Talking Sugaring with Jenna, Jacob and the Syrup Daddy at Baird Farm: EP42

Today’s episode comes to you from Chittenden Vermont where we visit with Baird Farm. If you’ve heard of them you may recognize that they are NOT a diversified vegetable farm. They are a medium scale maple producer with about  15,000 taps. Vermont is known for its maple but what makes them unique is that 90% of their volume is sold directly to the consumer. They lean heavily on online sales, and agritourism for their retail business. 

Like most of my shows the first hour features a walking tour where Jacob and Jenna provide an overview of maple production and what it looks like on their farm. We walk to the woods to see some trees and sap lines, pop our heads in a pump house then tour seeing the sugar house which includes the bottling room and retail area.  Once we’ve gotten the lay of the land we then pull up a stool in the farm stand. Jenna’s Dad, Bob, also known as the Syrup Daddy joins us for the conversation to share some insights to his history of Vermont agriculture and how it’s transitioned over the years into the business it is today. 

Transcript

Jenna Baird (00:00:10):

My name is Jenna Baird, and we are at the Baird Farm in Chittenden, Vermont. It's my family's farm that's been in the family for over 100 years, and we make and sell maple syrup.

Jacob Powsner (00:00:21):

I am Jacob Powsner. I am Jenna's other half. I'm not a Baird, they mostly just tolerate me here. And Jen and I returned to this farm about 10 years ago. I think this year will be our 10th season making syrup on the farm.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:00:50):

I'm your host, Andy Chamberlin, and I take you behind the scenes to learn how farmers are building their business in sustainable agriculture. These farmer-to-farmer interviews cover a wide range of topics, from cropping systems, marketing channels, lifestyle decisions, and lessons learned along the way. This podcast is supported by the University of Vermont Extension and the Vermont Vegetable and Berry Growers Association. It has funding from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food, and Markets as part of a specialty crop block grant. Unfortunately, the end of that grant funding is coming to a close soon, so if you enjoy the show and would like to help keep more episodes coming, please consider making a donation. Any amount is greatly appreciated and can be made on our website, thefarmershare.com/support. Thank you.

(00:01:36):

Today's episode comes to you from Chittenden, Vermont, where we visit with Baird Farm. If you've heard of them, you may recognize that they are not a diversified vegetable farm. They are a medium-scale maple producer with about 15,000 taps. Vermont is known for its maple, but what makes them unique is that 90% of their volume is sold directly to the consumer. They lean heavily on online sales and agritourism for the retail business. Like most of my episodes, the first hour features a walking tour, where Jacob and Jenna provide an overview of maple production and what it looks like on their farm.

(00:02:11):

We walk to the woods, see some trees and sap lines, pop our heads into a pump house, then tour the sugar house, which includes a bottling room and retail area, in addition to the evaporator and sap tanks. Once we've gotten a lay of the land, we then pull up a stool in the farm stand. Jenna's dad, Bob, also known as the syrup daddy, joins us for the conversation to share some insights to the history of Vermont agriculture and how it's transitioned over the years into the business that it is today. For reference, this visit happened January 29th, 2026. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoy the show.

Jacob Powsner (00:02:47):

Ah, there is the sun.

Jenna Baird (00:02:51):

Yeah. Hello, son.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:02:51):

Yeah. It's that last half hour of the day, sun.

Jenna Baird (00:02:53):

Yeah. It was gorgeous this morning.

Jacob Powsner (00:02:56):

It was a gorgeous day.

Jenna Baird (00:02:57):

Especially with a little bit of dusting on the ground last night.

Jacob Powsner (00:03:00):

It was like just glittering this morning, as I drank my coffee, the birds were on the feeder. It was nice.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:03:06):

Do you put anything in your coffee to make it glitter, like amber rich maple syrup?

Jacob Powsner (00:03:11):

Not usually. I just straight black.

Jenna Baird (00:03:13):

Run of sparkle.

Jacob Powsner (00:03:16):

So, we can just start talking if you want, and tell you a little bit about... So, what did we say? Jenna, this has... We just met Bob. Jenna's-

Jenna Baird (00:03:28):

Dad.

Jacob Powsner (00:03:29):

And he's been living here his entire life.

Jenna Baird (00:03:32):

Yep. Yeah, he always says he started making maple syrup when he was two, and then the next person he tells it to, he was one.

Jacob Powsner (00:03:40):

Yeah, the numbers are a little loose.

Jenna Baird (00:03:42):

It's like when I was in the womb. But he's been doing it for a long time, long story short. My great-grandmother bought the farm in 1918. The main farmhouse there, she ran as a guest house for a old school Airbnb situation, so people would come up and spend the summers here.

Jacob Powsner (00:04:03):

And they milked cows.

Jenna Baird (00:04:04):

Yep, and they milked cows. And then my parents met because my mom worked there, and they were also... My mom grew up on a farm in the town of Pittsford, just over the hill, and so they were farm families in the area, so they knew each other. Yeah. And then-

Jacob Powsner (00:04:21):

The family was farming on this road before that, they were just farming up the hill.

Jenna Baird (00:04:24):

Up the hill.

Jacob Powsner (00:04:25):

So, they stick 1918 on the sign because that's the direction blood lineage, if you track your lineages by blood. But otherwise, they were farming. Weren't they farming up at Dave and Michelle Parker's farm at the end of the road?

Jenna Baird (00:04:42):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:04:44):

It kind of dead ends up there. We're not far from Goshen. You could pretty much sled to Goshen if it was downhill.

