New Hampshire maple syrup production falls 17% due to a short winter

A short season hit the region’s maple syrup production this winter, with New Hampshire producing 17% less syrup than last year.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, New Hampshire had the same number of taps placed in trees as in the past two years – 513,000 of them – but each one produced less than a quarter of a gallon of syrup, a sharp decline from last year. Total state production was 127,000 gallons.

The story was the same throughout the U.S., where production in the five biggest Northeastern producers – Vermont, New York, Maine, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, in that order – fell from 4.1 million gallons last year to 3.4 million this year, the smallest crop since 2012.

Vermont is by far the nation’s biggest syrup producing state, making about 40% of the nation’s total.

Quebec dwarfs the U.S., however. It produces about 80% of the global total of maple syrup each year and in 2021 reported having 48 million taps in trees.

It takes roughly 40 gallons of sap from a sugar maple tree to produce one gallon of maple syrup. Sap runs when temperatures are below freezing at night and above freezing in the day; it stops flowing when temperatures fail to get below freezing.