Butternut Mountain Farm

I know many of you are wondering how we’ve faired. The southern and central part of Vermont were hit extremely hard with several towns experiencing major flooding  from receiving  more than 10” of rain in less than 24 hours. We were fortunate. We didn’t get as much rain and our facility is a distance from any major rivers and streams. We have power and are able to operate as normal. We will not have any interruptions in our ability to source maple syrup or to deliver products to our many valued customers. However, our farm operation on Butternut Mountain in  Johnson, 15 or so miles away, was significantly impacted by the storm’s winds.

While the farm is a relatively small part of our overall operations now, it remains of great importance to us. Our initial estimates are that we may have lost as much as 10% of the trees we tap. Our farm crew spent the better part of the day Monday clearing the first section of our main forest road.  There is weeks of chainsaw work to clean up the fallen trees and even more work to fix tubing, cable, and mainlines.  Most of the work is dangerous. Many of trees are completely blown over or the top is hung up in another tree or across a mainline making it especially slow going.

It’s devastating to think about the decades and in some places the generations it took to grow and thin the sugarbush.  Our crop, maple trees, will not re-grow in just a single year. On our farm the impact of this storm will be seen for years. So, for us we take it tree by tree, day by day and hopefully come sugaring time when the sap is flowing this will just be a memory. 

Our hearts go out to all those more significantly impacted than ourselves.