Jenna Baird (00:04:51):

There is a road that goes... You can't drive it. And then, yeah, I don't know. My parents were farming here. They were doing maple kind of as a... It was kind of dad's hobby, sort of, and then they scaled it into more of a business. I don't know, would you say in the '90s probably?

Jacob Powsner (00:05:14):

Yeah. I mean, the USDA calls maple the first calendar crop of the year, and it was like a lot of farms, the maple was the side hustle is often what I say. And so your grandfather sold syrup?

Jenna Baird (00:05:28):

Yeah. No, I don't think my grandfather did.

Jacob Powsner (00:05:30):

That's what Bob told me.

Jenna Baird (00:05:31):

I don't know what to ask him.

Jacob Powsner (00:05:31):

Gonna settle a score in that (inaudible).

Jenna Baird (00:05:34):

My great-grandmother, she made syrup, but back then it was really small scale.

Jacob Powsner (00:05:41):

Yeah.

Jenna Baird (00:05:41):

And my parents kind of grew that in the '90s, and then they started a small retail business. I think you'll have to ask my dad this one too, but I think he was the first maple operation to have an official website.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:05:53):

Whoa.

Jacob Powsner (00:05:53):

I don't know, is that true?

Jenna Baird (00:05:54):

That's what he says, I don't know.

Jacob Powsner (00:05:58):

It was early. You can go to the whatever, the Way Back, you know this website where you can get early snapshots of the websites, and you can see like the original, or one of the original websites from way back. And so they'd made a living and they paid their bills milking a herd of Holstein cows, and they had almost 60 head-ish when they were milking.

Jenna Baird (00:06:22):

I think that was the most they had.

Jacob Powsner (00:06:23):

And then they raised dairy heifers, and contract raised, and the maple, they took an intentional pivot away from dairying and towards maple. So this farm took an intentional pivot away from dairy and livestock, and towards maple. And now, I often say it's kind of a joke, but it's a real thing, Jen and I do pay our Netflix bills with maple syrup now.

Jenna Baird (00:06:56):

Except we use your mom's Netflix.

Jacob Powsner (00:06:57):

Yeah, we actually steal my mom's Netflix. But we're paying something else. We got the HBO, the Peacock, you know what I mean, they add up. And so today, or this past month, we tapped over 14,000 trees, less than 15,000 trees. And we're kind of standing in the middle, you can see this whole ridge we tapped. We're looking east, so up that knob, down where it dips towards that saddle over there, there's around 5,000 maple trees we tapped. We tap a couple thousand trees over that ridge line, and we're actually pumping sap over the mountain now. And you see the main lines here.

Jenna Baird (00:07:36):

Yeah, those trees eventually go into that building.

Jacob Powsner (00:07:40):

Yeah, they go under the road. Don't tell the select board in Vermont. Supposedly, Bob got permission back in the day. They haven't come back and asked.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:07:47):

Oh, that's grandfathered in?

Jacob Powsner (00:07:54):

And there's another... Where we're headed, to kind of the tip of the iceberg over here, there's another almost 7,000 trees over here. And then we lease land, like I said, over the ridge, we lease land, a side hill over here, and we just... Bob and Bonnie got access to more trees, and we're expanding right over here, kind of, and so we're adding trees. So, I spent most of the morning laying out where we're going to next. That's the big picture. The farm, in total, is 585 acres-ish. It's a lot of land.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:08:29):

Yeah, it is.

Jacob Powsner (00:08:31):

There's about 120 acres of open-ish land. Most of that we graze with another young guy, Jamie Hamilton, of Hamilton Cattle Company.

Jenna Baird (00:08:42):

Hamilton Cattle.

Jacob Powsner (00:08:43):

He's got cows all over the place.

Jenna Baird (00:08:45):

I think he's got three to 400 cows. I think there's usually like 60 of them here in the early summer or fall.

Jacob Powsner (00:08:57):

Yeah. So, he's a young, smart, driven guy that's trying to get into farming. He also went to VTC, and he really had his heart set on dairying and-

Jenna Baird (00:09:11):

He was working on the farm up the road. No longer milk's cows there, but they used to.

Jacob Powsner (00:09:18):

It was the last milking farm in the town of Chittenden. But beef was the direction where to go, where the money is, and so we lease him the land to do grazing here, and we market the beef too. So, in that little farm shop that we stepped into, we sell specialty steaks and ground beef.

Jenna Baird (00:09:43):

Yeah. I mean, I think it works well, because we have so much open land that doesn't have a use, and so otherwise we'd have to figure something out. And so it's sort of a win-win for both ends, for him and for us.

Jacob Powsner (00:10:01):

Helps keep the land clear.

Jenna Baird (00:10:03):

And it still makes it feel like, with animals on the farm, it's picturesque.

Jacob Powsner (00:10:10):

It's active, yeah.

Jenna Baird (00:10:10):

It makes it feel... I mean, not that we're not active in the woods, but when you drive by, you don't see that.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:10:15):

You need animals to make it feel like a farm?

Jenna Baird (00:10:18):

No. Well, we'll talk about the agritourism piece, but we do a lot of agritourism here, and I think that does... When people come and they see cows, it's really exciting.

Jacob Powsner (00:10:28):

People do like seeing cows.

Jenna Baird (00:10:30):

They have Jamie, him and his fiance, they have two longhorns.

Jacob Powsner (00:10:35):

Texas longhorns.

Jenna Baird (00:10:36):

And they're just kind of pets, but they spend the summer here, and so people really like those.

Jacob Powsner (00:10:44):

So here we are, at the tip of the sugar bush, and this is often where we bring tour groups. So, you'll see a couple trees that have passed.

Jenna Baird (00:10:53):

Yeah, there's some that are not tapped here. Those are the last of our trees that we have not tapped because we're saving them to do with tour groups.

