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The Boddy family’s maple syrup operation traces most of the history of maple syrup production since European settlement. In fact John Boddy has experienced much of the evolution himself.
The operation dates back to William Boddy taking up a homestead northwest of Walkerton, in Brant Township, Bruce County in 1864. Today the seventh generation of the family, John and his wife Doris’s granddaughter, now lives on the farm.
Their operation today represents the modern era of making maple syrup using permanent collection lines in the sugar bush, pumps, reverse osmosis, a steam-heated evaporator and stainless steel in every direction in the sugar house to give greatest level of quality control.
When William Boddy first started out, of course, maple syrup making was much different. Many, if not most, pioneer families tapped trees and made syrup and maple sugar for their own needs. They collected sap in wooden buckets, then boiled it down in a large pot over an open fire.
John remembers that in the 1950s there were five “steams” – five evaporators in operation – within sight of their farm. Today they’re the last of those farms still making syrup, the others dropping out as the high cost of equipment and meeting higher food safety restrictions took its toll.
Their operation is much larger than those family syrup-making efforts were, of course. They currently have about 5,000 taps, down from a peak of 9,000 taps because when they went to leaving the collection tubing up year round, the owner of one of the bushes they rented withdrew rather and have the pipeline up during the summer.
The Boddy’s history evolved to making syrup with a flat pan instead of a cast iron pot and collecting sap in a barrel on a horse-drawn stone boat. Then in 1921, a sugar shanty was built and their first evaporator was put to use.
In 1930 a larger shanty was built and a corrugated pan, heated by a Dominion & Grimm evaporator speeded up the process of turning sap into syrup. Since syrup making was easier, more trees could be tapped.
John can remember helping his father use horses in collecting sap from buckets hanging from spiles on the sides of trees. The good thing about horses was you could walk ahead to the pails on the next trees and the horses would follow you on their own, he says. Later they switched to a tractor with a half-track but it didn’t follow you, he says with a smile, and you had to walk more.
In 1962, still in the old shanty, a Lightning evaporator and raised flu pans helped make syrup making more efficient.
A break from the past was made in 1968 when they built a new sugar shanty near the side of Bruce County Road 3, where they still operate today. The move was made to give them access to electricity to power pumps so that sap could be collected using a pipeline. More bushes were tapped and the sap pumped to the evaporator. They had access to running water and installed an oil-fired finishing pan. In 1985 they installed a Thunderbolt evaporator and piggyback units for fuel concentration.
Now the 2010 season will be their fourth in their state-of-the-art facility in the sugar house that just keeps growing in the backyard behind the Boddy’s house.
In one room sits a large steam boiler, imported from the U.S. and refitted to be fired by oil heat. It was expensive proposition by the time all the proper regulatory clearances were obtained but the steam pays dividends. Unlike the days when they burned wood and the fire had to be kept fed, says Doris, the boiler pretty well does its own thing. In the days gone by it used to take three people to keep the operation going: one watching the sap, one watching the syrup and one firing the evaporator.
“It took one person doing nothing but putting wood on the fire,” she says, and the yard would be piled high with wood. Every time someone opened the furnace door the temperature would drop, complicating the making of syrup and reducing quality.
As well, says John, you can claim the oil burned as an expense against income, but wood taken out of the bush gets no credit. It takes about a gallon of fuel oil to turn out a gallon of syrup. With their earlier oil-based system it required three or four gallons of oil to make a gallon of syrup.
Other parts of the modern operation help explain the efficiencies.
Sap is collected in wet/dry pipelines from bushes – in one case pumped, via a pumphouse, from a neighbour’s bush a mile away. Sap is also piped from a bush on the other side of the highway, using an under-road line.
In an unheated room at the back of the sugar house are two large open tanks. The sap is piped into one of these, which can also receive sap collected from other bushes and trucked to the sugar house in a former milk truck.
From this tank the sap goes through a filtration system and is transferred to a second, nearby indoor tank where it sits until needed.
The sap next goes through the reverse osmosis system which removes half to three-quarters of the water from the sap. This thicker sap then goes to the evaporator. Where in the past it was typically calculated you had to boil down 40 gallons of sap to get a gallon of syrup, using reverse osmosis only about 15 gallons of the concentrated sap needs to be boiled to get the gallon of syrup, saving large amounts of fuel.
The steam also helps provide better quality syrup, John explains. In the old days when there was a fire directly below the pan, the syrup would often carmelize as it neared completion. Now the system automatically draws off syrup that’s ready every few minutes.
