A New Jersey university is using a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to test the feasibility of a maple syrup industry in the Garden State.
Stockton University is in its fourth year of producing syrup from the 300 acres of red maple trees that surround the school. The university’s campus straddles Atlantic City from Galloway, New Jersey, which is well known for its casinos and seaside resorts.
Stockton’s undeveloped maple trees, which are common in southern New Jersey, contain only half the sugar of maples from Vermont, the maple syrup capital. according to luck.
Red maples like Stockton “are less popular because they have a much lower sugar content, about 1% in red maple compared to about 2% in sugar maple,” said Ryan, assistant director of the Stockton Maple Project. Mr. Hegarty said. luck.
Hegarty added that it typically takes about 40 gallons of sap from a Vermont variety of sugar maple to make one gallon of syrup, according to Fortune.
But in the case of red maple, more water has to be removed during the syrup-making process, so it takes at least 600 gallons of sap to make the sticky, sweet brown stuff you spread on pancakes. The magazine reported.
Stockton’s Maple Project team is accomplishing this by “installing a large-scale sap harvesting system on Stockton’s 1,600-acre main campus using the latest technology such as reverse osmosis and vacuum-assisted pumps.” . Website Dedicate yourself to the project.
Professor Stockton asked local residents who have access to red maple trees 12 inches or larger in diameter to contact the university to see if they would allow Maple Project members to touch the trees.
The Maple Project says the mining process is simple, simply drilling a hole in the tree high enough to allow gravity to drain the sap. The sap is collected by plugging a tap into the tree and sticking a tube into a food-safe container, which is then boiled down to make syrup.
Because of its cooking process, Stockton’s syrup is darker and thicker than commercially available syrups, according to Fortune magazine.
The university already uses Maple Project syrup in its school lunch program, where students use it to make salad dressings and barbecue sauce.
“The ultimate goal of the grant is to encourage the production of maple syrup by home hobbyists and commercial sellers in New Jersey and similar locations on the Mid-Atlantic coast,” said Dr. Aaron Stoller said. .
“To achieve this objective, the research questions will specifically address issues of sap quantity, syrup quality, ecological forest management, and return on investment.”
According to Fortune magazine, maple syrup production is not new to New Jersey; residents have been making the sweet condiment since the state was inhabited by Native Americans.
But this is mostly done in the northern regions of the Garden State. This is because southern regions tend to be warmer, which affects when and how the sap flows. However, no large-scale industry was born.
Hegarty told Fortune that to get the sap flowing, “you need sub-zero nights, and then you need above-freezing daytime temperatures.”
In Stockton, that sweet spot usually starts around the second week of January.
Shirlize Katzenbach, who has been making syrup for more than 30 years at Sweet Sourland Farm in Hopewell, New Jersey, about 130 miles northwest of Stockton, first started making syrup in the 1980s, according to Fortune. At that time, he recalls that it was difficult to sell his products.
“Nobody’s going to buy it,” Katzenbach, who advised Stockton on launching the program, told the publication. “They said, ‘We’re buying syrup from Vermont. This is not good at all.’
In 2022, New Jersey produced a total of 1,817 gallons of maple syrup worth $88,000, Fortune reported, citing the state Department of Agriculture.
For reference, Vermont produces half of the approximately 6 million gallons of maple syrup sole in the United States each year, worth a total of $105 million, according to the Department of Agriculture.
