands of feet of blue tubing until it coalesces into a large steel tank behind their house.
SouthDown Farm is one of Kentucky’s largest producers of maple syrup, and the Longs are some of its biggest boosters as a cottage industry that could thrive in Kentucky.
“We’re just capturing something that has been here a long, long time,” Seth Long said.
He has a full-time job with a housing non-profit in Whitesburg, but first got interested in maple syrup as a home-schooling experiment with his kids. They tapped a couple of maples behind the house in a bucket, boiled it down and suddenly had delicious, liquid gold. Or amber, as the case may be.
In 2015, they attended a county extension talk on syrup production, got some grants and some loans, and suddenly had the makings of serious production. “It’s not for the faint of heart,” Seth Long admits as he climbed the steep hills criss-crossed with blue tubing from sugar maple to red maple and back again. “And it’s not a silver bullet. But it could be a silver bb to add some economic diversity, particularly in the coal fields.”
On Saturday, SouthDown will be one of numerous sites open around the state for Kentucky Maple Syrup Day. It’s organized by the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, which also just received $500,000 grant from the USDA to study the future of maple syrup in Kentucky, plus help people get started.
“We’re nowhere near the scale of Vermont or Canada, but it’s turning into a really great activity for woodland owners in Ky to make some money off their woodlands,” said Jacob Muller, an assistant professor of hardwood silviculture and forest operations extension in the UK Department of Forestry and Natural Resources.
Here’s what Kentucky has in its favor: A longer freeze and thaw cycle that starts sap flowing, providing an earlier and sometimes longer season than up north. And lots and lots of maples. According to UK timber surveys, Long said, there are up to 7 million maples in Letcher and surrounding counties alone. Muller said statewide there could be 50 million tappable trees. Most Kentucky woodlands are privately owned. In Eastern Kentucky, the terrain is helpful too, because the steep hills add the suctioning that sends the sap down the hill to tanks.
People in Kentucky have made syrup for a long time, from Native Americans who tapped the sap into carved out logs, to people who made it before sugar was readily available in Eastern Kentucky. The Longs said that when they take their syrup to farmers markets, there will always be older folks who remember making it themselves.
The trick with maple syrup is getting rid of all the water until it reaches 66 percent sugar. The Longs invested in a reverse osmosis machine that then requires less boiling time for the syrup. They estimated that Tuesday’s warm thaw after a long hard freeze, could send up to 400 gallons of sap down the hill in one day.
The Longs have now added plenty of value-added products. They grow peppers that they soak in syrup for a sweet-salty for a meat brine; their daughter make a variety of baked goods, like maple-iced shortbread and maple pecans. Seth Long says that southern maple syrup is superior, with a smoother, more buttery taste.
“The market demand is enormous because it’s really delicious, there’s the whole emphasis on local foods, and Kentucky Proud products do really well, too,” he said.
As the current president of the Kentucky Maple Syrup Association, he’d like to see maple syrup follow bourbon’s marketing as a niche product that people want to see made.
Then there’s the larger good — the sustainability of a product that leads people to take better care of their forests.
“For me it’s a really exciting way to get people connected to their land and take on some other projects for forest health,” Muller said. He said that while Kentucky is 50 percent forest, 90 percent of that forest is privately-owned.
“We use the term ‘tapping into Ky’s untapped resource.’” So maple syrup production could mean less clear-cutting and more attention to forest health, such as getting rid of malformed trees or invasive species. Better forests lead to help in fighting climate change and a host of other benefits.
“I just keep saying, 6.9 million maple trees ready to be tapped,” Seth Long said. “That’s a lot of maple syrup to be made.”
For more information on Kentucky Maple Syrup Day, go to https://ky-maplesyrup.ca.uky.edu/ky-maple-day.
