The Bobby Bones Show - Episode #2: Maple Syrup Brothers

Episode Date: May 15, 2019

What does it take to be a young farmer in a digital age? This is the story of two young brothers rising in the maple syrup industry in Vermont. Hear how important the Stewart brothers’ highly loyal and supportive community is to surviving and running a small agrarian business in 2019. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to On the Job. This season, we're bringing you stories about people finding their professional stride by virtue of who they know, whether it's breathing new life into an age-old profession, taking the reins in a family business, forging your own path with a new idea, or landing the perfect job doing something you'd never before even considered. Today, reporter Otis Gray ventures out into the deep woods of rural Vermont to meet the Stewart family. Vermont is a state historically known for its agrarian businesses, but a lot of these jobs have faded away over the last few decades. In this iconic New England landscape, the stewards run a high-stakes operation that is totally dependent on each other,

the community, and the environment they live in. Here's Otis. So for the Stewart family, today is a big day. Yeah, today is game day, if not the Super Bowl. So we're doing the thing. That's 23-year-old Tanner Stewart. And he says Super Bowl because running the Stewart's business is like running a football team if the off-season were 10 to 11 months long.

His brother Elliot and his dad, Mark, agree. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what it is. It's like the playoffs every day. And if you lose the Super Bowl, that sucks. You've got to think about it for a year. And that's basically what happens. It's a lot. to take on, but at the same time there's a lot of good rewards.

The reason the stakes are so high is because the family is in the third year of running Stuart Maple. Maple syrup is a huge commodity in the Green Mountain State and is a big part of its identity, kind of like how wine is to Italy. But the window for harvesting maple syrup usually lasts only three to five weeks. So unlike most businesses where if you have a bad month, you just try to do better the next one, the stewards have to make enough money in just one month to support them and their business. And no matter how much they prep in the off-season, a lot of their success is totally dependent on the weather. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's, I guess, that's the uniqueness of it all is that we really are on a small window from that winter

to summer range where we got to make everything. We're going to be following Elliot today, but it's important to note that the whole family has gone all in on Stuart Maple. I'm Tanner Stewart. Again, Elliot's brother. My name is Alyssa Turgeon. I'm Elliot Stewart's fiance. I'm Mark Stewart. Elliot's dad. Hi, Paul Stewart. His uncle.

I'm Gina. And of course, his mom, Gina Stewart, who Elliott says is the unsung hero of the business. Oh, that's really nice. I make cookies. That's the most important part. She's being modest. She runs the finances of the business and a million other things, while the rest play pivotal roles as well, from sales to social media to the actual boiling of the syrup.

Yeah, every single person. person and our family plays a huge role in the business and there's not really one person that could be replaced. Having grown up in Vermont myself, I know that every winter is completely different and you never know what it will bring. But for the stewards, that unknown is directly tied to their livelihood. And every year around March, it always comes down to one question. Will the sap run? It's a beautiful sunny March day. Snow on the ground and Elliot Stewart is trying to start our snowmobile so we can go out into the woods. The boys left me a sled that doesn't run.

To make syrup, you first drill a hole into a maple tree and you tap a little pipe into it. When it gets above freezing, the tree sap drips out of the tap looking kind of like water. You collect it and then you boil it down to make it more pure and syrupy. But it takes a lot to make a little. About 40 gallons of sap will make one gallon of syrup.

So the stewards have to tap a lot of trees to make a profit. And this year, they've tapped 20,000 trees. And one of Elliot's jobs is to go around the woods and make sure that all of those taps are working just the way that they should. We're up. So I'm on the back as Elliot takes me through the winding trails of the Stewart's sugar bush. Sugarbush being the 1,200 acres of land and maple trees that the family has tapped to collect pure maple sap. The lines go 8,000 feet in each direction from the sugar house. It's about a little over 600 acres of lines that flow to the sugarhouse.

