Kayte Young

From WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana. This is Earth Eats, and I'm your host, Kayte Young.

Ed Miller

Our younger generation, and mainly the girls have got hearing, and they can hear that high frequency squeals that that vacuum puts off. And, man, they can just go in the woods and just start finding them. And you just cut that out, put a connector in, put another one in and they can just run through the woods fixing holes. Older guys that can't hear, you'll struggle trying to find them [LAUGHS] do a lot of walking.

Kayte Young

This week on the show, we head out to Groundhog Road Maple Farm to learn all about the family business that dates back to the 1880s. Ed Miller and his friends and family have modernized the operation in recent years, and we'll learn how the syrup gets from the maple tree in the forest to the pancakes on your plate. Stay with us. Thanks for listening to Earth Eats. I'm Kayte Young.

Ed Miller

Then it comes to this float box right here. And this is what they call a raised flue pan back here. So the water level here is the same height as that pipe right there. Then it drops down to this level here. So whatever water evaporate out of there, this here float box here is letting it come over into that. So, right now it's coming and then it's going right in here to this here. Then it goes to the other side.

Kayte Young

As soon as I stepped into the sugarhouse at Groundhog Road Farms, Ed Miller started explaining the process of turning maple sap into maple syrup.

Ed Miller

The density of the syrup. And then it dumps.

Kayte Young

The wood sided-gray barn rests on a gentle slope on picturesque Indiana farmland near Bedford in Lawrence County. Several active chimney pipes poke out from the slanted metal roof, spewing wood smoke and maple sweet steam into the overcast February sky. A completely chill dog came out to greet me and I followed her inside.

After a quick hello shouted over the roar of machinery. Ed guides me to the two shiny box tanks tucked between the wall of the building and the giant evaporator that's doing all the work. The box tanks, called float boxes, are filled with raw maple sap pumped in from a tank just outside the building. The evaporator is a machine about the size of a small bus or a minivan, and it's made almost entirely of polished stainless steel.

It cuts a dashing figure in the rustic surroundings of the barn, a piece of high tech equipment on an old school family farm. The setting may be rustic, but these folks run a tight ship. Everything is tidy and organized, with systems in place to ensure a high quality maple syrup product. Ed and the other guys working with him explain each of these systems to me, complete with visual aids of the syrup being processed right before my eyes.

I'll take a stab at breaking down the basics without the benefit of visual aids. The Maple syrup division of Groundhog Farm is a medium-scale family business that's been producing maple syrup for generations. It's not their primary source of income, but it's an annual tradition that brings family, friends and neighbors together over a shared project in the middle of winter.

We'll hear more about the history of Groundhog Road Farm a bit later, but for now, let's try to try to understand the process of transforming the sap from the maple trees into the syrup on your pancakes. Or waffles. Or granola. Whatever you like to eat for breakfast.

Kayte Young

Let's start at the beginning with the maple trees. The land at Groundhog Road Farm is a mix of farmland and forest. But, in a way, the forest is also farmland. Their forest is filled with maple trees. When you run a maple farm, you depend on the health of your trees year after year for your harvest. When you extract maple sap, you need to be considerate of the tree if you hope to come back next year for more.

Ed explained to me that the methods they use today are more respectful towards the trees than perhaps previous generations had been.

Ed Miller

Papa, great grandpa, Dad and Tom, when they did it, it wasn't very good on the trees because they just used the brace and bit. And Papa was about your height, so he put the bracing bit right there and he'd just go like this. Well, he could only go up and down about two inches. So they go around the whole tree in that band.

Kayte Young

In that same spot.

Ed Miller

When we're all battery powered drills now, we can go as high as we can reach. You know, we're we're covering probably three to four foot of the tree. And as the tree grows, they will heal up and you can't even tell where it was at. So that's just the way the way we're doing it. It's better on the tree, I think.

Kayte Young

If you can picture it, they're basically changing the location of the hole they drill for tapping the tree. They aren't drawing from the same spot every time they're distributing it.

Ed Miller

It only sucks out just a small area in the tree. And they said it was only just a small percentage of the sap as it runs up the tree. It's only a small percentage. Probably less than 10% of what that tree is tree is producing is all we're going to get.

Kayte Young

I visited Groundhog Road Maple Farm in February of 2024. They started tapping the trees on January 20th. I asked Ed what the ideal conditions are for tapping trees.

Ed Miller

Plenty of moisture in the ground, 25 to 27 at night sunshine and 45 in the day. And that's when the sap flows the most. The warmer the weather, the faster the holes heal. When it freezes, they don't run. Like we had the drought last summer. That hurt us bad. And then we've had a very dry fall and that trees need moisture to grow. And I don't think we got good moisture down deep to keep the trees flushed out to get the good clear syrup, you know.

