By Nora Saks
Photos by Mat Trogner
From our March 2025 issue
Late one afternoon last March, the sun was going down and so was the temperature. Alan Greene, sporting his usual black Carhartt overalls and a handlebar mustache, hopped into his pickup and drove past a jungle of blue plastic tubing and spouts silently drawing sap out of maple trees. At the bottom of the hill behind his family’s homestead, in Sebago, he pulled over next to a small shed that houses a 600-gallon stainless-steel tank, one of five collection stations for sap from 1,100 or so trees across his three sugar bushes, as woods dense with sugar maples are known. A remote monitoring system that constantly transmits tank levels, temperature, and vacuum pressure to his phone had alerted him that the tank was full. “I don’t get much sleep this time of year,” he said.
Alan fired up a pump and, within 15 minutes, had siphoned the fresh sap into a holding tank on his truck and hauled it up to the sturdy little sugar shack his father, Ted, built six decades ago. There, two reverse-osmosis machines will extract between one half and two thirds of the water that’s in the sap. The next day, on a two-by-six-foot wood-fired evaporator, which looks roughly like a large baking pan, Alan will boil off more of the water, until sticky, golden-hued syrup is what remains — 40 gallons of sap from a sugar maple becomes about a gallon of syrup.
Alan, who’s 53 years old, represents the sixth generation of Greenes to perform this bit of ambrosian alchemy. Presently, though, Maine’s entire maple-syrup industry has hit a pivotal moment. Alan took over the operation of Greene Maple Farm nearly a decade ago, and at the time, his father, who died unexpectedly several years later, knew there were big changes on the horizon for the business. “But I don’t think he ever could have anticipated what we’re doing now,” Alan said. “I think he and my ancestors would be shocked.”
Inside the warm, sweet-smelling sap house, Alan talked about how his forebears began tapping these trees in the hills west of Sebago Lake back in the 1800s. From a manila folder labeled Maple Records — Old, he pulled out one of his grandmother’s diary entries, dated March 24, 1935. “Set up sap pan down back of house, in pines,” she wrote, “trees running good.” In those days, he said, his grandmother would have gathered sap the old way, lugging heavy metal buckets through deep snow to some flat rocks, then boiling it in a small pan over an open fire. That exact spot where they used to boil is just a stone’s throw from where the steel collection tank sits now. Sometimes, when he’s tapping, Alan’s mind wanders to the many family members who have come before him. “I’ll just sit here for a few minutes and think about the number of days and nights they sat chatting around the fire, watching sap boil,” he said. “To be able to know what those conversations were, now wouldn’t that be something.”
From left: Sap tubing at Greene Maple Farm; crystal-clear maple sap.
In the 1960s, Alan’s father, Ted, and mother, Loretta, transitioned the family’s longstanding pastime into a proper commercial operation, though still on a mom-and-pop scale. By 1980, Ted, along with many other Maine syrup producers, had ditched old-school metal spiles and buckets and fully converted the farm to a much more efficient system of flexible plastic tubing that relies on gravity to convey sap from taphole to tank. Production tripled in just one season, according to Ted’s handwritten records — “best year ever,” he scrawled next to 1981. He also experimented with an early, crude vacuum-powered system that could pull more sap than gravity alone. “I learned vacuum and running mainlines when I was 10 years old,” Alan said. “It was just part of the business.”
The walls inside the 11-by-15-foot sap house are covered with old photographs, antique sap buckets, and industry awards, and the little evaporator in the middle of the room has churned out many thousands of gallons of syrups since 1965, when it was installed. “I tell everybody, we make more syrup per square foot than any other sugarhouse on the face of the earth,” Alan said.
