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View ProfilesPublished March 19, 2024 at 2:17 p.m. | Updated March 20, 2024 at 10:15 a.m.
What do Bigfoot, a bubbling cauldron and three-plus politicians tapping a single tree have in common? No joke — though it's tempting — they're all signs of Spring Maple Open House Weekend at Baird Farm.
The 560-acre, fourth-generation family farm tucked in the foothills of the Green Mountains in North Chittenden is a favorite stop during the annual maple-season celebration, which invites visitors to more than 90 locations around the state. Baird Farm is so popular, in fact, that the cops showed up last year because too many cars were blocking the road. The Baird family didn't count the cars, but they do know they served more than 900 rosemary waffles.
On Saturday, March 23, and Sunday, March 24, the Bairds will once again open their sugarhouse and fire up the evaporator, offering the free waffles, syrup samples, tours through the sugar bush and other maple-filled fun.
The scene has grown since Bob and Bonnie Baird began hosting visitors on Maple Open House Weekend — sometime around when the statewide event started in 2001, Bob estimated. Their first year, about 10 people showed up, and none of them stayed very long. It was only 15 degrees outside, he said.
The next year, they had 50 people. The year after that, a couple hundred. That one was cold, too, and then-governor Jim Douglas was in attendance. Bob had washed out the pump on his new filter press, which is used prior to bottling. As he began drawing off 30 gallons of finished syrup, he realized he'd forgotten to drain it.
"It was frozen solid, and there were 100 people watching, including the governor," Bob said.
After another chaotic year when they had to evacuate the sugarhouse because the reverse-osmosis system started screeching, Bob and Bonnie decided they'd had enough.
"I always hated Open House," Bob said with a chuckle.
But now the organic-certified maple operation is run by Bob and Bonnie's daughter Jenna and her partner, Jacob Powsner, both 33. Bringing folks to the farm is a big part of the younger couple's plans for the family business; in 2018, they started hosting the event again.
They'll trade Bigfoot costumes for a giant, slightly demonic squirrel mascot this year — because "squirrels are the Lex Luthor of the sugar bush," Jacob said, noting how they chew on tubing. But Maple Open House Weekend will still be a great chance to get a sweet taste of what they're up to.
Maple syrup has been produced on the farm since before Bob's grandparents bought it in 1918. Until 1996, though, the farm was primarily a dairy. It grew from 13 cows and selling butter door-to-door in Rutland to selling milk to Boston, which Bob's father did after taking over in the late 1940s. In 1979, Bob and Bonnie purchased the farm. Their herd reached 60 milkers, eventually supplying milk to Agri-Mark Family Dairy Farms, the co-op that has since merged with Cabot Creamery Cooperative.
Bob and Bonnie sold their herd twice: first so that they could leave the farm and take a vacation with their two daughters, and then for good in 1996. Since then, maple has been the farm's main crop, though they continued to raise dairy heifers until 2013. (Bob also worked for the Vermont Land Trust for 11 years, and Bonnie is a talented landscape artist.)
For Bob's grandparents in the 1920s and '30s, 100 gallons of maple syrup was a good year. In 1973, when Bob rebuilt a sugarhouse on the site of the original one out in the woods, 500 gallons was the benchmark.
These days, 14,478 taps span a 237-acre sugar bush over several ridgelines. The Bairds aim for 7,200 gallons of syrup per year — half a gallon per tap. The main sugarhouse, originally a woodshed, has been expanded four times and now includes a retail shop.
Bob had planned to stick to wholesale, supplying drums of syrup to Butternut Mountain Farm in Morrisville and "selling the whole crop with one phone call," he said. Instead, Jenna and Jacob have focused their efforts on building a robust retail business, both on the farm and online.
After graduating from college — Jenna from the University of Vermont and Jacob from New York's Bard College — the couple worked on organic farms in Oregon and California. They returned to Vermont to help during sugaring season in 2015.
"It was a transition point," Jacob said. "Not only did Bonnie and Bob not want to do Maple Open House, they didn't want to retail syrup at all."
Jenna and Jacob took over the retail side for a trial year, then slowly started buying into pieces of the business while also working off the farm. Now, they're both at the farm full time and embarking on an official lease-to-own transition plan.