Kayte Young

So even if there's less water in the ground, you're still going to get the sap. You're just not going to get the lighter color.

Ed Miller

Lighter color and the quantity. You know, a lot of difference. If the ground's good and wet and you get freeze and thaws, man, them trees are just a pumping, you know, they're just pumping fluid up, you know? So I think that's the reason we started out with dark because we had the trees were stressed from the drought last summer. That's about all you can say.

Kayte Young

I wanted to get a first hand look at the source of the sap and how they get it from the forest to the sugar shack. Ben Ooley offered to take me out on the Polaris off road vehicle to tour the woods and the pump houses. Ben is a neighbor and a family friend to the Millers.

Ben Ooley

Like I said, I'm just a neighbor. That when I was a young kid, we farmed together. They owned a combine, we owned a chopper. So we came and chopped their corn silage to feed the cows, and they come and combined our corn. So, a good symbiotic relationship that we helped each other out. Pretty much always been about as close as family that you can be without being family.

Kayte Young

This operation is not the quaint Vermont family sugar bush you might be picturing with little metal pails hanging from spiles dotting the winter forest. It's an intricate web of white plastic tubing tapped into trees in one or two spots on the trunk of each maple.

Ben Ooley

There's roughly 1400 trees on this system, and that drip every two seconds is all that they're putting out. Right now, it's not worth the gas to run the pumps.

Kayte Young

But it is open. So once it starts flowing, it'll just go right in there.

Ben Ooley

Yeah. It can gravity flow into there. Even if the pumps are shut off.

Kayte Young

So what is the pump for? To get it into the tank that you're going to take it up the hill with?

Ben Ooley

The pump makes the vacuum to pull the vacuum.

Kayte Young

That's right. Okay. Right.

Ben Ooley

There's a gauge on top of there that will show you how much vacuum you have.

Kayte Young

And also, it seems to me like if you're doing the vacuum, you're getting it faster when it's flowing. So you don't have to count on the temperatures being exactly right for weeks at a time.

Ben Ooley

Yeah, you can maximize that smaller window. The temperature still has to be right. The vacuum won't do anything if the temperature is not right. But we had a freeze two nights ago. We ran the vacuum for 36 hours straight all day yesterday, all last night and about half day today. And the trees ran pretty much that whole time. At times it was bringing in close to 200 gallons an hour into this tank, and when we shut them off, it dropped down to bring it in about 30 gallon an hour.

Kayte Young

Ben made sure that I understood that when the sap is vacuum extracted, it is diluted. The sugar content is a bit less than what you get when you just let it gravity flow into a pail or a collection bag. But it's worth it to them for the speed and the volume. We move through the hilly forest on a narrow dirt trail. Ben shows me the pump houses where the vacuum systems live and the storage tanks.

It's all very elaborate, complex, and impressive. I was particularly stunned by the enormous drive through woodshed piled with neatly stacked timber, sized for the evaporator oven. I felt exhausted just looking at it. I wondered if it all came from their land.

Ed Miller

Yeah. Fallen trees, dead trees. We got a lot of timber ground. So that's what we do, is cut wood and get it all ready. We're probably two years ahead on this, and we keep it in buildings and stuff. So it's good and dry when we, seasoned wood when we, we go to use it.

Kayte Young

So in the off season, that's one of the things you're doing is dealing with the wood. What else do you have to do?

Ed Miller

Maintain your lines, your tubing and any other equipment. And then that's not a big chore. But anytime you have trees blow down, they get on lines and you got to stand stuff back up, cut the trees off, and the three quarter inch line are run on high tensile wire. So anytime anything goes down on that then you got to repair it pretty good. The 5/16 lines going up to the trees is not not so bad.

If it smashes it to the ground, you can just cut it out, pull it out and put another connector in it and just go back again like that. Dealing with the lines, that is the hardest part. But once you get it all going, then Sam can gather. He can get the vacuum pumps going, he can gather, and then one person in here can run this and make syrup. It's nice to have two, but one person could actually do this.

So then it's a two-person job. Back when we was gathering all by hand, well, we'd have 40 or 50 people out there with buckets a-gathering. You know.

Kayte Young

When you say Sam's gathering, what is he doing?

Ed Miller

He's running a tractor and a hauling tank. It's a 300 gallon hauling tank. And then he goes to each tank we got. And then one of them is, two of them are gravity flowed and two of them we got to pump it up with a sump pump up a hill. So we got a generator on the wagon that we can just plug up to the sump pump, and then we just pump it up into the wagon and it hauls 300 gallon.

Then he comes in here, then we pump it from that wagon into the tank out here. Little squirrels are the most pestiest things we got.

Kayte Young

So somehow the squirrels know their sap in there or what?