Now one person can run the operation, taking barometric readings – because the boiling point changes with the atmospheric pressure – then setting the thermostats at the boiling point, plus seven degrees. The operator has to check the refractometer to keep on top of the sugar content of the syrup.
Drawing off finished syrup more often means lighter, higher-quality syrup. As well, the speedier processing allows them to finish boiling every night and clean out the pan. It takes only about 20 minutes from the time the last sap concentrate enters the pan until the syrup is finished.
“And you actually get to bed at night,” said Doris, calling it a relief to be able to have more normal hours.
They recall one really good sap flow years ago when they boiled day and night for five days straight, with John sleeping behind the evaporator. By the end they were bleary-eyed and worn out and knew they had to make a change.
As well as the shiny stainless steel equipment in the evaporator room, there’s a new room to the south, (its walls sheathed to meet food-safety standards), for the bottling of the syrup and equipment for turning the syrup into maple butter and maple sugar. This equipment is so expensive it will take a long time to pay for itself Doris explains, but it makes the making of the butter and sugar much easier and more precise.
This room, designed by John himself, features in-floor heating which makes it much more comfortable to do packaging and further processing compared to the old days when people nearly perished doing this work.
Still in the planning stage is a new cold-storage room that will take the operation to the next level.
Most of their crop is marketed directly from the farm with heavy traffic of local people and tourists on Bruce County Road 3, running right by their door.
They started selling from the farm when they moved the evaporator to this site in 1968.
“There’s a steady stream of people coming in,” says Doris. “In some cases their ancestors bought syrup from our ancestors.”
Many observant people flock in the door as soon as they see the plume of steam rising from the evaporator in spring, so they can buy the first, light, subtly-flavoured syrup. Others like the deeper-coloured, stronger-flavoured syrup that is made later in the spring and put off their visit until then.
Though maple syrup is a spring tradition, customers are arriving all year long. Tourists see their big maple leaf sign out front and drop in to get some of the precious nectar. The Boddys keep a map and ask people to mark with colourful pins all the places in the world their syrup has ended up. Pins are distributed across the world.
There’s another busy season around Thanksgiving as city people, closing up their cottages, stop in for a supply of maple syrup to get them through the winter. Christmas brings another busy sales time and then people come in February for syrup for their pancakes on Pancake Tuesday.
As well as selling syrup in the usual glass bottles and plastic jugs, the Boddys also can syrup, a rarity in Ontario though many Quebec producers use them. The cans are popular with shoppers at their sugar house because they can buy a case-full and only open cans as they need it, or divide up the case among a family, instead of having to buy a big jog and portion it out.
The cans, however, don’t sell well in the retail stores where they sell their syrup, People there want to buy in jars or jugs. The 100 Mile Diet’s emphasis on local food has increased interest in local syrup, Doris says.
Though maple syrup is one of the oldest traditions in Canadian farms, the innovation goes on. In the bush, for instance, they keep trying new designs of spiles and other innovations. The University of Vermont does a lot of research to help improve sap flow and syrup quality.
The family is looking forward to Ontario hosting the joint meeting of the North American Maple Syrup Council and the International Maple Syrup Institute in Stratford in October, with 400 producers from across the continent expected.
As the days grow longer and maple syrup producers like the Boddys wait for the 2010 season they can only hope for a sap run as good as last year. After two disappointing seasons, last year’s was one of the best, John says. Snow in April and a combination of days just the right degree of warmth and nights the right degree of cold, kept the sap running for a long period.
In fact, Doris adds, “We were so tired by the end of it.”
It’s a family affair as the season approaches. John and their son John will be joined by up to six others in the tapping rush. It’s a job that’s become much easier than in past eras thanks to the permanent lines and electric drills to help bore the holes for the spiles.
When the boiling-down time comes, there’s even a bit more history on hand as 87-year-old cousin John Miller, who used to have his own sugar bush and who spends part of the year living with them, will be part of the processing.
It means there is a lot of maple syrup history to be told by those in the Boddy sugar house come spring. Still, they know how much things have changed, too. “The romance part of it has kind of gone,” says Doris. “It’s just a factory now.”◊
BRUCE COUNTY FAMILY SPANS THE EVOLUTION OF MAPLE SYRUP
The Boddy family’s maple syrup operation traces most of the history of maple syrup production since European settlement. In fact John Boddy has experienced much of the evolution himself.
The operation dates back to William Boddy taking up a homestead northwest of Walkerton, in Brant Township, Bruce County in 1864. Today the seventh generation of the family, John and his wife Doris’s granddaughter, now lives on the farm.
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