Our Second Year Making Maple Syrup in Our Back Yard - 2020 Totals

We pulled our taps today and officially ended our 2020 maple syrup season. I was a little sad to see the season end, but with the snow off the garden there's plenty of other things around here to keep me busy.

We did a few things differently this year, the main one being my boiling setup. My husband was never happy with the cheap cobbled-together six block setup I used last year, and started with again this year.

We searched online for better DIY setups, and finally settled on this one: 

Side View

firebox view

We bought the blocks (thirty-six 8"x8"x16" cement blocks) for under $50 (they just happened to be on sale for 98 cents each at Menard's that week), and it was well worth it for how much easier and pleasant it made the process. The high chimney had a great draw, so once we got everything snugged up, it was almost smokeless for me sitting next to it (you can see steam rising from the pans in the pictures above, not smoke). In our first version, we'd only had the firebox two blocks high, which meant bending almost to the ground to fill (not a big change from my old six-block version). We decided to raise it up another block high to make it easier for me to ladle sap from one pan to another - my back is mostly back to normal after my herniated disc last summer, but I'm not eager to aggravate it again! The taller firebox weakened the chimney's draft, though. To fix this, we filled in the bottom of the firebox up to the level of the first blocks with dirt. We lined the bottom with a piece of stainless steel roofing panel that was lying around (hooray for obtanium!) to keep the wood off the cold, wet ground. This also made it easier to clean out the ashes between boiling sessions (the ashes and biochar were then sprinkled on the garden beds, of course!). 

With the fire more contained, it was also more consistent, which made the boiling much more efficient. Since I could boil more in one sitting now, I was able to put in more taps and gather more syrup each day. We went from 16 taps last year to 23 this year; a couple of those new trees were really prolific, and our production jumped from 3 1/2 gallons of finished syrup last year to 10 gallons this year. 

Another upgrade this year was the purchase of a Brix tester (see link below, or click here to see the one I bought) (I learned about this tool in the book Sweet Maple by Michelle Visser - which I highly recommend! It's full of useful information about all aspects of the maple syrup making process, as well as directions on how to make maple cream and maple sugar - and of course plenty of tasty maple syrup recipes!)

My syrup always seemed thinner than what I'd purchased from the store, and after problems with two inaccurate thermometers, I decided to stop messing around and buy something more exact. It's a little picky to work with, but well worth it in my opinion just for the peace of mind that I was doing it right. It lets you know exactly when your syrup is at the right concentration (66-68% sugar, or "Brix")

If you don't want to spend that much just for peace of mind, I've found that bringing your sap to the point that it sheets off of a spoon is a good non-technical (and free!) way to know that your sap is done (here's a quick 12 second video I took tonight to show you what it looks like, in case you don't know - I didn't!) This is the same as the test you'll see in many old cookbooks for knowing when your jelly or jam will set.

So, here's my final numbers for 2020:
Number of trees tapped: 23
Number of days I boiled sap: 13
Cost of new supplies: $175
     $100 (more taps, bags, and hangers)
     $45 (blocks for new evaporator)
     $130 (Brix tester)
Value of finished syrup (local price $12/quart) $480
                                     Net savings: $305

So my investment that just broke even last year ($150 in supplies for just over 3 gallons of syrup), easily absorbed the cost of the upgrades I made this year and still saved over $300. Not a bad return for a few sessions of sitting around a campfire on a sunny spring afternoon!

2019 Chicken Harvest - The Good, The Bad, and The Numbers

I think this was our best year yet raising Cornish cross meat birds (aka "broilers"). The birds grew out well (dressed out weight averaged over 4 pounds per bird) and looked happy and healthy. Best of all, we didn't lose any to predators, weather, disease, or "sudden chicken death syndrome" (AKA "it just died").

As we have for the last few years, we ordered the broilers through our local feed mill, who get their chicks from Sunnyside Hatchery in Beaver Dam, WI (which is about as local as I can get). I've ordered directly from the hatchery before and had them delivered through the post office, but the price is the same, and I like that I can pick up their first bag of starter chick feed at the same time I'm picking up my birds. I bought straight run, which means I get both pullets (girls) and cockerels (boys). Pullet chicks cost less because they don't grow as large or as quickly, which of course means cockerels are more expensive because they produce more meat more efficiently, so straight run seemed like a good compromise between cost and efficiency.  

We kept them in the same old cobbled-together wooden brooder we've used since we got our first batch of chicks years ago (the picture above is of our broiler chicks from last year; the picture below is of our laying chicks from this spring). This year we used wood shavings for bedding instead of the newspaper and paper towels I've used before. It was slightly more annoying because the shavings got into the water fountain and food trough, but not enough to be a real problem. 

At two weeks old, we moved them out into their "halfway house" - an ark-style small chicken tractor a friend gave us a few years ago. This way the chickens had access to fresh air and sunshine in the daytime, but still had a solid wooden covered area for nights and inclement weather. 

At four weeks old the chickens outgrew this pen and went into a rectangular 4'x8' chicken tractor (click here to see how to build your own). This year we switched to white tarps instead of blue, which made my husband happy (apparently blue plastic tarps in the yard look a little too redneck; white plastic tarps are much more classy) 😉. Although these homemade shelters may seem pretty flimsy, we had some major storms in our area this year while the chicks were growing out (there were many, many large trees down across the state from the first storm, and our power was out for five days while the electric company repaired broken power lines and blown-down poles) and even though their only protection from the weather was the tarps (and the fact that their pasture was in a slight depression on our land), the chickens all came through just fine. 

The main difference this year, other than the pine shavings, was that we were able to give them a lot more space to run. We had a 4 feet high by 50 feet long garden fence that wasn't in use, so my daughter claimed it to build a pasture area for the birds.  We moved them to fresh pasture every few days as the grass got beaten down and covered in manure. They still had a chicken tractor in the center of the pasture for protection from inclement weather and for shade from the hot July sun, but for the most part they spent their time outside in the fresh air. This was much more room than we'd been able to give them before (usually we've kept our broilers confined to just two 4'x8' tractors) and it seemed to really make a difference. The birds were much cleaner, and were able to be more active (well, as active as a Cornish cross chickens ever will be . . .)

All well and good, but what about the bottom line? We had happy, healthy chickens, but how expensive was it to raise them this way? Since we didn't have to buy or upgrade any infrastructure (other than the tarps, which were about $2 each), the purchase price of the chicks and the cost of their feed were our only inputs. The chicks cost us $1.40 each, plus a $6 fee for buying less than 50, for a total of $76. They ate 700 pounds in the 8 weeks we raised them, which cost us $380.50, or a little over 54 cents a pound. Those together add up to a total expense of $456.50. Divide that by 50 birds and you end up at $9.13 a bird. They were all right around 4 pounds each when we put them in the freezer, so for an easy estimate let's say that's 200 pounds of meat. A little more simple math, and I figure we're around $2.28 a pound. Not bad for locally-sourced (doesn't get more local than your own back yard!) organic-fed pastured chicken! The closest organic chicken I could find for comparison was over $3 a pound (and that wasn't local or pastured, plus I would have had to pay for shipping). Local, pastured, but not organic chicken was $2.18 a pound. There really is no comparison for meat you've raised yourself, to the standards you want for your family - but it's still nice to know you're not paying much more than you would for second-best!