Ed Miller

No, they're just curiosity and chew on it. Deer will do it a little bit, but not nothing like a squirrel. The squirrels just love chewing on stuff. But our younger generation, and mainly the girls have got hearing, and they can hear that high frequency squeals that that vacuum puts off. And, man, they can just go in the woods and just start finding them and you just cut that out, put a connector in, put another one in and they can just run through the woods fixing holes.

Older guys that can't hear, you'll struggle trying to find them [LAUGHS] do a lot of walking.

Kayte Young

So there's something for everybody to do out here.

Ed Miller

There's nothing flat about it. It's all hills and hollers. So, you know, it's pretty rough terrain on most of it.

Kayte Young

I really love that image of girls traipsing through the woods, finding the leaks and tagging them, or perhaps repairing the lines themselves. It really speaks to the all-hands-on-deck nature of the maple season out at the Miller family farm, and the joy that the Maple harvest brings to everyone involved.

Kayte Young

We'll hear more about that later on in the show, but for now, let's take a short break. When we return, we'll be back in the sugar house with that elegant beast, the evaporator. Stay with us.

Kayte Young

Kate Young here, and we are back at Groundhog Road Farm, learning all about maple syrup production with Ed Miller, spokesperson for the maple syrup division of this Miller family farm.

Kayte Young

Once the sap is brought in from the forest, it's ready for the next steps. The basic principle in syrup production is evaporation. The sap that comes from the tree is sweet, but it's diluted. It's mostly water. The goal of the evaporator is to remove the water and concentrate the sugar. If you've ever tried this at home or witnessed an outdoor open fire operation, you might remember how long it takes to get the syrup boiled down.

I've done it myself, and as I recall, it took days. But with this fancy evaporator at Groundhog Road Farms, things move a bit more quickly and they have another trick up their sleeves: reverse osmosis. Ed refers to it here as RO.

Ed Miller

We bring the sap in from the woods. This goes into this tank right here, and it's a 900 gallon tank. And we've got a pump that we pump it from there into here. So this is what we call our sap tank. And then from here it goes into that RO machine and then this tank down here. So they're both full right now. It's just crystal clear water. So. But then the sap comes up, goes down, and then dumps into this tank right here.

And then from this tank is where it's gravity flowed into, gravity flowed into that float box. So you can see this is concentrated sap right here. And you got to take care of this sap just like what you do milk. It will spoil in a day to two days at room temperature. So when it when it comes out of the trees, we try to take care of it as fast as we can to keep it fresher. And it'll it'll grow a bacteria mold in it will just turn white.

And once it gets to then, then you're going to have bad, bad syrup.

Kayte Young

So now we're back where we started this story at the float boxes where the concentrated sap is stored, waiting to go into the evaporator. I asked Ed to explain exactly why the RO machine makes things easier.

Ed Miller

And it's just about like a water softener in your house, or that you're saving the pure water and you're getting rid of all the minerals and stuff, you know, lime and all that. Well, this here we're saving all the minerals and the impurities, which is the sugar and the sap, and then we're getting rid of water. So if it comes in, we run 100 gallons of sap through that we get rid of 75 gallons of water and we're saving 25.

Kayte Young

So that's even a pre that's the first step. And then it goes into there.

Ed Miller

So that's reason we're getting so many gallons per hour off this is because we're breaking it in a fourth, breaking it down to a fourth. And then we use that, they call it a permeated water, there's nothing in it. And then that's what we use to clean everything we got here. And then when we go, which  we're going to clean our pans this afternoon, we run that back in behind this here sap, push the sap out to serve, and then we'll save the sweet stuff.

Then we'll fill it up with that permeated. And there's no minerals in it. So it's grabbing, trying to suck minerals back into that water. And when it does that it helps cleans your pan.

Kayte Young

Nice. Wow.

Ed Miller

So, it kinda double does, yeah.

Kayte Young

Ah! I love it when the byproduct of a process is actually useful later in the process. And this was a new term for me. I had to look that one up. Permeate water is what remains when you pull out all of the minerals and the impurities through a reverse osmosis machine. Typically you use that to purify your water. But here they're using it to get 75% of the water out of the maple sap, which is really going to cut down on the evaporation time.

Then that pure water is what they use to clean the equipment. And it does an especially good job because it's grabbing all of the minerals and the impurities left in the machine. It's beautifully complete.

Kayte Young

Mark Miller is stoking the fire, or rather adding wood to an already raging fire in the evaporator oven.

Ed Miller

We got to do that about every, oh, ten to 15 minutes; it burns down that fast. So then when he does that, he turns the fan on. And that's the fan down there. It's forced air. Forced air blows it in there and makes it burn hotter. That's what we're looking at. Hotter the better.

Kayte Young

All right. And then you've got all the sap in there in this tank.

