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  • Kenn Hastings

BREAD LOAF VIEW FARM


I grew up in this area, but I personally came from Massachusetts. When we moved up here I was 13 years old and it was a very rural area, and I wasn’t used to this kind of rural. Now, I’m 13 and I’m kind of at the beginning of my prime, I’ve made a lot of friends and suddenly I had to leave ‘em all! Anyway, I came up here and started going to school. We had a vocational technical center in Middlebury and there were several agricultural related courses that you could take and one of the courses was forestry, which included maple sugaring. I actually was not in the forestry class; I started in the agricultural management class, but then the spring time of year came and we had options in our course study, so I chose to go out and do the sugaring part. It wasn’t because I had any inclination to be a sugar-maker. I just wanted to get out of school, I wanna do something that’s not in a building. Anything just to get me out the door! We went with the forestry teacher and he brought us out to a local farm and it turned out that it was one of my classmates’. But it wasn’t surprising, there are lots of sugar houses out here. We live in a sugaring belt. His was old and hadn’t been used for a few years. That happens a lot, sugarhouses get rejuvenated all the time. There are not many sugar houses that haven’t been added on to or improved over time. That’s my beginnings of it. I don’t know if I really fell in love with it then, but at least I was outside and as a farmer you just want to have hands on experiences. After I graduated from school, I guess I liked it enough so I hooked up with a buddy of mine and they had a sugar house on their farm and I helped them out. That’s how a lot of people get into sugaring, they help somebody out. That’s probably tradition, and now that I’ve gotten 30+ years of experience, I can see myself in other people when they come through the door, and they’re like “I wanna learn about this!”, and there’s so much to learn, and I still learn, I never stop learning. To be a sugar-maker or a farmer in general you have to have the mindset that you are not gonna know everything, but you will make discoveries, and that’s very, very cool.

So now I’m ten years out of school, It’s 1985 and I have a dairy farm. I decided that I wasn’t really sure I wanted to be a dairy farmer anymore, so I was gonna get out of it. I went to pay my rent to the neighbor farmer who I rented a house from, and I told him “I’m selling all my cows the first of March.” He just said, “Well what the hell ya gonna do then!?” And I said, “Well I don’t know, I’ll probably go help somebody but I’m not gonna come work for you!” I still remember telling him that. Then he said, “well why don’t you go down and see Dominic, you know he used to sugar my woods and he hasn’t done it in quite a few years. You could probably buy all his stuff and it would give you something to do for a month ’til you figure out what you’re gonna do.” Now, this is an old farmer who’s just kinda inspiring a younger generation guy, who didn’t know what he really wanted to do. I knew Dominic well and I knew all about his sugaring, so I went down and I talked to him. He and I agreed that he would sell me everything he had for five-hundred dollars and I could use his sugar house for one year. So that worked. I went up in the woods and hung buckets and some tubing and I was really roughing it. I mean it really was as antiquated as you could get. Very labor intensive. That was fun, but it was like “uh, I don’t know if I really like this”, you know this is a lot of work! But I did it and I think I made about 40 gallons. That’s kind of where I started.

After that year, it came time for sugaring again and I really wasn’t too gung-ho on doing it. I was out to the bar one night with one of my buddies, and he asked if I was going to sugar this year. I was like “ehh, I don’t know”, then he goes “well, I just got laid off from my job and I’m looking for something to do, why don’t we sugar together?” I said “well, the problem is, Dominic only gave me the use of his building for one year, so I don’t know what we’re gonna do.” I did go back to Dominic and I asked him, but he was an old Frenchman that stuck to his word. He thought I should too, so no, he wouldn’t let me stay there another year. I improvised, and my buddy and I got an old wagon from a farm and put the evaporator in the wagon. We built some sides to it, and a roof, and we dragged the wagon up into the woods. That was the fun part, that year I had a lot of fun. I finally had someone to do it with, so that’s another thing about tradition, the more people there are, the more fun it is. I always say to people when they ask me how I stay with sugaring, that it’s a disease, and if you get hooked on it, you will probably sugar until they bury you in the grave. Either that, or you’re gonna totally hate it. That year we went out and sold everything we had and bought stuff that was bigger. I had another farmer friend, and we took his building and converted it into a sugar house and that operation went on for several years. We continuously got bigger and bigger. At that point we typically had around 1,500-1,800 taps and typically made around 300 gallons. In 1989, I had purchased some land and I built my own sugar house and we got even bigger. We were up to around 3,000 taps, and at that point we were about 50/50 with pipeline and buckets. That went on for a few years until the late 90s when we had a really, really bad year. The temperatures were awful and we were doing things really old school. At that point in time, sugaring was actually a dying industry. A lot of it was price; the cost of making it and the labor just didn’t get you enough money. It was a secondary income for a lot of farmers. That was the first major setback I experienced, and ultimately that was a bad situation for a couple years. In 1999, we had an ice storm in January and my woods were just decimated. It was awful, it effected the maple belt completely, from Vermont all the way into Quebec. That was probably the pits in terms of the life cycle of my sugaring. Also at that time, there was a lot of new technology happening with sugaring like reverse osmosis machines and filter presses; it cut out so much labor. Out in the woods we started seeing a lot of research done on tubing and vacuum systems, so even though we were at the bottom of things, a lot of technology was going on then. From that point to today, it’s just been a straight up climb in terms of production.

Fast forwarding now to here, this opportunity came about because this property was owned by a man named Hilton Foot, and Hilton was an old-time sugar-maker. I knew him when I was a kid; he’d been sugaring here since the 30s and 40s and his grandfather was also a sugar-maker here. So for us, that’s tradition. It looks fancy and new but it’s got heritage behind it, there’s a lot that happened here prior to this. Ultimately, Hilton passed away and Churchill and Janet Franklin purchased the property. Churchill had experience with sugaring as a college student at Middlebury College and essentially he was impressed that he had these woods, though not realizing at first what it was when he bought it. I was the one who told him he had a gold mine. It was maintained by a devoted sugar-maker but the land just hadn’t been utilized for a while. Churchill finally committed to this project and this year coming up will be our tenth year in this building. Part of this building is tradition too. In another room, we have pictures of what sugaring was for the Native Americans and the first European settlers, and we also have some old ones from WWll. This timeline has a very incredible story to it.


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