Sugar Time

On the lower slopes of the Green Mountains, the snow was almost gone. As the dazzling sun shone through the sugar bushes (maple groves), it glinted on some 3,000,000 tin buckets hanging on the grey trees. This week, as the weather turned warm, the groves tinkled with the "plunk plunkplunk plunkplink" of maple sap dropping into the buckets. "Dollars droppin'," Vermonters said, as they paused to listen. It was sugaring time.

As Vermont farmers harvested their great cash crop, they were characteristically gloomy about its size and the weather. (A good run requires frosty nights and warm days.) In his sugar house near Arlington, pink-cheeked old Clifford Mears grumbled: "There'll come a south wind and, by God, in a day it'll all be over. Dry up the spiles."

Rite of Spring. But this year farmers, who got only $3.39 a gallon for syrup under OPA, would not have to worry about price. It was already up to $5 a gallon, and many Vermonters were holding out for $7.

Nearly a third of Vermont's 24,000 farmers produce maple syrup or sugar, making the state the nation's top producer (1946 output: 633,000 gallons). But many of the farmers who sell the syrup by mail to friends regard sugaring more as a sentimental rite of spring than as a business. Their philosophy is that "It don't cost me nothin' to make sugar. If I wasn't doing that I'd just be fixin' fence." And sugaring, with wives and children turning the gathering and boiling of the sap into a frolic, is more fun than fences.

Rebellion from the South. A man who would change all this is not a native Vermonter but a tall, determined gentleman from Virginia, Colonel Fairfax Ayres, 57. A veteran of World Wars I and II and Wall Street, Ayres retired to the Green Mountains ten years ago to hunt and fish. He bought a farm at Shaftsbury, which had a 100-year-old maple orchard. Today he owns three farms, has 3,500 buckets out and produces some 700 to 1,000 gallons of syrup. Ayres thinks that the way farmers have cut down their maple groves is bad, their marketing worse. He would 1) bar anyone producing syrup outside of Vermont from calling it "Vermont syrup"; 2) set up a state marketing and quality commission; 3) have packers take over the entire marketing program.

But the most radical of Ayres's ideas is for Vermonters to stop eating their own syrup. He doesn't think they can afford to, not as long as they need the sugar money to buy a new plow point or improve their stock.

Some Vermonters agree that Ayres's ideas might do the state some good. To help make syrup uniform, Ayres invented a combination thermometer-hydrometer. If the syrup is too thin, it will spoil; if too thick, sugar crystallizes. But farmers were more impressed by the way Ayres got around the low OPA price last season. Ayres mixed maple sugar with pecans, sold the confection by mail at a rate of about $15 a gallon.

But he would be surprised if his general program for cooperation, now being studied, by a Vermont legislative committee, is adopted by the farmers. He has learned enough about Vermonters to quote the old saying: "I don't see how a Vermont farmer manages to fix a piece of ground for corn. To do so he has to cooperate with the horse."

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