About eight years ago, Wesley Hubbard came home from school with a project he wanted to do: He wanted to try to tap the sugar maple trees on his family’s farm in Wise County to make maple syrup.
“I think he just saw something on TV about maple syrup and he knew we had some maple trees so he wanted to tap them,” says his father, Brian. “I told him go ahead. He picked out 10 trees.”
Wesley moved on from that experiment and went off to college. Brian Hubbard kept tapping the trees. “I think I liked it better than he did.”
From those 10 trees the first year, Hubbard now taps about 1,100 trees — he’s lost count. He sells the syrup locally. “It’s mostly word of mouth around here,” he says. “I think my wife’s got a little Facebook page. That’s basically it. I’m not very technological.”
The maple syrup from the Southfork Road Farm in Pound has garnered fans, though, and one of them is Torrece “Chef T” Gregoire, a New River Valley-based chef who has consulted with multiple restaurants from Blacksburg to Bristol (and is also well-known for her appearances on the Food Network). Chef T is also in charge of a historic event this weekend in Richmond. With Saturday’s inauguration of Abigail Spanberger as governor, Virginia acquires two things it’s never had before: our first woman to be governor and our first “first gentleman.” As part of the weekend’s festivities, Adam Spanberger will host a First Gentleman’s Breakfast on Sunday at the Science Museum of Virginia. The maple syrup for that event — all 15 cases of it — comes from Hubbard’s farm.
For those of you who think maple syrup comes from Vermont or, heaven forfend, some store-bought brand that’s really made from high-fructose corn syrup, you might be surprised to learn that Virginia also makes maple syrup.
For those of you who already knew that, but thought Highland County — home of the annual Highland Maple Festival every March — was the only place that made maple syrup in the state, you might be surprised to learn that syrup is actually tapped in 19 counties in Virginia, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
You might be further surprised to learn that while other types of agriculture are under stress, the number of maple syrup farms in Virginia is growing: from 29 in 2017 to 54 in the most recent USDA farm census, in 2020. Highland County remains the state’s maple capital, with 10 of those 54 farms, accounting for 70.6% of the state’s output. It’s unclear what has prompted that growth, but the Virginia Cooperative Extension Service has been promoting maple production as a way for landowners with maple trees to generate extra income. In November, the service held a Southwest Virginia Tree Syrup School at St. Paul. Sugar maples grow throughout the western part of the state, so the potential for syrup production is, shall we say, largely untapped.
Virginia is not likely to displace Vermont anytime soon. Vermont produces about 3.1 million gallons of syrup a year; Virginia squeezes out somewhere north of 2,000 gallons. Still, that figure is growing (up from 1,385 gallons in the previous census), as are the places that realize they have maple trees that can be tapped. In 2017, seven counties in Virginia had maple farms; now that number has nearly tripled — all in the western part of the state except for Loudoun County (which does border the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge) and Halifax County in Southside. One of the fastest-growing maple syrup producers in Virginia is Wise County, driven by Southfork Road Farm.
That first year, the Hubbards tapped trees the old-fashioned way — driving a stake into the trunk and letting the sap drip out into a bucket. “We’d slip and slide and spill,” Brian Hubbard says. “I said if I do this, I need to run it downhill.”
Now Brian Hubbard has a modern syrup operation, with plastic tubes connected to the trees, and a vacuum pump delivering the precious sap to his sugar house, where it’s boiled down to syrup. He says it takes five trees to produce one gallon of syrup. By last year, he tapped 1,000 trees; this year, he added about a hundred more and says he still has more that could be. He’s a self-taught maple farmer: He read up on research from the University of Vermont. After about two or three years of operation, he visited a maple farm in Highland County. “That’s the only one I’ve ever seen,” he says.
The main business at Southfork Road Farm is growing blueberries in the summer and producing sorghum in the fall; syrup has now become an agricultural product that can be produced in winter and early spring. “You need a freeze and then a thaw,” Hubbard says. That combination of cold nights and warm days is what gets the sap rising, which means it’s time to tap the tree.
Spanberger’s nominee for secretary of agriculture and forestry, Katie Frazier, knew Chef T, and Chef T knew Hubbard. When the chef called about syrup for the First Gentleman’s Pancake Breakfast, Hubbard donated 180 bottles.
It’s fresh, too — all boiled down within the past few weeks. More is on the way. He was busy Friday, tending another batch being boiled down.
