Farm Mobbing is a work share program that brings student volunteers to Madison area farms on a weekly basis. Students will work with the farmers on various tasks while learning about the processes involved in getting a food item from seed to market. In return for their help volunteers will be compensated by the farmers with either a meal or a basket of fresh produce.
Let me tell you: we lucked out. For example:
- Usually it's just a day trip, but we got to stay overnight.
- Usually you actually do a lot of hard manual labor, for the most part we stood around and talked to Rufus and his family and drank beer.
Don't get me wrong! I would have loved to do some physical work and help out around the farm; it's always a good feeling of accomplishment. But who doesn't like standing out in a beautiful forest in the middle of nowhere in chilly February weather with a big fire and new friends and a beer?
So for this Farm Mobbing expedition, there was a group of four of us that drove two hours in a rented Prius to Keewaydin Farm, owned by a cool guy named Rufus.
What happens in late February/ early March on a farm? Maple Syrup.
First we got a tour of a neighboring farm. Kenny and Michelle are living the life. They built their sugar shack (this sugar shack is anything but a shack. It's absolutely beautiful. See picture directly below.) with the help of friends and family and everything that went into it has a story. They are artists in every sense of the word. They filled in a few of the cracks in the wood on the inside of the shack with ground up turquoise mixed with some kind of putty.
They told us all about the process of turning sap into syrup. Their sugar shack sits down in a valley and these lines and gravity do all the work of collecting the sap. No buckets for Michelle and Kenny anymore.
Then we got to taste their maple syrup. So so delicious. Drank it straight out of a cup.
Rufus' process is a little more rustic.
First there's some drilling. Doesn't hurt the tree, but it's kind of fun because you can see little holes all up the tree where they've tapped them past years.
Then you hammer in the tap. I was really bad at that and kept breaking off part of the metal because I would hit the wrong bit so Laur took that over. Can you see the old holes in the tree??
Then you hang the bucket and the sap starts pouring out. (On good days. It was too cold the day we were doing it.) Some days, probably like this week when it's supposed to get up to 50, you can collect a full 5-gallon pail of sap in a day.
The sap is poured into a big vat over a huge fire. So the rest of the time we spent feeding the fire or collecting wood Rufus cut down.
This is the sap boiling. I think they said it was like 33 gallons of sap to 1 gallon of syrup.
For dinner we just threw hotdogs, potatoes, and eggs into the sap to cook them. Seriously. Straight into the sap. Never had a better hotdog: it had just a slight taste of maple.
This is Max:
At about 8p, when it was way too dark to see what was happening in the sap vat, lots of wood was put onto the fire. We were leaving for the night, which is a tricky time since you want to put on enough wood to keep it going all night, but not too much where you'll burn the sap.
It was practically an inferno. About twenty minutes later, Rufus declared that he'd probably went a little overboard. Earlier we had been informed that Rufus is known for burning the sap according to his father (who also used the phrase 'dry as a popcorn fart' while telling us this tale of how they started to burn off a small bit of prairie grass and ended up burning acres and acres of land when it got out of control)
Parts of the bottom of the vat were visible, no sap covering them, which is really bad from what I gathered. We were sent gathering snow and throwing it on the fire in an attempt to stop the cooking of the sap.
When we left, Rufus didn't seemed too concerned, so hopefully the syrup wasn't ruined. We probably will never know since we left right in the morning and headed back to campus.