Jacob Powsner (00:11:00):

We didn't miss them.

Jenna Baird (00:11:01):

No.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:11:03):

We're saving them for demonstration.

Jenna Baird (00:11:04):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:11:05):

Do you know about like modern maple, and tools and stuff?

Andy Chamberlin  (00:11:08):

Yeah, I'm certainly aware of the industry. However, not all of my listeners are up the curve, I'll say.

Jenna Baird (00:11:15):

Sure.

Jacob Powsner (00:11:16):

Yeah. So, it's a really fast growing industry. It's quintupled size maybe, in 20 years. It's a $2 billion industry. And this farm has doubled in size in the past 10 years-ish, in terms of taps. So we're tapping more trees, we're making more syrup, and partially why it's grown is like market and demand, and demand for more natural sweeteners and less processed sugars, right? So less high-fructose corn, less cane, and more maple and agave and honey. And so Jen and I came back to this farm. This is our-

Jenna Baird (00:11:55):

Maybe 15, I think.

Jacob Powsner (00:11:56):

10th.

Jenna Baird (00:11:57):

10th year.

Jacob Powsner (00:11:57):

Sugaring season here. And pretty much every year, we've added some amount of trees to make more maple syrup and market more maple syrup. When we first came back, her dad, Bob, said, "You better figure something else out to do other than just maple," and so we had all these ideas.

Jenna Baird (00:12:20):

Well, you're talking about Vern. He's the one with the blueberries. He was like-

Jacob Powsner (00:12:24):

We did reach out to Vern.

Jenna Baird (00:12:25):

Yeah, right, yeah. We were thinking about-

Jacob Powsner (00:12:27):

Blueberries.

Jenna Baird (00:12:28):

Blueberries. We thought about hops.

Jacob Powsner (00:12:32):

Hops. We went to all of Heather Darby's hops conferences, and... Hops are a crazy crop.

Jenna Baird (00:12:36):

Yeah. But the maple just kind of, we were able to grow it enough that it's worked. We do have Christmas trees, that's kind of like a side project.

Jacob Powsner (00:12:47):

We sold our first one last year.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:12:48):

Okay.

Jacob Powsner (00:12:48):

We sold one.

Jenna Baird (00:12:49):

They're not very big yet. Yeah, we've sold one tree.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:12:52):

How many, or how big an area is dedicated to trees?

Jenna Baird (00:12:55):

We can look at them, if you wanted.

Jacob Powsner (00:12:56):

Yeah, we can look at them. There's a couple thousand trees across. Most of them are in about a three acre-ish plot.

Jenna Baird (00:13:05):

We're still adding, but-

Jacob Powsner (00:13:07):

And we plant them every year, and so that'll be a fun companion crop. There's a deep history of folks, at least in the Northeast, and Vermont especially, that do Christmas trees alongside maple because of the seasonal... The seasons kind of match, yeah. And so this farm has grown a lot and changed a lot. And what we're going to see over the next little bit, right, like some things are exactly the same in the sugar house, but then some things have really modernized. The tubing is all on high vacuum. We use electronic remote monitoring systems to get high production. There's a lot there we could dig into. What are you curious about?

Andy Chamberlin  (00:13:55):

I don't know. It's all cool to me. 14,000, that's pretty good size, isn't it?

Jacob Powsner (00:14:03):

Yeah, it's a good size. Everybody's got different numbers. If you go to the Vermont Department of Ag, they think there's like 1,500 sugar makers. If you go to the Vermont Sugar Makers Association, they think there's somewhere north of 3,000 sugar makers in Vermont. And normally, how they categorize it is like small producers, medium producers, and large producers. And so like anyone that's like maybe 5,000 and under, 7,500 under, are like a small producer. Anyone that's between like 10 to 25,000 is a medium producer, even though it sounds very big, right?

Andy Chamberlin  (00:14:39):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:14:40):

And then anyone who's over 25,000 trees, I think they consider still a large tap producer. And there's lots of those farms in Vermont, you just don't necessarily see them or hear about them because they don't have... They're not on Google Maps. They're not publicly advertising they're selling bulk syrup.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:14:58):

Right.

Jacob Powsner (00:14:59):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:15:00):

And they're way out in the boonies.

Jenna Baird (00:15:01):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:15:01):

They're way out in the sticks, yeah. There's a lot of them up in the Underhill. You know where you're at, either they're there or that corridor up in Franklin County, there's something like... There's like a couple hundred thousand trees tapped up there.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:15:16):

It's ridiculous. For our farm story, I'm like, "Okay, we're in Underhill, I know there's a ton of..." And like I'm Googling it, and like you guys are coming up.

Jacob Powsner (00:15:23):

I know.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:15:26):

There's satellites all around, but I can't find them.

Jacob Powsner (00:15:26):

[inaudible 00:15:30] is arching.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:15:31):

They're wholesaling. They're shipping it by the barrel.

Jacob Powsner (00:15:38):

Who do we know up in Underhill? Isn't William Butler, he's right there.

Jenna Baird (00:15:42):

Is he the one we know?

Andy Chamberlin  (00:15:45):

That's who we're selling, Moose Mountain.

Jacob Powsner (00:15:46):

Moose Mountain, yeah, he's great.

Jenna Baird (00:15:46):

Yeah, he's great. He's got a good sense of humor.

Jacob Powsner (00:15:50):

He does. He's funny. Anyways, so you're down here in the, quote-unquote, banana belt kind of. Man, this is like, I don't know, we're at about 1,100-ish elevation. The top of the sugar brush over there is closer to 1,500, and we have nice, for the most part, like nice temperatures. The trees run well. This side of the sugar bush, these are all younger trees that we're looking at here.

