Sunday, March 18, 2007
A main line tube stretches through a forest at the Hall Farm in East Dixfield. Rodney Hall runs three main lines to route sap from the trees to a tank.
Sap on tap
EAST DIXFIELD - Before you ever reach the Hall Farm sugarhouse, you smell the cows and sense the heat of where they're housed on your way past the dairy barn.
After three decades on the Hall Farm, Rodney Hall, who produces the maple syrup there, scarcely notices.
"I grew up with it," said Hall, 38, of the cows' potent, all-natural smell.
Real Maine working farms seldom focus on just one crop.
When Maine Maple Sunday takes place next weekend, it will be the 22nd annual celebration of the maple season on Hall Farm, an organic dairy farm where lumber is harvested and maple syrup is made.
Maine Maple Sunday will be a huge gathering at southern maple syrup farms, despite the fact that most of the syrup produced in the state comes from northern operations.
"Somerset County makes about 90 percent of Maine's maple production," said Kathy Hopkins with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension.
In Somerset County in 2002, there were more than 1 million taps run by sugar farmers, compared with just 11,000 in Cumberland or 31,000 in York County, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.
Considering many of the high-profile southern Maine farms that are visited on Maine Maple Sunday have just a few hundred taps each, the Hall Farm in East Dixfield, about an hour north of Auburn, offers a genuine taste of this traditional northern Maine crop.
The Hall Farm at the edge of the North Maine Woods has 8,000 taps strung out through its sugar bush, but even it is dwarfed by some of the more northern maple farms with 20,000 or more taps.
The bulk of New England's maple syrup comes from Vermont and Maine, as much as 53 percent and 34 percent, respectively, according to the USDA.
And there are a few distinctions where Maine holds on its own.
"This is the 25th year of Maine Maple Sunday. A lot of other states have Maple Sunday now. But Maine was the originator of that," Hopkins said. "It is something they can be proud of."
Next Sunday, the old schoolhouse on the Hall Farm, where Dick Hall was taught as a boy more than 50 years ago, will open its wooden doors for the annual maple-flavored feast.
There, ancient blackboards and antique farm equipment in the two-room schoolhouse will serve as the backdrop for anyone looking for a lesson in an authentic Maine maple syrup family.
BACK TO THE (FAMILY) LAND
Growing up, Rodney Hall knew he wanted to be a farmer.
He went to University of Southern Maine, but only because his father made him.
"He wanted me to have something to fall back on," Hall said.
When Hall returned home to East Dixfield for good, he continued his maple syrup business, which he started as a high school senior. He never looked back.
Seven generations of Halls have made a living off the land in East Dixfield.
All have produced maple syrup, but Rodney Hall is the first to produce it at the East Dixfield site.
Hall's grandfather, Orlando Small, produced it at another site in Farmington using buckets and draft horses to collect the syrup.
Hall brags that his grandfather's draft team was so used to the annual trek through the snow, the horses would walk and stop at each maple tree along the family's sugar bush.
The only elements of Small's system Hall keeps alive are the hard work, and a few token buckets.
"We still tap about 200 on buckets, because my father thinks it's the thing to do," Rodney Hall said.
"It doesn't look right if you don't have a few buckets," Dick Hall said.
The maple syrup season is short-lived, while the organic dairy operation runs year-round.
This means this month Rodney Hall starts and ends the day helping his father and brother, Randy, milk the 35 Holstein cows.
He has just six hours in between to get the taps in place, or start the process of making maple syrup, pulling it from the trees and into the basin in the sugarhouse.
TAPPING INTO TRADITION
Hall jokes as he throws on snowshoes and a pack in the biting wind. He loves the hike in the snow to miles of taps, which are hooked to the hoses that deliver the sap to the sugar house.
The hoses are run off a vacuum system that sucks the sap into the sugarhouse, where it is collected.
The lines of hose, which cost Hall $16,000 more than 20 years ago, remain hung through the year. But the taps are drilled into the tree and affixed to the hoses each winter, right before the sap runs.
The process begins at the end of February, before the warm days hit and the sap starts running. It takes a few weeks to tap thousands of trees.
"It's so big now, we have to start early," Dick Hall said.
The day in late February Rodney Hall was snowshoeing through his sugar bush, it was cold and icy.
With gloved hands he drills 2-inch holes and lightly taps his plastic spout into the tree with pliers, before attaching it to the hose.
He is careful with the angle of the spout, and almost delicate with the treatment of the old maple tree.
The exact angle of the tap's hole is important, he said, and he faults a visitor on this day for guessing why.
"Oh, come on!" he shouts, explaining the obvious reason: The element of gravity is needed to drain the sap.
Hall trudges on in old, wooden snowshoes, moving at a slow but steady pace. It takes him no time to drill the hole and set the tap.
It's the hike that makes for a long process when you've got thousands of trees to tap.
Hall relishes his role in keeping the tradition alive.
"A lot of people snowshoe on hard-packed trails. We snowshoe where there are no trails. We don't have any other way to get to the trees," Hall said.
And, Hall admits, this is not even "real maple syrup country."
"Eighty percent of the maple syrup in the world comes out of Quebec," Hall said.
Staff Writer Deirdre Fleming can be contacted at 791-6452 or at:
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