As with any agricultural crop, some harvests were better than others. But what syrup makers could count on was the sugaring season itself. In this part of the state, they could expect snow to arrive in November or December and stick around until March, insulating tree roots from damaging deep freezes. They could also bank on consistently cold weather throughout the winter before a long, slow warm-up. The alternating of freezing nights and thawing days creates a pressure differential inside a tree’s vascular tissues, pushing and pulling sap, which is simply a mixture of water, sugar, and minerals. The time to tap was always just before the first big thaw. “The last few days of February going all the way through March, that was maple season,” recalled Loretta, who, at age 76, still lives across the road from the sap house. Farm records show that from the 1970s through the early 2000s, the Greene’s first boil was almost always the second or third week of March, and the last boil was in April.
From left: Alan Greene sets up for Maine Maple Sunday; syrup-topped ice cream for Maine Maple Sunday at Pingree Maple Products; Maine Maple Sunday at Dunn Family Maple. This year, the 41st annual Maine Maple Sunday is March 23 (and some producers start offering demonstrations, samples, and family activities the day before)
Once the sap was running, gathering and boiling became a daily ritual that started early and often finished late. The family could count on having company on days when steam was coming out of the sugar shack — neighbors stopping by to say hello and customers looking for the freshest syrup. On the occasion of the first boil, it remains Loretta’s custom to fire up her antique cookstove and make biscuits (which she has also been serving at the Fryeburg Fair for more than two decades). “I put butter on them and bring them out while they’re still hot,” she said, “and we have syrup right from the pan to go on them.” Plus, on the fourth Sunday of every March, she drizzles fresh syrup over ice cream and dishes it out to the almost 2,000 visitors who come through for Maine Maple Sunday, a statewide celebration her husband and other Maine Maple Producers Association board members dreamed up in 1983 (Alan is serving as the association’s president this year). “Sugaring is a wicked lot of work,” Loretta said, “but it’s what we did in the spring.”
Sugaring still is what the Greenes do in the spring. But the way they do it — and the season itself — is changing. Last March, while Alan was busy boiling, he talked about how strange the winter had been, with long warm spells and virtually no snow (indeed, that winter wound up being one of the state’s warmest and least snowy on record). The farm produced 331 gallons of syrup in all. It was a decent season in that sense. In another, it was a record breaker: “We started tapping on February 5,” Alan said. “That’s by far the earliest we’ve ever tapped.” A year earlier, they had started on February 12, which was also ahead of schedule.
Other maple farmers have also seen their tapping seasons creep earlier and earlier. “Historically, we’ve always tapped just about Valentine’s Day in our area, and I’m getting a week ahead of that now. Probably ought to be tapping even earlier,” said Tom Pingree, who runs Pingree Maple Products, in Cornish. “It used to be that, after the January thaw, it would be so cold you didn’t even want to leave the house. But we’re not getting that same super-cold stretch anymore, and we’re seeing days in March that are almost 70 degrees.”
At Dunn Family Maple, in Buxton, Scott Dunn also used to tap in mid-February and boil into early April, but he said the weather has gotten so volatile that he’s started watching the 10-day forecast on January 1. “I pay attention to the January thaw,” he said, “because those early runs can really make your season.”
What producers like the Dunns, Pingrees, and Greenes are experiencing in the woods tracks with patterns that climate researchers and ecologists have been charting: climate change is profoundly altering the Northeast’s maple belt, a broad swath of hardwood forests that stretches from western New York up through New England. “We haven’t lost that much season duration here in Maine yet, but we know that everything is speeding up and changing,” said Jason Lilley, a sustainable-agriculture specialist with University of Maine Co-operative Extension who works with syrup producers across the state.
With more than 450 licensed producers averaging about 575,000 gallons of maple syrup every year, Maine now has the third-largest maple syrup industry in the country, one that supports hundreds of jobs around the state and generates $55 million in economic activity, inclusive of revenue, wages, and visitor expenses, according to the Maine Maple Producers Association. But the business is hardly a monolith. While family-run farms with maybe 1,000 taps predominate in the southern part of the state, selling their product locally, the vast majority of Maine syrup comes from massive operations in the north woods, particularly in Somerset County, up toward the Quebec border. There, taps per farm number in the tens of thousands, and the syrup is sold wholesale by the 40-gallon drum, mostly to out-of-state processors who then package it or incorporate it into other food products.
