How many taps per acre

Taps per Acre? What is your average tap count per acre? I have been marking a woods for next season and have been avgeraging around 70 per acre.

I know that it far better than my sugar bushes. Mark Maple. I flagged taps in about 2 acres. I was being on the conservative side of things as well. I still have about 80 more acres to go. Only problem is the maples are scatterd around in about 2 acre sections. These sections have never been maintained for sugaring either. So I have slowly been gettin cull trees out also. All nice trees 95 percent are 16 inches and bigger. Not all are sugars though some are reds and a couple of the sections are all reds then there are a couple sections that are all sugars.

If you have an interest or need in growing high value timber, you will want to make sure that the maples are either not part of that plan or understand the impact of tapping on timber value. You can also exclude maples from the contract that you or a forester think might be high quality in the long run.

Also, those tubing lines we talked about before? Those would impede a timber sale, so you would want to work the lease physically around a timber sale or make that a consideration in the lease length. Agricultural forest is woodland where the owner has agricultural land that is contiguous. Ignore all trees that do not fill the window no matter how big they are. Each angle gauge is set at a certain basal area factor, or BAF, the table below is calculated to use with the 10 BAF window.

Each tree that fills the gauge window is in the plot and needs to be measured and added to the tally.

In the table, assign each tree to the appropriate DBH class by having a second person measure each in or window filling tree with a circumference tape or tree scale stick. Place a dot or dash in the box under the appropriate DBH category for each tree that filled the window when inspected at 4. Finally, sum and calculate average for all the points to find the average taps per acre to the section of sugarbush included in this evaluation.

For example from one plot point as you rotate the full degrees you identify 2 trees between 10 and The plantation method certainly comes with enough appealing advantages, that it seems like a obvious choice for a sugarmaker to adopt the practice as a supplemental source of sap.

But what if the plantation system replaced the current method completely? If maple does head in that direction, the change would not happen immediately. Perkins notes that their initial data showed that the cost of labor and materials for the new system was the same as a traditional system if you did not include the price of the land. In other words, despite the significantly higher yields from a smaller area, it would still take a great deal of time to hook up the saplings and a capital investment in more taps.

Furthermore, the actual gadgetry needed to install the plantation system does not exist yet. Dave Folino, owner of Hillsboro Sugar Works in Starksboro, Vermont echoed what many other sugar makers I spoke with said; it could be a game changer. I would hate to see the same for the wild crop but it is probably economically inevitable.

Folino puts in 14, taps over acres of his steeply sloped land. He notes that he is almost 60 and the thought of working on flat land in a more controlled space is tempting. But he also worries that the industry will shift to more workable land such as the fertile, northern Midwest.

Personally the thought of taking maple out of the forest and turning into another row crop saddens me. We have been in the maple business since and our sugarhouse has a reputation for utilizing the most modern technology available to maximize efficiency of production. Nevertheless, the news of the plantation system has been a lot to chew on since we learned of it. We are relatively new to the trade but have come to love it, one of the principal reasons being our interaction with the thousand acres of forest behind our home.

Like Dave Folino, I fear that the industry will no longer be special to New England but will be usurped by entrepreneurs anywhere with the right climate. And on a more visceral level, I feel that maple syrup is and should remain a product of the wild. Aside from mushrooms and game meat, the woods of Vermont hardly yield anything edible. And yet, this exquisite sugar can be extracted from the trees while still leaving them healthy and the forest a home to everything from rare wildflowers to bob cats.

For me, knowing its origins elicits an amount of pleasure equal to tasting its unique flavor when I drizzle it over morning pancakes. Finally, I ponder what will happen to the acres of working forests if landowners are no longer making an income from them through tapping the trees.

It would be unrealistic to expect all of those landowners to choose conservation. I am aware that change will come to the industry over the next few decades whether we adapt or not.

There has always been a romantic notion of the tradition of gathering sap in buckets with horse drawn sleighs and boiling it down over a wood-fired pan. That image has already been replaced by tubing instead of buckets, four-wheelers instead of horses and sugar houses that resemble modern factories. This could be considered just another innovation to make the process of producing the amber gold easier and more profitable.

The spirit of the study, she says was to give sugar makers a new tool in the toolbox.