Maple syrup production in Ontario 'won't be a long season' due to warm temperatures

The unseasonably warm weather is taking a uniquely Canadian toll on one industry: maple syrup production.

The season usually starts early March and goes into April for about six weeks. This year, though, one Ontario farmer says the timing has shifted – it starts earlier and it doesn’t last.

“We’re getting a sort of double whammy here,” Randal Goodfellow, who has been the owner of East Slope Maple Products since 2016, said about the recent weather. “[The season] starts earlier, before we’re ready, and then we’ve had these high temperatures, so it appears like it’s going to end sooner, so it won’t be a long season.”

Only three per cent of Canada’s maple syrup production comes from Ontario; however, it’s the country’s third largest producer. There were 389 maple farms in the province in 2021, down from 391 in 2016 and 416 in 2011, according to Statistics Canada.

The industry relies on freezing overnight temperatures that warm the following day, around a high of 5 C and a low of -4 C.

Without these kinds of temperatures, maple farmers risk an outflow of syrup that is too great to keep up with when boiling the syrup and packaging it before it becomes unusable.

According to Environment Canada senior climatologist David Phillips, a lack of snow in the winter in followed by typical spring-like weather is ideal. Going forward, he says there are three possibilities – warmer than normal, colder than normal and seasonably normal temperatures.

“In recent years, we’ve had the maple syrup season has come early, sometimes in February, but the problem like we’ve had in some places in Quebec and Ontario and New Brunswick, which have the best maple syrup producers in the world, have suffered because it was a sudden warm and then the snow melted,” Phillips told CTV News Toronto.

“…It’s just that it’s been warm too soon, too fast.”

In Quebec, where 92 per cent of Canada’s maple syrup is produced, some maple farmers are starting earlier than in previous years.

“Do we try to be earlier than we did 15 years ago? Yes,” David Hall, president of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers of Monteregie-East, said. “Most of us, our operations are getting larger, so it takes us longer to get ready and be ready for a certain date.”

He explained that in the 2014/15 year, the first day he boiled syrup from his crop was March 30, whereas in the last two years, the season started in early February.

“In our part of the world, too warm is the biggest Achilles heel to our business,” he said. “If it’s too cold, probably in the end we’ll still make for an adequate season… But you know, it looks like it’s going to be a monster season.”