Ed Miller

The SAP comes in right back here. You see it coming in? We just got a float box right there. So when the water level goes down in there, the float goes down. Unless more water in. And then that way it keeps it a constant level in there. And this back pan is raised flues. There are about 11in tall like that. So if you stretch that pan out it would be wider than the sugar house. So then the water goes in there, goes up a pipe and it dumps in at the top end of this here pan.

The raw sap does. Then there's a divider in the middle. So then it'll start coming back this way--

Kayte Young

Since you don't have the benefit of seeing what Ed is describing, I will explain. They're starting out with an already concentrated sap, thanks to the reverse osmosis. Then the sap leaves the float box and enters the stainless steel pan that's divided into three channels. The syrup flows from one channel to the next as it loses moisture and gets closer to syrup.

Ed Miller

So it's almost like a flat river. So it just keeps pushing the sweet to the front is what it does. And then we've got a thermostat right here. Check the density of the syrup and then it dumps into a bucket.

Kayte Young

Okay. And so this stuff that's in this pan, it just keeps moving around until it gets to that density. Then it will empty out. Then more will come in?

Ed Miller

More will come in. So if we take two gallons out here, it's got to let two gallons plus whatever you're evaporating in there. So it just keeps pushing the sweet to the front, just in a constant motion.

Kayte Young

It's just like a line for a ride at the county fair. It snakes around. You wait. And then when it's time to board the board the ride, 20 people leave the line. The rest move forward. New people join the line and everybody waits. The divided pan separates the more diluted sap from the more concentrated syrup. If you had one big batch with no dividers, you'd have to wait for the whole pan to reach the syrup stage and then start over again with a fresh batch.

This system allows for a continuous flow of syrup production, which is crucial for a large operation like Groundhog Road Farms.

Kayte Young

But this will dump out kind of all at once when it's ready.

Ed Miller

About a gallon to two gallons at a time.

Kayte Young

Oh, I see, so it's moving. As it loses.

Ed Miller

It keeps moving like this.

But as it as it's losing more moisture.

Ed Miller

Yes. Yeah.

Kayte Young

That is so neat. Oh my gosh.

Kayte Young

And so at that part that's boiling so hot, there's no risk of burning it because it's got so much moisture in it and it's moving.

Ed Miller

Yeah, it's moving. And you got moisture or water on the pans. Now if your pans get down thick then you can burn it. Same way when it foams up like that. If you get too much foam in there, you know all your moisture is in them bubbles. So then your moisture level by your pan gets less. So that's what you got to keep an eye on the whole time.

Kayte Young

But also because it automatically dumps out when it gets to the right temperature you have less risk of burning.

Ed Miller

Very less. Yes. We don't have to monitor it as often as you need to. Other than just looking at your bubbles. Yeah. Because if the float boxes, it should keep it at the same level all the time.

Ed Miller

That's another thing, syrup or sap will boil about, like making pasta, if you're making pasta how sometimes it boils, and all at once it'll just erupt, boil over. So we gotta put the oil in there to break up the surface tension of the bubbles and make it go back down. If you didn't do it, that thing would just boil over. So we're always putting oil in there to break up the bubbles.

Kayte Young

What kind of oil is that?

Ed Miller

That is a commercial food grade oil that leader company up in Vermont sells. We used to use just vegetable oil or canola oil, just whatever but this here stuff's just a little bit better, I think.

Kayte Young

Well, this is a wild contraption, I did not know something like this existed.

Kayte Young

The RO machine and the continuous flow divided pan evaporator allow the farm to be more efficient.

Ed Miller

You're looking at about eight gallons an hour of syrup is what we can make off of this here evaporator.

Kayte Young

This elaborate evaporator isn't their first one. Ed told me that their old evaporator didn't have the automatic valve to release the syrup when it reached the correct concentration.

Ed Miller

Everybody be busy doing their things, so then we had what we call a drunk buzzer in there and it was electronic and went right at syrup and we had it sticking down in there. And then when it got right at syrup or close to syrup, the alarm would go off, that way everybody know you was at syrup. Before that you might just be, you know, busy doing something, oh we're already past syrup, we're going towards candy.

[LAUGHS] Well, this here is just a lot better operation.

Kayte Young

It's wood fired, are they always?

Ed Miller

They say wood fired tastes the best because you're constantly getting it up to high temperature, then you open the door and the temperature goes down, then you bring it back to a boil again, and it does some kind of caramelization in the syrup. It's supposed to make it taste better than just being a constant, you know, if that was gas fired just constant, the surf would just come right around and just run out, you know, and you wouldn't get that hot, cold, hot cold, hot cold like that.

Kayte Young

That's interesting, would not have thought of that. I thought maybe it would taste better because you kind of get a little smoke in there or something.

Ed Miller

Yeah [LAUGHS].