So it's quite a bit of ground to cover. The land itself is shaped like a bowl, a little valley surrounded by mountains covered in maple trees. Light blue tubes that collect sat run like phone lines through the woods and along the trail. It's tough terrain, and we're riding along a trail that looks down at an alarmingly steep ravine on the left-hand side. The main lines on our left here, there are two in. pipes and it's a long ways down to the river down below. So you're climbing down in this ridge that's like what like 60 degrees trying to get the taps in? Yeah it's it's steep. It's definitely there's some spots where you're just like you're hanging on you know you're

got to climb with your hands in some spots and those are those are always fun days. Nobody wants to go to that section of the woods. You break your ankle you're on your own. On a snowmobile riding through some of New England's iconically beautiful woods, you might get kind of jealous that this is Elliot's day-to-day job. Yeah, it's definitely, I mean, I'm not mad about it. It's definitely, it's not, it's not too bad of a thing. Fair weather, it's all good. It's the nasty days that are hard. It isn't all sweet, delicious syrup and Robert Frosty and landscapes. The business end of Stuart Maple aside, their success is highly dependent on Mother Nature, so there are a lot of

variables, and the stakes are high. Most of their days are taken up just maintaining the lines, between fallen trees and leaks or bad taps and animals biting the lines, anything could interfere with the sap running. If you don't take things day to day, it's very overwhelming. You know, when you think about the woods as a whole, we have 1,200 acres of land with trees down everywhere. And if you're like, if you wake up in the morning and you think you're going to get it done that day, like you're going to drive yourself crazy.

You've got to take it day to day and do one step at a time. And as long as you're working hard and getting something done every day, it's one step in the right direction anyway. Just being out here in the woods all the time, you're out in the fresh air, and you can think so clearly. And so that, honestly, it kind of helps me to be able to process things

where you have like five million different things going on, but you can easily kind of just go through everything in your head because there's no distractions. You're out here in the woods, there's no noise. It's just cold, and you're just out there hiking. By the time you get tired or you're cold, You go back in and you do it all again the next day. And there's no weekends.

You just do it any day the weather's good. It's relaxing in a sense. So that's what you don't want. So that's a big leak. So what that does you can see in the line. Each one of these blue lines connects to many trees. They all run down to the Sugar House below where we started our ride. The lines are airtight and pull the sap through a vacuum system through the woods.

But if there's a leak like this, this one, there's no vacuum pressure and any trees behind that leak will be stopped from running as well. Again, this is one of 20,000 taps that they have to keep an eye on. This one's a pretty steep one right here. We're riding down one of the trails and we have to duck under a big tree that fell right down over one of the main lines. A pretty common nuisance that becomes a serious problem with big storms. Like this past fall, November, December time there, we had that crazy, heavy wet snow that blanketed the trees, snapped branches.

And so we just had quite a mess on our hands. It looked like a bomb went off in the woods. Like, oh, man, we had all these lines all cleaned up, ready to go. And then, oh, we got to go back through more chainsaw work for a couple weeks. Elliot's 25 now. He spent a year at college before deciding he wanted to come back home and go full-time into sugaring. He eventually convinced his brother, Tanner, who's now 23, to do the same. And this is unique here.

A lot of young people are leaving Vermont to go find work in bigger cities and less are sticking around to carry on the agrarian businesses that have long been a big part of the culture. Yeah, we definitely are on an island. It's definitely, there's just not a lot of people doing, like going out on the limb and just hoping that it works. And, you know, we're fortunate our parents have supported us with it. My dad's done a similar thing where he was a carpenter all of his life,

and he went out on the limb with us and did the sugaring full-time. So we've basically got to the point where we're like, okay, well, if we're going to do this, we have to leap. And I think that's actually what's made us pretty successful at it is that we are 100% committed. So like when we go home at the end of the day, we talk about maple syrup. We wake up in the morning. Everything is maple all the time. about 70 acres of trees over there that we have tapped. And so that at times can be a negative because we struggle to shut off from it.

So there's a lot of times where it's just like, wow, we've talked nothing about life at all outside of maple syrup. In the off season, the Stewart spent the entire year prepping for this month, removing old lines, making new trails, repairing damage ones, drilling new trees, finding vendors to buy the syrup once they have it, it's a monumental amount of work that all leads up to right now. You know, you work for nine months, 10 months, you don't ever make a penny. You get to a point where you can start to question what you're doing. You're like, wow, I haven't made a single dollar in a long time.

You have to really have a good mindset with it and have to trust that you know what you're doing. Because if you start to question it, then it's like, oh boy, we got issues. We'll get back to the story in a second. First, a word from Express Employment Professionals. A strong work ethic takes pride in a job well done. This is you. But to get an honest day's work, you need a callback. You need a job.

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You can see pretty quick that after putting in all of that work, the payoff can be pretty sweet. That is the sound of sap flowing. A lot of it. Down at the Sugarhouse, all the lines from the woods feed into this big cement box, the size of a small basement lined with a food safe plastic. This is a really good sight for you. Yeah. Oh, yeah, this is exciting.