The range of geography and climate is so great that a banner year up north can be a dismal one down south, or vice versa. The same can be true for inland versus coastal operations. Given the different realities producers face across the state, it’s difficult to generalize about the impact of climate change in any given year, Lilley said. The trend lines, though, are clear. A 2019 study from the University of Massachusetts Amherst predicted that, by the end of the century, output of maple syrup in most of New England, except for northern Maine, will likely drop by half. “The big thing is the sugaring season is shrinking and getting earlier,” Lilley said. “But really, the biggest thing is it’s becoming more unpredictable.”
From left: firing the evaporator at Pingree Maple Products; Alan Greene checks sugar content with a hydrometer; the syrup color spectrum.
Timing is everything in the syrup business. Earlier starts to the season are one thing, unpredictability is a whole other problem. Producers want to be ready for the early sap runs, catching every last drop they possibly can. More sap means more syrup means more income, but collecting the early runs has other benefits too. “A lot of times, the earlier sap is sweeter, and we don’t have to boil it as long,” Lilley said. “The shorter the time we boil the sap, the lighter the grade, and the more delicate flavor it’s going to have.” He happens to be something of a connoisseur, running a maple-grading school for producers (syrup is sorted by grade: golden, amber, dark, and very dark) and helping judge the best-tasting Maine syrup in an annual contest.
To the layman, the obvious solution might seem to be tapping earlier, but the issue is trickier than that. Drilling tap holes, installing new spouts, and readying miles upon miles of plastic tubing can take up to 10 weeks for some bigger operations. For smaller producers, tapping early also poses a labor challenge, because sugaring is almost always a side-hustle for them that has to be squeezed in around other jobs. “We’re busy farming, and syrup season comes along, and we say, ‘Oh, it’s warm out. Sap’s running. We need to do something.’ And by then we’ve already missed those first runs,” said Alan Greene, who recently retired from the Portland Fire Department and also raises grass-fed beef with his wife. “I won’t say it’s profitable. If you don’t count the hours, you can make a living.”
There’s also biology to contend with. For syrup producers, invisible microbes are never out of mind. As long as the weather stays around freezing, freshly drilled taps remain sterile. However, as soon as temperatures climb much higher, naturally occurring bacteria, yeasts, and molds can take hold, feasting on the sugars in the sap, changing its chemistry and lowering the quality of syrup. Plus, trees will grow new tissue over the tap holes, to fight infection in what are essentially open wounds, choking off the flow of sap. And then there’s the looming end of sugaring season. As soon as buds begin to break on trees, the sap acquires an off-putting taste — “sour, bitter, and sulfury,” Lilley says — and sugar shacks have to call it quits for the year.
What all this amounts to is that syrup producers are forced to gamble with Mother Nature and their bottom line. Tap early, risk exposing trees to more microbes, and hope it will be worth getting on the treadmill of constantly collecting and boiling what might be smaller batches, since sap that sits around can spoil. Plus, if the weather turns cold again and the sap stops flowing for days or weeks on end, equipment will need a thorough clean before starting up again. Alternatively, wait too long and risk running into a premature end to the season. “It’s a grind,” said Scott Dunn. “But we only have a small window, so you’ve got to make it when you can.”
Alan Greene told me that,in spite of all the dire climate predictions, he really isn’t too worried about the future of Maine’s maple industry. “We’re able to adapt to that because of technology,” he said. “Technology’s gonna save the day there.”
Over the last decade or so, several important innovations have come to sugaring. Inside modern sugar shacks, reverse-osmosis units have saved large amounts of labor and energy by reducing the amount of time the evaporator needs to run. Some producers are pushing technology even further. Shawn Dunning, for instance, who runs Out on a Limb Maple Farm, in Jackman, is working to develop programmable, autonomous, steam-powered evaporator systems.