Jenna Baird (00:16:21):

And when we came-

Andy Chamberlin  (00:16:22):

Most are south-facing, except for the 2,000 over the hill?

Jacob Powsner (00:16:26):

Yeah, it's like east and west-facing, but we get a lot of this kind of southern exposure. There's not a whole lot of like northern exposure.

Jenna Baird (00:16:34):

When we came back to the farm in 2015, my dad was just starting... They logged back here, took out a lot of the pines, and then this is pretty much all new since then, everything back this way. Though they used to tap my great-grandmother, before they were doing a lot of tubing, they used to tap back in that old abandoned sugar house and-

Jacob Powsner (00:16:55):

Rusty buckets, hauling sap. And like Bob said just before, right, we don't haul sap here anymore, so it's all pumped.

Jenna Baird (00:17:06):

It's really nice.

Jacob Powsner (00:17:06):

It is really nice. I mean, one way of thinking about sugaring is it's basically outdoor plumbing. It's like running an obscene amount of like drip irrigation, right? There's 110 miles of tubing on this farm, with 10,000 little tees and fittings, and Ys, and Legos that keep it all together. And so, I mean, most of your listeners probably don't know, but modern maple is all made on vacuum. So, you take like a vacuum pump, like people would have in their milk houses, or like the dentist's office, like the schlerp tool, and you stick it on all the tubing, and we get a lot more sat that way. We might get two, three times more sap under high vacuum. And so like we are really obsessive. I mean, we're obsessive about a lot of things here. We have obsessive personalities, but we're really obsessive about maintaining high vacuum in the woods, because it's like a real viability, make it or break it. Yeah. That's like in a pop house.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:18:01):

Otherwise it's a whole lot of work for a little sap.

Jacob Powsner (00:18:03):

Yeah, as it is, it's a lot of sap to get a little sugar.

Jenna Baird (00:18:05):

Right.

Jacob Powsner (00:18:08):

So, maybe we could look back here, just so we get an idea of like how main lines are constructed, if you've never seen them, right? But we're lashing these big... These are for the most part, high density polyethylene, like BPA-free, food-grade lines. We lash them to wire, almost like a vineyard system, right? Because everything needs to be anchored, it needs to be supported. We want it on a 2% grade so it drains well. And like oftentimes, we'll be the ones driving down the back roads of Vermont, like rubber necking, cranking our heads around to see, like, "Oh, you can really tell a good sugar maker by how their main lines are."

Jenna Baird (00:18:49):

Yeah. Sometimes you see the ones that are like this.

Jacob Powsner (00:18:51):

Yeah, these are the ones that are like wave, and you're like, "Oh, boy."

Andy Chamberlin  (00:18:55):

Amateur.

Jacob Powsner (00:18:57):

No, there's no shame here. There's no shame, Andy. Everybody's trying their best, but it's good to see nice taut tubing, especially this time of year. So like our calendar workflow here is, we like to clean up the tubing and the early winter late foliage, hopefully. It's hard for us to get out to the woods these days because of the growth of the retail business, but we walk all of the sugar bush. So, there's maybe 250-ish acres that we actively use for maple. With this expansion, we'll be at around close to 275 acres just for maple. And so we cut off trees, we make sure the pipes are nice and taut. We add trees if there's trees that are big enough to add, we pull off trees that have blown over and died, and then so we're all ready to tap.

Jenna Baird (00:19:52):

When you say cut off trees, anything that's fallen on tubing lines.

Jacob Powsner (00:19:57):

Yeah, right.

Jenna Baird (00:19:58):

Because if when you start tapping in January, and you have a couple feet of snow, things are buried and frozen, and it can take like two times longer to tap your trees if you're dealing with that.

Jacob Powsner (00:20:12):

And so I mean, that takes a lot of time, just prepping this season. And then for folks who aren't familiar with maple, every year, you need to drill new holes into trees. Every year, you need to pound new spouts into those holes, and hook it up to either the tubing system or your bucket system to gather the sap. And we start tapping trees early and earlier, partially because of climate, and partially because of the tools in tech and modern maple. So like if you asked Bob years ago, if we would be tapping in January, he'd be like, "That's insane. You don't tap trees in January." In Vermont, they used to say you tap trees, right, the week before town meeting day, which is the day we all get in one tiny room and we fight over the budget.

(00:20:57):

And so like they used to say, you know, you want those wounds to be kind of fresh? You can see an old wound right here, right? This is last year's tap. You want the wound to be fresh, so that when the big runs happen in March, the little vessels in the xylem can get essentially clogged essentially, and the tree is healing up after you drill the hole. It does this thing called compartmentalization, so it's like walling off the damage. But some large operators, like there's one in this county, they start tapping trees in November, and then they have 50,000 trees or so to tap. And then if it's a warm green Christmas, they make syrup. Even if they're half-tapped-

Jenna Baird (00:21:41):

They made syrup before Christmas, I think, the past couple of years.

Jacob Powsner (00:21:44):

A lot of people have. And then if you have a couple thousand trees tapped, then you can turn on your vacuum pump early. And if you turn on your vacuum pump early, you can kind of like tighten up the whole system. You can like get the biggest problems out of the way, so when the runs do happen in February or March, then you're like full throttle.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:22:05):

Capitalize on the January thaw.

Jacob Powsner (00:22:07):

Yeah. And so we made syrup in January... What was that? Was that three seasons ago now, Jenna?

Jenna Baird (00:22:15):

It wasn't last year, it was the year before.

