SHILOH — It’s been a bad year for maple syrup farmers. 

In order for trees to produce sap, the weather needs to be 25-32 degrees at night and 40-45 degrees during the day. It also needs to be sunny, and there can’t be any wind.

“Trees are like humans. If it’s cold for us being outside, them trees are cold, then I can put sap out. So if we feel warm outside, the trees feel warm outside, they’re gonna give us sap,” said Ned Lucius, a volunteer with the Ashland County Park District and a lifelong syrup maker.

But an unseasonably warm and relatively dry winter has hampered maple syrup production this year, leaving trees with little moisture to produce the sweet stuff.

On a good year, Lucius might be able to produce 300 gallons of maple syrup with his home setup. This year he’s only made 120 gallons. 

Lucius also operates a more modest syrup-making operation once a year with the Ashland County Park District for Maple Syrup Day. That took place on Sunday, with visitors seeing first-hand how it’s made, eating free pancakes, and taking a wagon ride.

The first step in the syrup-making process is to tap the trees and extract the sap, a process that Maple Syrup Day visitors could see during a wagon ride. An average tree produces 2 to 4 gallons of sap per day, Lucius said.

Next, the sap is taken to a “sugar house” where it’s put into an evaporator that boils off the water content. Most sap has around a two percent sugar content, a far cry from the sweetness required for syrup. 

Because of sap’s low-sugar content, 43 gallons of it are needed to make just one gallon of maple syrup. 

The evaporator at Cooke Park, home of Maple Syrup Day, was set up in a shed that felt more like a sauna due to the clouds of steam puffing out of the evaporator. 

“I mean, good for your pores,” Lucius said.

Once the water has been boiled off, the syrup is siphoned through a paper filter that catches any “sugar sand,” a solid byproduct of maple syrup making. From there, it’s just a matter of transferring the syrup into containers.

Lucius got his start in the maple-syrup business at a young age when his father started making it. Now 32, Lucius helps his family’s company, Lucius Maple Syrup in Crawford County, and he can tell by the smell of a room or how syrup is boiling if it’s ready or not.

“It’s stuff you pick up on the years of making maple syrup, just the kind of stuff you learn,” he said.