The Rural Voice, 2005-03, Page 20storage tanks at the sugar house.
It wasn't always as easy. When
Bill and his wife Susanne started out,
they didn't own any land so his
father said he could build his first
sugar camp on the corner of his
property south of St. Augustine. In
1988 they began renting the bush
where the new sugar camp is located
(they bought it in,,1991) but all the
sap was trucked to St. Augustine.
Later they were able to buy the bush
off the farm to the north, giving them
a total acreage of 170 acres
surrounding the new sugar camp,
only 25 of which are workable,
leaving lots of room for trees that
support a 12,000 -tap operation
producing 4,000 gallons of syrup.
Outside the evaporator building
is a pumphouse to pump the
sap into the storage tanks.
"I've made syrup in a sugar kettle
all the way to using a steam pan," he
recalls of the evolution of his syrup -
making experience.
"My brother and I played at
making maple syrup when I went to
public school and high school," Bill
says.
He started seriously making syrup
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16 THE RURAL VOICE
The Targe new sugar camp offered opportunities to making changes.
with neighbour Donald Thompson
after graduating from high school in
the spring of 1968. "I've been
playing with syrup ever since," he
says. "It's a disease. I enjoy working
in the bush."
"Once I got married you either
had to make some money at it or you
couldn't afford to keep doing it."
In 1975 the newly -married couple
built their first sugar camp. He'd
been using tubing before but added a
vacuum pump which increased yield.
In 1980 he and another producer
from Bayfield got interested in
reverse osmosis and went to see a
machine in operation near Elmira.
They each ended up having a
machine custom-built, becoming the
second and third producers in the
province to use the membrane
systems that removes two-thirds to
three-quarters of the water water
before sending the concentrated sap
to the evaporator.
"It saves a lot of fuel. You're just
boiling the concentrate," he says.
"It's still a lot cheaper to run pumps
and get rid of a lot of the water than
it is to evaporate it."
Today reverse osmosis is probably
used by about 98 per cent of Ontario
producers with more than 2,000 taps
and some with less than that many,
he estimates.
The use of tubing has been
another huge advance in syrup
making. "It's still work, but the thing
is you can spread the work out. You
can get the tubing out ahead of the
season and you have to wash the
tubing out after the season, but when
you're actually making syrup, you
can run a lot bigger operation with
less help."
The latest innovation has been the
use of steam to heat the sap pans.
"I was interested in trying (steam)
and if we built a new sugar camp we
were going to incorporate that into
it," he says. "I didn't have enough
room in theold building to set
everything up."
Getting into a large-scale
operation is a big investment,
he admits. "The only thing
with us is pretty nearly every year we
always change something. There's
not many years you make syrup
twice in a row without trying to
improve something."
Despite the warm weather in early
February, Robinson was in no hurry
to tap. He's made it a practice never
to tap before February 10. The very
cold weather of January meant that
even a few warm days weren't going
to encourage much sap flow, he said.
He'd experimentally tapped a tree
near the sugar camp and four days
later there was little more than an
inch in the bottom of the sap pail.
He has taken advantage of mild
weather in the past to stretch out the
plastic tubing through the bush but
"I've seen years by the time you were