Jacob Powsner (00:22:18):

Oh, you know, I don't have the light. If we go to the other pump house, I have the breaker closed over there. Why don't we do that? It's right over there, and then we can see a cool pump house.

Jenna Baird (00:22:28):

It looks the same.

Jacob Powsner (00:22:32):

And then partially, so this industry, right, like back in the day, there was always the January thaw, right? It's not like they invented that down in Washington DC, to fool us. Jenna believes in chem trails, and all that stuff.

Jenna Baird (00:22:45):

Don't put that in there.

Jacob Powsner (00:22:48):

But like there was always a January thaw, but Jenna's grandmother probably didn't go out and put buckets on because you might get this much sap.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:22:55):

Yeah, right. It ain't worth it, yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:22:57):

It ain't worth it.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:22:57):

But if it's running right to you.

Jacob Powsner (00:22:59):

If it's running right to you and you get two, three times more because you're under high vacuum, and you can fix all your vacuum leaks, like that marginalia all adds up. And so like people have made a lot more syrup on the margins of the season, both early in the season and figuring out how to make sludge at the end of the season, basically until May.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:23:20):

Sludge.

Jacob Powsner (00:23:20):

And the large, the really big farms, they can make a lot of syrup at the end of the season, especially with this new boiling technologies, like steam, and you clean up the sap so it doesn't spoil as much. There's a lot there. So the past couple years, Jenna and I have been not on the early, early kick, but on the traditional kick.

Jenna Baird (00:23:43):

I don't think we... We'd have to hire more help to do the early, because we're really busy in December with holiday orders and shipping and packing, and stuff, so like-

Jacob Powsner (00:23:53):

Ship and pack.

Jenna Baird (00:23:56):

I don't know how we would start that early.

Jacob Powsner (00:23:58):

Well, we might figure it out anytime.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:24:01):

How many crew members are helping you throughout the season?

Jenna Baird (00:24:07):

Right now, there's us, and then we have two employees, and then my dad.

Jacob Powsner (00:24:13):

There's four of us. Well, yeah, there's four of us including us. So we have two folks, Charlie and Wesley, you'll meet Charlie, he's-

Jenna Baird (00:24:20):

He's bottling syrup.

Jacob Powsner (00:24:22):

Wesley's out fixing these new lines out there. You might meet him too. And then Bob is like bonus, he does whatever he wants to do and-

Andy Chamberlin  (00:24:33):

Right, but he's not under obligation.

Jenna Baird (00:24:40):

If there's an emergency, maybe.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:24:41):

[inaudible 00:24:45].

Jacob Powsner (00:24:44):

There's a whole thing there. So just maybe we should spell it out for a second. The third generation, Bonnie and Bob, Jenna's parents who own this farm, and own the real estate, and they own the maple production, they basically lease this farm to us.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:25:00):

Okay.

Jacob Powsner (00:25:00):

And we worked with farm viability and Sam Smith. You know Sam Smith?

Andy Chamberlin  (00:25:08):

Yeah. Yeah, he's great.

Jacob Powsner (00:25:10):

He helped us navigate like how to think about structuring some sort of transition of just the production end of the business, and so-

Jenna Baird (00:25:19):

And Mark did some of that.

Jacob Powsner (00:25:20):

And Mark Canella too, who, he's a real expert, in terms of numbers and maple, and how to value things, right? Like how do you value old tubing in the woods, and how do you value this rusty old tank that probably shouldn't be used legally for sap anymore, like all of these things. So, the answer is zero, by the way. And so, we pay them to use the farm and use the equipment, and one day, we will eventually pay off that massive, massive number. Although sometimes it doesn't seem like the number's going down, does it, Jenna?

Andy Chamberlin  (00:26:07):

It's a moot point because you're going to do it anyway.

Jenna Baird (00:26:11):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:26:12):

So, this building needs to get cleaned up before the season, but this is just showing you how we gather sap.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:26:17):

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:26:18):

And so, you know, there's a mess of tubing that's coming into the wall, this fills up like a bathtub. This is actually like an old dairy bulk tank. If it looks familiar, that's why. Most maple producers don't use something like this, they use something called a releaser. Have we seen these things, they're like blue canisters?

Andy Chamberlin  (00:26:37):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:26:38):

How they function, right, it's you need a way of holding the vacuum power. You need a way of holding the vacuum and also gathering the sap, and so this does that all in one, and this is set up on... There's three well pumps in there essentially.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:26:56):

Those right there? Those are the-

Jacob Powsner (00:26:57):

Yeah, yeah. So, those are liquid well pumps. And from here, we're pumping sap up the hill to the sugar house.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:27:06):

Okay.

Jacob Powsner (00:27:06):

A lot of your listeners, if they're not familiar with sap, a lot of people think of sap, and they think thick and brownie, syrupy, sticky, like pine pitch. But sap is not like that, right? Sap is 98.5% water-ish, and one and a half percent sugar. So it's moving through these pipe systems like water, it's freezing like water, tastes like water.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:27:32):

This is a fancy little pump house.

Jacob Powsner (00:27:34):

We put up this nice steel.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:27:35):

Yeah. Is it all insulated?

Jacob Powsner (00:27:36):

It was some blueboard. You should have seen it the other year when it wasn't insulated. And actually, the tiny amount of insulation we put in there does really help. There's still some heat tape. There's still like a couple nights of the year where you might put a light bulb in the tank to stop it from freezing with those pumps. But this little side space next to it, we do have a heater. So, these are the vacuum pumps that we were talking about, right? These are what generate the suction. These are liquid ring. These are both 10 horsepower pumps. They're water-cooled pumps. They're hooked up to VFDs, Variable Frequency Drives, right? So we can control the speed of the pump.