Kayte Young

So I bet you go through a lot of wood then like that'd be 15 minutes?

Ed Miller

Yes, alot, every 10 to 15 minutes to 15 minutes, about a half a wheelbarrow load if somebody wants to know how much wood, about a half a wheelbarrow load every 15 minutes.

Kayte Young

Once they get all the syrup processed through the through the evaporator, they transfer those buckets to a collection tank inside the sugar house. It's much more stable now that most of the water has been removed. The finishing and bottling happens another day. This is a good time for a break. When we come back, we'll learn about the final steps of maple syrup making and hear about the history of Groundhog Road Farms.

Stay with us.

Kayte Young

Kayte Young here. This is Earth Eats and we're back at Groundhog Road Farms in Bedford, Indiana, the Maple Syrup Division.

Kayte Young

So where are we in the maple syrup making process? We've extracted the sap from the maple trees, removed water using reverse osmosis, then we ran it through the evaporator to remove more water and to bring it to the consistency that's very close to the syrup you would put on your pancakes.

Kayte Young

I returned to the farm later that week for bottling. More family, friends and neighbors were milling around, and there was food in the kitchen attached to the sugar house.

Ed Miller

Pancakes, sausages, square donuts, we're living today.

Kayte Young

Before you can bottle the syrup, you need to filter it. Before you can filter it, you need to finish it, which basically means removing that last bit of moisture to reach a density of at least 66% sugar, also known as 66 degrees Brix, which is required to be legally offered for sale as syrup. To start with, they pull buckets of that nearly finished syrup from the storage tank and start warming it up on propane fired camp stoves that they have set up in the sugar house.

Once it's warm, they pour it into the finishing vat. That's where I found Ben [PHONETIC: Uley] at the finishing station, tending a vat of hot syrup.

Ben Ooley

Just gonna heat it up and then double check and make sure that we're at the right point. Once I get a full batch in here and get it to a rolling boil.

Kayte Young

At this point, Ben needs a hydrometer. It's a large glass sort of thermometer, t's about 12 inches or so, and to use it, you fill a narrow metal cylinder with the syrup and you drop the hydrometer in. It floats and bobs a bit, and when it settles, you look at the place on the hydrometer where the syrup line hits.

Ben Ooley

The hydrometer measures the specific density of anything in a scale called Brix.

Kayte Young

For maple syrup, as I said, they're looking for a reading of at least 66 Brix. It means that enough water has been removed from the syrup for it to be shelf stable, and for it to pour over your waffles like you expect it to. Next, the syrup needs to be filtered to remove impurities.

Ben Ooley

Everything that was in the syrup that is not syrup that you don't want to eat.

Ed Miller

Then we got a filter press right here. We hook this hose right here to that right there, and it pumps it through this filter press and it cleans it all the trash nastiness out of it. And then right here is our little filters.

Kayte Young

That's Ed Miller. He's pointing to a machine about the size of a loaf of bread, with a series of metal plates that hold special filter papers.

Ed Miller

And they go between each one of these like that right there.

Kayte Young

Oh, wow, a filter press. Okay.

Ed Miller

A filter press yeah. and it cleans it and just makes it just crystal clear.

Kayte Young

But before they do that, they add a white powder to the hot syrup, a substance called filter aid.

Ed Miller

It's crushed up seashells. They also call it dematiaceous earth, but it's basically crushed up seashells and it's just porous enough that you mix it in there and it keeps it from just skimming across the filters. It just keeps it flowing, basically.

Kayte Young

So that it can move through the filters more easily.

Ed Miller

It seems very backwards, but you get more through the filters putting this in it before than if you didn't.

Kayte Young

And it doesn't affect the flavor at all 'cause it's getting completely filtered out.

Ed Miller

It's getting completely filtered out. Just as soon as  I get it mixed in, I'll start filtering it out.

Kayte Young

The filter aid somehow allows the syrup to move through without clogging up the filters too quickly. Eventually, the filters will get clogged up with sediment and now with the filter aid too, and they'll need to be cleaned out before the next batch can go through.

Ed Miller

About every 50 gallon, 40 to 50 gallons. And then put the new filter papers in and go again.

Kayte Young

This is the sound of the syrup going through the filter.

Kayte Young

It takes quite a while for the whole tank of syrup to move through that filter, but once it does it goes directly into another tank, which they call the canner.

Ed Miller

It's a water jacketed canner, there's roughly an inch of water around the outside of the whole thing, and the water is heated to just under boiling so that it maintains that warm temperature of the syrup.

Kayte Young

Without burning it.

Ed Miller

Yeah, without cooking it anymore or burning it or anything just stays nice and warm at 180 degrees. The Board of Health regulation says that it has to go in the can at 180 degrees or above to safely can and store, kill all the bacteria in the jar and everything like that.

