12-02-2025
Maple syrup season: OSU-Mansfield's sugarbush teaches sustainability through sugaring
Maple syrup season has returned to North Central Ohio.
Sap should soon be flowing in most Ohio trees this week, said Gabe Karns, an assistant professor with the School of Environment and Natural Resources at Ohio State University.
Prime syrup-making season runs from mid-February until early April when the trees start budding.
"In your ideal world, you would get down into the low-to-mid 20s at night," Karns said. "During the daytime, you want it to get up around 40-45 degrees, plus sunshine."
Faculty, students and volunteers have been busy this month preparing the sugarbush at OSU-Mansfield for this year's syrup production.
Their efforts will be on display 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. March 8 during "Maple Madness," a free public event that will feature syrup-making demonstrations, tours of the woods and a meal of pancakes with fresh maple syrup.
Several species of maple trees are native throughout the Buckeye State.
The woods at the OSU-Mansfield campus contain a luscious 19-acre patch of maples known as the sugarbush, according to Kathy Smith, director of forestry for the School of Environment and Natural Resources at OSU.
This is the seventh season that sap is collected from the 1,200 maples in the sugarbush and made into maple syrup.
The location was developed for sap collection and maple syrup production thanks to state funding.
The sap drains through several miles of tubing in the sugarbush that gets pumped into a massive storage tank.
The site also contains a smaller wood-fired evaporator that's good for cooking a few hundred gallons of sap each day.
The evaporator at OSU-Mansfield is designed strictly for educational purposes. Most of the sap collected from the university's sugarbush is taken by a maple syrup producer from Ashland County who remotely monitors the sap tank's level.
"He's got a thousand-gallon tank on a trailer," Smith said. "He comes and takes it 1,000 gallons at a time."
During the height of the sap flow, the tank has to be emptied two or three times daily.
Sap from the Mansfield sugarbush processed in Ashland is returned to campus and available for purchase.
The project was created to teach Ohioans about maple syrup production, from landowners to students and even consumers.
A shocking discovery for educators was how many people had become disconnected from what true syrup really is.
"Most syrup today, if you look at those on the shelf, they don't have any maple in them," Smith said.
Some visitors learn that maple syrup is created from condensed tree sap. A few realize that sap from trees other than maples — like birch, hickory and sycamore — can also be made into sweet syrup. Everyone is taught that some trees can provide up to three gallons of sap each day and it takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.
The system at the OSU-Mansfield sugarbush is used year-round to demonstrate to landowners and professionals the intricacies of successful sap collection. Several seminars are available for those who want to create their own sap-to-syrup operation.
The university also plans to build classes for students who would like to study Ohio's maple syrup industry.
"It will be taught through the lens of sustainability," Karns said. "Local food is actually better than faraway food for a number of reasons."
He said the goal is to teach people that sustainability and making syrup from native Ohio trees go hand-in-hand.
"Weaving sustainability through the practice of sugaring is the furthest thing from a new thing that you can possibly imagine," Karns said. "But in some ways, with some segments of society, it is sort of like an epiphany."
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This article originally appeared on Mansfield News Journal: Maple syrup season has reached the sugarbush at OSU-Mansfield