(00:28:28):

They save power, but like you can do cool tricks with these with maple, if you're not familiar, where like... If there's a lot of leaks, if we turn on the vacuum system and there's a lot of leaks over there, I can isolate it with valves, and put one vacuum on this side, one vacuum on that side, and I can see, right, if the vacuum is spinning faster, drawing more hertz, there's more problems over there, and so you can immediately be like, "We're going over there to fix leaks today." People have really, really fancy pump house situations now.

(00:29:04):

So we call this a pump house, it's like a collection spot. People have some that are totally off grid, that are run off generators and solar, that run 40, 50,000 trees. This one is like a little old school. We could put like a fancy smart camera in here and look at the numbers, but we almost have intentionally not done that because it forces us to come down, and actually like, " Oh, if the thing is leaking water, then we want to know if it's freezing in the next room because the heater breaker has tripped. I want to know."

Andy Chamberlin  (00:29:39):

It'll tell you to check on things now and then.

Jacob Powsner (00:29:41):

Yeah, it's a short walk.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:29:43):

Yeah. It was half mile away, up over the hill, then that's a different story.

Jenna Baird (00:29:49):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:29:49):

And we have one. We have one that's... The farthest tree is about a mile and a half away, and there's a pump house over there that almost runs itself during the season, but-

Jenna Baird (00:30:00):

Sometimes you got to remind yourself-

PART 1 OF 5 ENDS [00:30:04]

Jenna Baird (00:30:03):

Sometimes I got to remind ourself, "I should probably go over there and look at it."

Jacob Powsner (00:30:06):

Hell yeah. Make sure those machines are actually doing what they're supposed to do.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:30:08):

Yep.

Jacob Powsner (00:30:11):

The alternative and what you see many, many maple farmers do-

Jenna Baird (00:30:15):

Should I put the bottom one or no?

Jacob Powsner (00:30:15):

I'm not sure it matters. It's just running water in there. We're not eating it yet. Is to buy a truck and haul sat. So you see pickup trucks with IBC totes, right? On the back or-

Andy Chamberlin  (00:30:32):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:30:33):

... big tanker trucks, if you can afford one, like big stainless steel prepped.

Jenna Baird (00:30:37):

People also RO their sat before trucking it, so they don't have the whole set up.

Jacob Powsner (00:30:41):

So you don't have as much liquid or weight.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:30:44):

[inaudible 00:30:45].

Jacob Powsner (00:30:45):

That gets it up to 40%. There's all sorts of different concentrate machines out there. Most producers, if they have a modern [inaudible 00:30:55] they're boiling at around 20-ish, they do make these things that are called sometimes hyperbrics machines that can go way higher and you need to boil on a flat pan evaporator. Have you read about these?

Andy Chamberlin  (00:31:08):

No.

Jacob Powsner (00:31:09):

So Proctor Maple, the University of Vermont's Maple Research Center, I think they have one of those systems still. And that's one possible direction of the future of maple. And so the idea a lot of those people are doing is they're trying to keep the sap as long as they can. So like using chilled tanks or otherwise, and then concentrating the SAP through reverse osmosis and maybe doing like six boils a year.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:31:43):

Oh.

Jacob Powsner (00:31:43):

Right?

Andy Chamberlin  (00:31:44):

Just to save energy?

Jacob Powsner (00:31:46):

Save energy and time over boiling. Versus what we do here every day during the season is you spend most of the daylight hours running around fixing the outdoor plumbing. And then as the sun sets and the temps are dropping again below freezing and the trees start dripping, you go back to the sugar house, you see how many thousands of gallons of sat you have and we clean it up here every night pretty much. There's-

Andy Chamberlin  (00:32:15):

So you have a good run's day's capacity?

Jenna Baird (00:32:19):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:32:20):

Yeah. Every day is different. Some days you look at the weather and you're like, "Sap's not going to run tomorrow so I'm going to try to squeak it through the night." Or you can play tricks with the sap always. So like you can force it through the reverse osmosis machine and just sweeten it up to 2% or 3% and you can cut your volume in half so you have more storage. Every farm, right? And this is true with veg farms or dairy farms, there's a bottleneck somewhere. For a lot of people that's labor, right? And one of the bottlenecks here is liquid tank storage, right?

Jenna Baird (00:32:56):

And just space in general.

Jacob Powsner (00:32:57):

Sometimes you just have to deal with it. Space in general, as you will see as we walk through the sugar house, it will be tight, but-

Andy Chamberlin  (00:33:06):

That's common on all farms. Never have enough space.

Jacob Powsner (00:33:12):

Yeah. We are definitely in the outgrown status of the current sugar house addition. The building we're going to walk through has had four or five editions put on it, one shed after another kind of a thing, layers of shed, like in-shed-seption, all the way down. What is that? Turtles on turtles all the way down. You know this creation myth?

Andy Chamberlin  (00:33:40):

No, I haven't caught that one.

Jacob Powsner (00:33:40):

Just talking about crazy stuff. So Jenna's parents built this main ... They poured the main slab in '79?

Jenna Baird (00:33:52):

Yeah, I think it was '79.

Jacob Powsner (00:33:54):

So after he moved from the sugar house out back- Take a quick peek here really quick while we're outside.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:34:02):

Check out the portalet. The [inaudible 00:34:04].

Jenna Baird (00:34:03):

Yep. I know when we do tours, I feel like they always think I'm like headed to the-

Speaker 1 (00:34:07):

[inaudible 00:34:08].

Jenna Baird (00:34:09):

But there's a secret door here.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:34:10):

This door needs a diamond on it, like Noland's Farm.

