- Gallons of maple sap are a norm for producers with each maple season.

But what's grown harder to predict is when the annual freeze-thaw cycle, many of them rely on will take place.

- The freeze-thaw cycle is, is very important in the maple production.

When the trees freeze at night, their roots absorb water from the ground and then as it thaws during the day, the pressure forces that water up the tree and then we're able to obviously tap into it.

I notice a difference in the timing of the season where traditionally we always thought of it as being a march season as a start date.

We're seeing more and more in - February and even into January we have these kind of quick thaws and quick swings of temperature from cold to really warm.

And that makes it really challenging for maple producers.

- Those changing conditions are forcing producers like Scott to get a bit more creative with how they tap and save their sap.

- We brought in the refrigeration unit about three years ago in order to keep the sap colder before we boil.

If we keep that sap stored above 40 degrees for any period of time, we're gonna get significant microbial growth.

What's happening there is those bacteria are metabolizing the sugar that is in maple syrup and they're changing it into another form of sugar.

- I like to think of the raw maple sap coming from our trees as like milk.

And you wouldn't want to leave milk sitting in a tank outside when it's 60 degrees out within the industry.

We need to have different strategies to try to collect as much sap as we can in a potentially shorter timeframe.

- Through grant funding from the Northern New York Agricultural Development Program, Adam and his team at the Eline Maple Research Forest developed a cost effective way to save sap while maintaining quality product.

- The do-it yourself sap chillers are built by modifying a window air conditioner in combination with a picnic cooler.

The window air conditioners that are, you know, used for cooling down air can also be adapted for cooling down a glycol water solution.

We use that because it can drop to a much colder temperature without freezing into a solid block of ice.

And then that glycol water solution can be pumped through a heat exchanger to cool down our maple sap.

So it - Allows you to almost pick your boiling times where if you're not chilling the concentrated sap, you really have about 24 hours to get it boiled and, and processed and turned into maple syrup.

- Early use of these DIY chillers is already proving beneficial, cutting down on labor time, reducing evaporator usage by 40%, and even lowering cleanup time after boiling.

- My hope for Maple producers implementing the DIY sap chillers is that they can build one of these sap chillers at a fairly affordable costs in that they can implement that into their operation and that it helps their operation be more efficient and improve the quality of their maple products.

- We just have to be understanding and open to the fact that things, things change and that's okay.

Just because our grandparents tapped on March 1st or March 15th doesn't mean we can't tap on December 1st.

The one thing that we're trying to do at Maplewood Suites is just be prepared on our end.

Right?

Be prepared in the woods, be have the tubing prepared.

Everything's ready to go, say theoretically by December 1st.

So if we do have a warm December, we can go tap trees and take advantage of that - For WPBS Weekly.

- I'm Luke Smith.

To learn more about Happy Earth Month PBS is celebrating by releasing a ton of great new episodes across our channels.

Diving deep into our amazing planet, we think our viewers will enjoy the special compilation video on PBS Terra All About Cascadia mega quake.

Links to that and PBS Full Earth Month playlist are in the description.