Ryan Hegarty, assistant director of Stockton University's Maple Project, toiches a tap he just placed into a red maple tree at the university's Galloway, N.J. campus on Feb. 21, 2024. The university is using a federal grant to examine the feasibility of establishing a maple syrup industry in southern New Jersey, where the predominant maple trees yield half as much sugar as those in New England, which produces most of the nation's syrup.
The key to the project is utilizing some underdog trees that are not in the same class as the sugar maples typical of Vermont. Although there are some sugar maples in the northern part of New Jersey, Stockton is located in southern New Jersey, about 16 miles northwest of Atlantic City, where red maples are more common.
That is accomplished by using a high-pressure membrane to separate sugar and water molecules. That enables sap that came out of the tree at 1% sugar to enter the cooking process at 4%, an important efficiency if a new industry is to be established using sub-optimal trees. In 2022, New Jersey produced 1,817 gallons of it, worth $88,000, according to the state agriculture department. By contrast, Vermont produces half of the nearly 6 million gallons of maple syrup sold each year in the United States, worth about $105 million, according to the federal agriculture department.
At Stockton, that usually begins around the second week of January, when participants use cordless drills to bore tiny holes into the trees and place metal taps into which the sap flows. A vacuum-powered hose system helps the sap along and carries the liquid to collection buckets at twice the rate of just letting it drip out without assistance.
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