Jacob Powsner (00:34:17):

Have you seen Ken Hastings' outhouse? Did I send you a photo of that?

Jenna Baird (00:34:20):

Yeah, you did.

Jacob Powsner (00:34:21):

Oh, he covered his plastic for a potty with a wood framed, like a more rustic-

Andy Chamberlin  (00:34:28):

[inaudible 00:34:28] kind of.

Jacob Powsner (00:34:28):

This is a bread loaf. Do you know this farm? Outside of Middlebury, they do a good job. We should do that with our porta-potty. I had this whole thing, you want to side ramp?

Andy Chamberlin  (00:34:40):

What?

Jacob Powsner (00:34:40):

It was COVID. So Jenna and I came back to the farm. When we came back to the farm, we weren't selling syrup out of the front of the sugar house like the room you stepped in. We were selling syrup out of the back of Bonnie and Bob's farmhouse-

Jenna Baird (00:34:56):

There was-

Jacob Powsner (00:34:56):

... where they always had a little room.

Jenna Baird (00:34:57):

There was a little room where my great-grandmother used to make butter.

Jacob Powsner (00:35:01):

She used to make butter there.

Jenna Baird (00:35:02):

And there's this cold unheated room that was attached to my parents' kitchen. And when we came back, that's where my parents had the store, so we were continuing to sell out of there. But then we grew the business enough-

Jacob Powsner (00:35:15):

That's two years?

Jenna Baird (00:35:15):

... where it was starting to get really problematic with our relationships.

Jacob Powsner (00:35:19):

[inaudible 00:35:20]. Yeah, they were like, "You guys can't keep selling syrup out of the car."

Jenna Baird (00:35:22):

They were like, "You have two years and you got to move it out." And it was just like customers would come and we didn't live in their house, so my mom would be calling me like, "You got a customer."

Jacob Powsner (00:35:31):

We lived across the street."

Jenna Baird (00:35:32):

Yeah. And so then we moved it down here. We built, you'll see the bottling room and the store. So we built a little addition on there, but it was-

Jacob Powsner (00:35:43):

2017.

Jenna Baird (00:35:44):

That was in 2017 and now we've greatly outgrown that and it's, We should have built bigger. But-

Jacob Powsner (00:35:52):

But we didn't put in a bathroom because who puts in a septic for sugar? Have you tried to price out of a septic? And so for years, we would have customers come by and then we started doing these tours where we would walk down to the trees like we did with you and talk about kind of all the things we're talking about and then they would need a bathroom right about now with the [inaudible 00:36:15] and so then we would have to take them into our house-

Jenna Baird (00:36:18):

Into our house.

Jacob Powsner (00:36:19):

... the whole thing. And that got a little old and cold and so then like peak 2020 COVID, I was like, "You know what I'll do? I'll build a really, really nice outhouse, a composting outhouse and get a really nice one that tumbles the poop." You know what I mean? And really breaks it down. And so I built this 10 by 10 shed and I sheet rocked it and everything-

Andy Chamberlin  (00:36:45):

Whoa.

Jacob Powsner (00:36:45):

Yeah we could look at it if you want. Whoa. Did we have a poop in there?

Jenna Baird (00:36:48):

No. We never put any bathroom things in it, but we call it the poop chateau and it's basically extra storage space.

Jacob Powsner (00:36:56):

But we said-

Jenna Baird (00:36:57):

Really nice.

Jacob Powsner (00:36:58):

[inaudible 00:36:58] the chemical porta-potty. But we are in this nice little heated space. This is a reverse osmosis machine, right? It looks like something you would find in a submarine. So these hosts of the membranes, right? And so under high pressure, 400, 500 PSI, you force the SAP through. You can separate clean H2O from everything else and what we boil is the everything else, the concentrated maple juice. This used to be our bottleneck. We used to have two machines here, one here and one here. And then we got a working lands grant to upgrade the power service, because we couldn't even put this in unless we put more power in. And so that was huge. So this is no longer the bottleneck for our operation, because we would be up all night long, just turning this on rinse, turning it on wash, turning it on rinse again, so that it's all ready to go for the next morning. So now we get a little bit extra sleep.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:38:04):

How much power service is coming into the farm?

Jacob Powsner (00:38:10):

Jenna and I pay for like five meters with GMP.

Jenna Baird (00:38:14):

It's really annoying.

Jacob Powsner (00:38:14):

The dashboard.

Jenna Baird (00:38:17):

And they've all been like transferred from my parents name to our name and trying to navigate that has kind of been-

Jacob Powsner (00:38:23):

Pump houses, houses.

Jenna Baird (00:38:26):

There's two pump houses, the sugar house, our house, and then we haven't talked about this yet, but we now have another, there's another house, properly-

Jacob Powsner (00:38:35):

Jenna and I just bought a fixer upper.

Jenna Baird (00:38:37):

It's a big fixture upper. But that's another-

Jacob Powsner (00:38:38):

That's going to be a farm stay short term rental.

Jenna Baird (00:38:41):

But as far as the sugar house goes, the service is-

Jacob Powsner (00:38:46):

We have 600 amps, but there's another story.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:38:54):

Just for the sugar house?

Jacob Powsner (00:38:58):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:38:58):

600 amps?