Kayte Young

And it has to be at that temp while it's being canned.

Ed Miller

Yeah, you've got to get it up to that point before you can can it.

Kayte Young

And by can it, he means dispensing it into the jars or the bottles. Here's Ed Miller.

Ed Miller

The tanner's got water around it and that's where the syrup goes right in there. And then this will jacket it, and then it's got heater element right here.

Kayte Young

Oh I see, so the water--

Ed Miller

Heats the water up to, we wanna a can at 180 to 185. That way it kills all bacteria, all germs, everything, and then when we pour it out, the little spouts right here into our jars or whatever we're putting it in. And then we've got a little tray that goes right here, just slide the jar on there, open it up, fill the jar up, shut it, put the lid back on it. And then turn it upside down so it heats up the seal on your lid, and then you're good to go.

Kayte Young

Maple syrup is extremely stable. Unopened, it can last a very long time.

Ed Miller

Stay sealed till the lid rusts out. So we've had people have jars, ten years. As long as it stays sealed, it'll stay forever.

Kayte Young

The day I attended the bottling session, another family was there bottling their maple syrup. Esteban Garcia was working the bottling station with his young son, Santiago. I asked him to describe the steps.

Esteban Garcia

So you open it up basically, everything is passed through the filters, and so it's ready to be bottled. You put it in the bottles and close the lid, turn it upside down so it seals and it's ready to be consumed.

Kayte Young

To me, this is the fun part. Or maybe satisfying is a better word. The act of placing the sealed bottles and jars into neat rows inside a milk crate, stacking those milk crates, loading them onto a truck, and then sending this beautiful premium product all glowy and labeled out into the world. It feels good.

Kayte Young

The final step involves a sticker on the bottom of each jar or bottle, with a number that indicates the year and the day of the year. To find the day of the year, they consult the almanac style calendar hanging on the wall of the sugar house, which includes small numbers in the corners of each day square, marking what day of the year it is. So, for instance, on February 1st, the number would be 32.

It's the 32nd day of the year. There's 31 days in January, so February 1st is day 32. That's the batch number, so the product can be traced should it ever need to be. The Millers follow all health and safety protocols for commercial syrup production, and their facility is inspected by the Department of Health. And speaking of batches, on a narrow, backlit shelf in the sugar house sits a row of quarter pint mason jars, you know those little short ones smaller than a jelly jar, each filled with syrup.

They take a sample from each batch of the season and display it on the shelf with a strip of white behind it, so you can really see the color of the syrup glowing in that indirect lighting. That year, it went from a darker syrup, about the color of a cup of black tea, to a lighter, more amber color as the season progressed and we got more rain.

It is beautiful and satisfying to look at. It used to be that lighter syrups were referred to as grade A, and darker ones were called grade B, but that system implies a difference in quality and it's really a difference in taste.

I personally have always preferred the dark syrups, they have a stronger maple flavor. In 2015 a new grading system was adopted in the US, which is now used globally. All maple syrups are known as grade A, but now there's a range, grade A golden, grade, A amber, grade A dark, and grade A very dark with descriptive words next to them like delicate and robust taste to help consumers choose the type they prefer based on flavor.

Kayte Young

Ed Miller's family has been processing maple syrup for generations. I asked him to tell me the story. We talked with the persistent rattle of the evaporator fan in the background.

Ed Miller

The family moved here at this farm in 1880 and we've got all that well documented. My papa weren't born, but my great grandpa and great-great-grandpa, they moved here in 1880 and everybody made syrup back then, so they started making syrup. And then once they got a little bit further along in it, they got to making a syrup, especially through the depression when nobody had no money for nothing.

So if you could have something else to sell, I mean, they sold eggs, they sold syrup, they had raised beef and cattle, and you were just pretty much giving them away because they wasn't worth anything. So anything you could do to make some income, that's what they did. Then they got a little bit bigger in the 60s and 70s with making syrup, but then the farming got bigger and then they didn't have enough time to spend all that time in the two months, you know, the first of the year.

Kayte Young

Because they were raising livestock and.

Ed Miller

Yeah, raising livestock, yeah, they had a hog and sow operation and beef cattle operation and crop, so that was keeping busy. So they kind of did away from the chickens and did away from the syrup. So we all helped when we was growing up, we all graduated school helping and then they quit making it. But then me and all my brothers and cousins, we all got married, we started having kids, well, the kids needed something to do [LAUGHS].-

So this time of year there was not much going on, so then we come back, open the sugar camp back up, and then we just kept getting bigger and bigger. And then we went to all sap sacks and we got out to 1370 sap sack holders. And then all the families would come out and help, women, children, everybody come help and gather, then come in here and we cook and socialize and just havea ball. And the kids got to play in the rocks down here.