“But the big shift, at least from a yield perspective, is really with the technology in the woods,” Lilley said. Measures that might seem minor, like using clean, disposable plastic spouts, with check-valve adapters to prevent the backflow of any bacteria-laden sap sitting in the plastic tubing, create a tightly sealed sap-collection system. And the most significant change has been in vacuum technology. Unlike the rudimentary apparatus Ted Greene and his peers fiddled with in the 1980s, new-wave vacuum-pump systems, usually not much bigger than a window air-conditioning unit, are sap-extraction powerhouses. The extra pressure they exert helps keep lines free of bacteria and, crucially, helps pull sap out of the trees on days when weather conditions and atmospheric pressure aren’t conducive to natural flow. “With vacuum,” Scott Dunn said, “I can take an average run and make it a good run. I can take a good run and make it a great run.”
Even with growing uncertainty in the sap season, the adoption of new technologies has led to some good years lately (2024 marked a recent high point, with statewide production climbing to 701,000 gallons). But retrofitting an entire operation isn’t cheap — a vacuum system alone can cost thousands of dollars for a small syrup business. “For anybody who’s trying to make a living in syrup,” Lilley said, “it’s going to be increasingly difficult to do that without making these kinds of investments.”
Alan Greene talked about another way to guard against climate change — a longer-term measure that more and more producers are attuned to. “The worst thing you could do is have a monoculture of sugar maples,” Greene said. Scientific studies indicate (and maple producers tend to agree, based on personal experience) that increasing the diversity of a sugar bush — cultivating maples with a wide range of ages and growing other species of trees, both maple and non-maple — can significantly reduce the impact of disease and pests. A healthy forest will be better positioned to adapt to whatever climate change throws at it.
Inside the Greene’s steamy old sugar shack, Alan watched the thickening sap and the thermometer. His uncle, Lloyd Record, kept the evaporator’s fire fed. The sap bubbled, and an earthy, caramel-y aroma filled the air. “We’re getting close,” Alan announced, four degrees more to go. Everyone assumed their positions: Alan brandished his thermometer like a wand, Lloyd stood ready at the valve, and Loretta grabbed a handful of spoons. “My father always said we take a very simple process and we make it look complicated,” Alan said with a smile. “That was his favorite thing to say about it.”
Alan has been thinking about who will carry on the family tradition. Ever since he took over, he’s been focused on investing in and growing the business. Next door to the old sugar shack, construction on a new one, with more than five times the square footage, was finished this year. Alan plans for it to have a bigger evaporator, a retail space, and enough extra room to host a community bean supper now and then. “I think if I could get our production up to 800 gallons, which is about double what we’re doing now, I could make this sustainable,” he said.
From left: Lloyd Record in the Greene sap house; inside the tiny sap house at Greene Maple Farm, where the same wood-fired evaporator has been making syrup for 60 years; antique taps at Greene Maple Farm.
His niece, Keira, currently a college student, comes home every week during maple season to work alongside Alan and said she hopes to be his partner one day. They haven’t had a serious conversation about it yet, though. Alan told me he appreciates her interest but worries about Keira taking on that responsibility before she has had a chance to really figure out what she wants to do with her life. “You don’t want to saddle somebody with, ‘Well, this will all be yours someday,’” Alan said. “My father didn’t lay it on me, that it was going to be up to me to carry it forward. It was my choice.”
Alan dipped a ladle into the gooey amber. Rather than dripping, the syrup hung off the ladle in one continuous sheet. He checked the temperature again. “We’re at syrup,” he said calmly, and a quiet chaos ensued, with Lloyd down at the valve drawing syrup off as Alan released more sap into the pan so the batch wouldn’t burn. Once all the syrup was safely in a steel pail, Loretta passed around spoons oozing with the hot syrup. Alan tried it, paused to think, and said, “I like it. Not as much as some of our syrup, but there’s nothing wrong with it.” Loretta didn’t quite agree. “Damn,” she said, “I think it’s pretty good! This might even be a biscuit night.”