The tidy retail shop is stocked floor to ceiling with jugs of syrup. There are tiny 100-milliliter bottles of amber rich (the most popular grade) as well as gallons of everything from golden delicate to very dark strong. Additional shelves boast gift boxes; maple- and pancake-adjacent products from other local producers; grass-fed beef from Hamilton Cattle, whose herd grazes 60 acres of Baird Farm in the warmer months; a very tasty maple ketchup; and a line of infused syrups, made with sumac, mint, birch bark and spruce tips foraged or grown on the farm.
This summer, Jenna will sell cut flowers at the shop, too — just one of the side hustles that she and Jacob count under the "diversification" section of their business plan. They've planted Christmas trees, though they're not yet big enough to cut. Every year, Jenna grows giant pumpkins — 992 pounds is her record.
The pumpkins are mostly for fun, she said, but they've proven to be a useful way to get visitors to sign up for the farm's email list, along with its free, hourlong tours (available daily by appointment).
In early March, Jenna and Jacob walked this reporter down to one of the farm's three pump houses. The morning's temperature was still below freezing, but sap had started to run from the small trees on the sunny side of the mountain. Bob soon joined, riding over a hill on a four-wheeler while Jacob hummed the William Tell Overture.
When Bob and Bonnie quit dairying, they took the vacuum pump that milked the cows and hooked it up to the trees. Last summer, the family upgraded and reburied a mile of the underground tubing, which will allow them to get a better vacuum from the sugar bush's main hill and eventually increase the number of taps.
"It was a muddy project, given how wet it was," Jenna said.
The underground lines mean less maintenance and wind damage, but the team still spends between 20 and 40 hours walking every foot of tubing on the farm after each storm.
To give themselves a buffer after that project — and because they just wanted to get it done, Jenna said — they began tapping a week earlier than normal, on January 4, and finished on January 22. They boiled on the 29th — the first time they've ever made syrup in January. By March 9, they had produced over half their target crop for the year.
"I don't want to jinx ourselves," Jenna said, noting that Bob had predicted a "banner year" in 2023 — the only time he'd ever made a prediction — and the end of that season was a struggle. She's already seen ramps growing in the woods — an earlier-than-usual sign of spring.
"We could be anywhere from a C- to an A+," Jacob said of the season. "Tentatively, it feels good. But you never know until it's all over."
Back in the sugarhouse, the couple showed off a shiny new Steam-Away box on the back of the evaporator, funded by the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers' Association Certification Program, which helps producers upgrade equipment to meet modern food safety standards. The Steam-Away, which preheats sap, arrived a few days before they began boiling.
"Classic sugaring industry," Jacob said with a laugh.
Sitting on a still-warm drum of finished syrup as sap poured into big storage tanks nearby, Jenna ran through her checklist for Open House Weekend. She's already accumulating plates, forks and volunteers, and they'll be sure to save sap to boil. In the bottling room, Wesley Davis was bottling fresh syrup. A couple of days before, they'll prep 30 or 40 gallons of rosemary waffle batter, making extra Bisquick-style dry batches in five-gallon containers. On the day of the event, they'll add Animal Farm Creamery buttermilk.
Volunteers from Rutland-based Come Alive Outside will oversee the cauldron, boiling syrup over an open fire and toasting maple sugar-coated marshmallows. Red Clover Ale, a small three-barrel brewery in Brandon, will pour its Sapsucker maple stout, brewed with a gallon of Baird Farm's darkest, richest syrup, for on-site consumption. (Four-packs will also be available at the brewery.)
Red Clover has used Baird Farm's syrup for five or six batches of the stout, which it sometimes serves in glasses rimmed with the farm's maple sugar.
Pete Brooks, one of the brewery's cofounders, is looking forward to being part of the Open House Weekend festivities. "Jenna and Jacob are just awesome people, and any time they ask us for something, we say yes," Brooks said. "It's nice having other young, energetic business owners in the area."
Jenna and Jacob are optimistic about the future of "Maple World" — their playful name for the industry — despite the crop volatility and risk of climate-related disruptions. They may be tapping earlier and walking the lines more often, but maple has a lot of good things going for it. "I mean, it's a jar full of sugar that tastes delicious," Jacob said. "I would sugar all year round if we could."
"And if all else fails," Jenna said, "we'll start farming squirrels."
Spring Maple Open House Weekend at Baird Farm: Saturday, March 23, and Sunday, March 24, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., at 65 West Rd. in North Chittenden. Free. Info, 558-8443, bairdfarm.com.
The original print version of this article was headlined "Rolling Boil | Baird Farm's next generation embraces Maple Open House Weekend"
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