This is the excitement that we wait for throughout the year. This is what we work for. And it's rewarding to see it happen like this. That is a swimming pool filled with sap. I think we'll probably be close to 80,000 gallons of sap over the last 48 hours, which is a lot. This basement-sized holding tank where the sap runs into, it fills fast. And now, this is when Elliot's dad, Mark, lets the sap flow into a giant boiler that looks like a stainless steel train car. And this right here is how they make their finished product.

They boil out most of the water, turning the sap from 2% sugar into 66% sugar. So how many gallons are you going to be making today, you think? Probably around 500 gallons somewhere in there, 5 to 600 gallons of syrup. Finish product. Finish product, yeah. Lots of syrup in a short amount of time. With today being game day, I asked the rest of the family how they were feeling. Today is awesome.

It's wonderful to see the sun come out and the sap finally run and it's a good thing. And how's the Super Bowl going today? Not bad. I think we're up at halftime. We're doing well right now, so not mad about it, that's for sure. The game is strong today. We've got a great chance of taking this one home. Also, the steam of the maple syrup smells pretty good.

So you're kind of in like a little like maple syrup. are up high when you're in there. So the maple bubble. Exactly. So it's a good day for the Stewart family. And after touring the woods in the Sugarhouse, I could tell that the reason for their success is because they all rely on each other.

Like Elliot said, none of them can be replaced. And seeing them work together, that is abundantly clear. But just as much as a family depending on each other to make a livelihood, a lot of their business depends on the community, too. There's a lot of hoops to jump through a lot of different roadblocks along the way, but with the support of the community, you know, it's made it all happen. In return, they've actually given opportunities to their neighbors that didn't even exist before,

like the stewards leasing trees from their neighbors each year at a dollar apiece. It kind of gives landowners a avenue to make a little money off their property and, you know, adds up fast as a lease payment. So they appreciate a check in the spring and a gallon of syrup or whatever. And so it's kind of a new way to make a little income off of a property. I also have to mention a few other byproducts of the Stewart's maple business that really blew my mind. First, right next to that swimming pool size tank filled with sap is an equally big tank filled with crystal blue water. This year we'll produce a million gallons of water.

A million gallons. That's because they actually run the sap through a reverse osmosis machine before they boil. Basically, it's just a machine that helps separate the water from the sugar so they can save a little bit of money on boiling. That separated water is pure, beautiful water that they can sell to a bottled water company that specializes in just that. And we have a contract with them to start selling it as tree-filtered organic water. Pretty cool. Second, all those trails that they've made to work on their lines are now open. to everyone as a public hiking trail system, which I think is just amazing.

And lastly, they've inadvertently become environmental warriors of sorts. That's because the way that the stewards are growing and the more land that they occupy, it means that they play a big role in the landscape around them thriving. So they regularly work with a forester to always make sure that they're tapping responsibly, and with the leasing that they do for their neighbors, Elliot preaches the long-term economic value of sugaring versus cutting down a tree for its lumber. If we can promote the value of the woods, they won't be cut down because there's more value to keeping them standing. Like sugaring is really tied to the forest health real heavily.

And we're really reliant on a healthy woods, which is what we're trying to always work to achieve that. Just as the maple syrup that they make now is a perfect representative, of the land, they are becoming a big part of the area's identity. And with each other to rely on, they only have plans to keep growing. You know, we've grown our business to where our business kind of, our sandbox is a lot bigger than it used to be, I guess, is a simple way to put it. Giant playground. I mean, we were always in the woods, and building forts in the woods, our hands are always

dirty, our clothes are always dirty, we were always outside. and, you know, this work is literally no different than my childhood. You know, it's literally the same exact thing. It's the same hill, you know, it's the same area, and, you know, I can get out there and enjoy it. Literally what we did as kids, you know, and it's fun. For On the Job, I'm Otis Gray. Thanks for listening to On The Job.

Brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. Find out more at ExpressPros.com. This season of On The Job is produced, by Audiation and Red Seat Ventures. Our executive producer is Sandy Smallins. Our producer is Otis Gray. The show is mixed by Matt Noble at the loft in Bronxville, New York.

Find us on IHeart Radio and Apple Podcasts. If you liked what you heard, please consider rating or reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We'll see you next time for more inspiring stories about discovering your life's work. All right, if you have ever dealt with a traditional home security,

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