I mean, there was something to do for everybody. So then that's where we went to, and then we thought well, let's go a little bit bigger and then get inspected by the health department for Indiana so we can start selling this. So then that's when we got with the new evaporator, more efficient, we got inspected, and so now we can sell it to anybody we wanna sell it to. And everybody still comes out, we just don't have as much fun in the woods a gathering.

But everybody still comes, and when we build a big kitchen on down there, so everybody comes over and just eats and hangs out and drinks and has a good time. Bring your kids with you, and so, kid friendly, you know, real kid friendly.

Kayte Young

That's so great, so this is a lot of family time down here.

Ed Miller

Yes it is, family and friends is what it is. There was eight of us siblings and several cousins and several neighbors, then all of us kids have got grown kids with kids. So there's a lot of people come and hang out, just a lot of people.

Kayte Young

And do any of you do this, kind of this is your job or is it all just kind of you're doing it on the side?

Ed Miller

Yeah, we all do this on the side for the farm. Brothers and sisters on the farm, and so we just do it for extra income, not really for anybody to profit off of, but just to maintain the farm. You know, the money just goes into the kitty, and that's what we use just to maintain the farm. Everybody gets free maple syrup so we can eat it, and we get two to three months of fun with family and friends.

And then we sell, I don't know, maybe $10,000 worth of syrup just to go to the farm. But yeah, it's mainly just family and friends because we've got like, Jim [PHONETIC: Deal] over here, he's been retired, he just comes out and helps and we feed him and and neighbor guy Ben [PHONETIC: Uly] he comes over and just hangs out and helps and his dad helps. But yeah, just family get together. A lot of people will just come over and they'll just sit there and just drink a beer and we'll just all socialize.

You might not see them, but once a year, but just sit there and just socialize while we're doing it, you know.

Kayte Young

Yeah. I mean, it's always fun to get together over while you're doing something.

Ed Miller

Yes, yes. Productive, that's what we like to be. Not real productive, but as long as you're productive and you're drinking a cold beer, you can't beat that [LAUGHS].

Kayte Young

Ed mentioned the kitchen. Off the side of the production floor and down a few steps is another room with a gravel floor. It's fully enclosed and covered, but it has the feel of an outdoor kitchen. On one side, there's a long countertop with a sink and some shelving for storage. On the other side, there's an old cast iron wood stove surrounded by built in benches. It's a place for folks to gather to get warm and share some food.

Ed Miller

That wood stove down there is what hat was in the kitchen before they went to gas heat. And that's what mom heated up the water on for us to take baths in. Yeah, when they always said Saturday night baths, that was the truth. The youngest went in first, wash tubs, about 67 is when they put a shower in. And we had a stool a little bit before that, just had an outhouse before then. So all those kids were raised in the in the old house.

Ed Miller

All of us were raised there but I can just remember the wash tubs, you had the soapy water and the rinse water [LAUGHS]. The bigger kids would take the little ones and soap them off, scrub them down, rinse them off, dry them off. They go put clothes on, you know.

Kayte Young

While the farm and the sugar camp hold fond memories for the Miller family, they're also creating new ones and collaborating with others around maple syrup production. The day I was there for bottling, David Ray of Stonewall Maple Syrup had brought some of his family out to get their own maple syrup bottled. We heard from his son-in-law, Esteban, a few minutes ago, he's there with his son, Santiago, and they brought their friend Michael, who had his own syrup to bottle from his family's farm.

Stonewall and Groundhog Road share some of the processing equipment. It was getting pretty loud in there when I asked David Ray about it.

David Ray

The filter press and the water jacketed bottler is what my son bought probably 15 years ago, and they would pick it up and haul it down here every year, and they would bottle, and then we would come go back and do it at our house. And one year they like just come down and do it all here. So we don't even haul it, we just leave it here year round, and it's just kind of an annual one Saturday a year, we all get together and it's really fun.

Kayte Young

That's awesome.

Ed Miller

We got to get together with them, see how bad a year they done or how good a year they done.

David Ray

Yeah, so we usually touch base during the season, like, find out have you tapped yet or is your trees running [CHATTER] but it's a really a fun process, and the Millers are great and it's just a fun time of year. But yeah, we've only tapped probably two acres out of the 300 acres of wood, so if we wanted to, we could beat the Millers. But then it would be a competition, and then they would go tap more trees.

So it'd be like one of those escalating things, like, instead of a Cold War, it'd be a syrup war [LAUGHS].

Kayte Young

Yeah, he was talking about how much they enjoyed just getting together with family and friends and neighbors.

David Ray

That's what it's about, I mean, the syrup is a side benefit, and you have it all year long and can think about it, but yeah, it's more just the social aspect, you know. Doing this today and then getting together with the family, you know, by the time you go down there and collect for three or four hours and come back and cook, it's a fun time.

Kayte Young

Ben [PHONETIC: Uley] has been helping out with the sugar camp for years.

Kayte Young

You don't mind all the hard work?

Ben Ooley

No,  it's not that hard when you split it up and have fun at it.

Kayte Young

While they do have fun together during maple season, they also have expectations for high production each year. I asked Ed if he had any closing thoughts about the 2024 harvest.

Ed Miller

Not a very good season, we're kind of disappointed really, 'cause we should be able to average 600 gallons with the amount of spouts we got at, so we only got 465, wasn't it? [CHATTER]  yeah 465 gallons. But it's the weather related thing, some years you have good years and some years you don't. So this is just one of those years that just wasn't a good year for maple syrup.

Kayte Young

And some of that was the the drought, the dry.

Ed Miller

The dry last summer, yeah. I think that hurt us more than anything, we ain't got no moisture down deep. And that's where the roots are pulling that moisture up into the trees. Well, if you ain't got it, you can't pull it up, you know. But next year should be better. [LAUGHS].

Kayte Young

I hope this year has been a better year for maple. I've been talking with Ed Miller with the Maple division of Groundhog Farms in Bedford, Indiana. Ed and his friends and family gather each year in January and February to harvest sap from the trees on their land, process it in their sugar house and bottle it for distribution. They enjoy time together over a shared project, catching up and staying connected.

Kayte Young

When I first contacted Ed Miller to do a story about their maple production, I was thinking about maple syrup as a wild foraged food, you find it out in the forest after all. But when I spent time out at Groundhog Road Farms and toured their forest of tapped trees, it quickly became clear that this is not foraging, it's more like agriculture.

Or maybe it's something in between. I was interested in the foraging aspect of maple production, because I had just begun recording interviews for a special Earth Eats series, all about wild food.

And while I changed my mind slightly about whether or not this type of maple syrup production fits that category, I do think this is the perfect time to announce the new the new series. It's called Earth Eats, Eats Wild. It's a nine part series and it's divided into three seasons. The first three episodes air in the spring. The next three in the summer. And the final three episodes drop in the fall.

Along with the leaves. The series is all about wild food. We head out into the fields, forests, and neighborhoods with experts and amateurs alike to learn how to find wild mushrooms or how to make fragrant syrups from flowers. We learn how to identify plants which parts are edible, and we head into the kitchen to prepare interesting dishes.

Kayte Young

Have you ever eaten a spruce tip? Did you know that magnolia petals taste like ginger? I hope this series will awaken a new awareness about the everyday plants that surround us, and encourage engagement with the natural world. The more we know about our environment, the more likely we are to care about it and to want to protect it. When we have meaningful sensory encounters with our surroundings, when we observe and taste the plants growing in our parks and our backyards, we build relationships and become more connected to this place, the place where we live right now.

I've discovered great joy in my foraging practice, and I invite you to join me, first in simply learning about it, and then you can decide if and when you might want to dip your own toes in. Mark your calendars for March 29th for the first episode of Earth Eats, Eats Wild. We have an inspiring and informative interview with Monique Philpott. She's a wild edible plants instructor at Indiana University and the founder of Soulcraft Forest and Folk School here in Bloomington, Indiana.

Kayte Young

We forage and feast with her students, including some very young chefs, cooking with daylily tubers, stinging nettle leaf, onion grass and more. We'll also feature bonus photos, videos and recipes on our social media pages, so be sure to follow us at Earth Eats. That's Earth Eats, Eats Wild. Debuting Saturday, March 29th on WFIU and on our YouTube channel and wherever you listen to podcasts. I can't wait to show you how delightful wild food can be.

Kayte Young

That's it for our show this week. We have photos and videos from Groundhog Road Farms on our website Eartheats.Org and Facebook and Instagram at Earth Eats. You can always find our episodes on YouTube, just search for Earth Eats or WFIU on YouTube and select the Earth Eats playlist. The Earth Eats team includes Eoban Binder, Alexis Carvajal, Alex Chambers, Toby Foster, Louanne Johnson, [PHONETIC: Leo Pies], Daniella Richardson, Samantha Schemenauer, Payton Whaley and we partner with Harvest Public Media.

Kayte Young

Special thanks this week goes to Ed Miller, Ben Ooley, David Ray, Esteban Garcia, everyone at Groundhog Road Farms, Maple Syrup Division, and to Michael Valliant for connecting us.

Kayte Young

Earth Eats is produced and edited by me, Kayte Young, with extended production support this week from Leo Paes. Our theme music is composed by Erin Tobey and performed by Aaron and Matt Tobey. Additional music on the show comes to us from Universal Production Music. Our executive producer is Eric Bolstridge.