Jacob Powsner (00:38:59):

Yeah. When Bob first built this building, he did not put power in it. So he ran an extension cord down from the dairy barn and he had some Coleman lanterns. Then he buried direct burial, a nice power line, and then he had enough power to run lights. This is way before reverse osmosis. And then like they came out with reverse osmosis and he was like, "Oh no." So then they buried, they had like 100 amp service for a little bit. Then they buried the power line and had like a 200 amp service from that pole over there across the road. And right then he had the opportunity to put an empty conduit right next to the other one, but he thought, "There's no way you would ever need more power." And then 10 years later we did that and we buried an empty conduit in case we need a thousand-

Jenna Baird (00:39:51):

Do it again.

Jacob Powsner (00:39:52):

... amp service. They make electric evaporators that are pretty cool. They're sweet. They sell a lot of them up in Quebec, partially because they're incentivized to use Hydro-Quebec power and all sorts of things. It's unclear whether we would ever get one here, but they are pretty cool. Cool. That's the reverse osmosis stuff.

Jenna Baird (00:40:18):

Want to go in the sugar?

Jacob Powsner (00:40:20):

Yeah. Let's go in the sugar. The core of this business is direct to consumer selling maple syrup. Like we were talking about, we do offer agri-tourism, we offer free tours, which is kind of crazy. Every service provider ever or UVM extension agent says, "Why don't you charge for your tours? You're absolutely insane."

Jenna Baird (00:40:38):

Sam.

Jacob Powsner (00:40:38):

Yeah, Sam. And then, so on a good year, well, last year was a good year. We made about 8,000 gallons of syrup and as of this month we bottled around 7,000 gallons of syrup just to sell out of a small chug. And so we do some wholesale, some restaurants, some mom and pop businesses in Vermont, like general stores and things like that. We sell to the local school district now, which is cool to get local food in schools. But then the bread and butter of this business is selling Syrup by the jug or shipping it online. These are orders that are going out today. We're running a sale. Most of these orders aren't like just randos off of Google. They've come and made some sort of connection to the farm. They've either visited in person or watched a squirrel video on Instagram or something like that.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:41:42):

They're not randos, you say, they-

Jenna Baird (00:41:44):

I will say-

Jacob Powsner (00:41:45):

There's some randos.

Jenna Baird (00:41:45):

I think Jacob says that, he says that line a lot, but I think that more and more, you can see on our website if they're first time customers or not and I think that statement would have been right like maybe three, four years ago, but I think more now we are getting a lot more random traffic through the website. But that's not to say that like, yes, a lot of our good customers, loyal customers that are continuing to turn by every Christmas, those a lot of times are people that have come here, spent an hour with us touring through and follow us on social media now and have a connection to the farm, enjoy the monthly newsletters and all that good stuff.

Jacob Powsner (00:42:28):

People that buy direct from farms are totally insane. You know this from your farm, right?

Andy Chamberlin  (00:42:33):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:42:33):

People who come and pick your own flowers, that's their own special, wonderfully, beautiful, unique breed of human out there. You know what I mean? Like the masses of America, they buy their syrup at the Trader Joe's and the Costcos and the Whole Foods of the world.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:42:48):

Yeah, yeah, you're correct.

Jacob Powsner (00:42:50):

That's not-

Andy Chamberlin  (00:42:50):

And you know the average consumer that comes to a farm store. Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:42:53):

So when Jenna fields emails and calls from people, we get the whole schmorgish board of the spectrum of people that love to buy direct from farms and that's-

Jenna Baird (00:43:04):

I was just telling Charlie, the people that call, we just were talking about this are even more unique, like you get the people that order, but then the people that will call you to order, those are the people that, yesterday I was saying to him, I had a 25-minute phone call with one, just chatting.

Jacob Powsner (00:43:21):

But that's a generational gap you think for the most part?

Jenna Baird (00:43:23):

I would say most of the callers are older.

Jacob Powsner (00:43:26):

Boomers and Gen X-ers?

Jenna Baird (00:43:28):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:43:28):

The Millennials aren't chatting on the phone.

Jacob Powsner (00:43:31):

The millennials are texting their order, right?

Jenna Baird (00:43:33):

Yeah, yeah, we get that too, but yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:43:37):

So that's a quick snapshot of like the market of where things go and there's more and then we also sell bulk syrup. So that other thousand gallons, right? We sell in a drum and if you don't know much about bulk syrup world, there's really four or five really large packers that often have their own farms that have outgrown them kind of and buy up the crop from all over the Maple Bell and then reheat it and repackage it. And they're the ones that are supplying the Safeways and the Whole Foods and the HEBs of the worlds.

Jenna Baird (00:44:13):

Yes. We sell now a small percentage to them, a lot smaller than what we used to and then we sell infused syrups. We have maple sugar.

Jacob Powsner (00:44:22):

Some value add.

Jenna Baird (00:44:25):

The infused syrups are fun. They're more unique to our farm where we're using things like wild forage instead of a flavoring or buying in things. So we have the birch bark, which tastes like root beer. There's this wild spruce tips, wild mint, sumac infused.

Jacob Powsner (00:44:43):

We sell other products like we sell the butter, not mountain farms, so we sell our candies and grains.

Jenna Baird (00:44:49):

We're in the midst of a brand refreshening. Do you know Andrew Plotsky Stitchdown Farm?

Jacob Powsner (00:44:59):

Or-

Andy Chamberlin  (00:44:59):

I know of them, like I knew of you guys.

Jenna Baird (00:45:00):

Yeah. So Andrew, we worked with Andrew who did a lot of the label stuff. So like you can see these are old labels. These are the new ones. So right now there's a hodgepodge of mixed on the shelf because we're just trying to go through old inventory. And he helped us do the tin can project and our friend Shane did the artwork on that.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:45:24):

I love that. That's really unique.

Jenna Baird (00:45:26):

Yeah, they've sold really well.

Jacob Powsner (00:45:27):

Yeah. The tin can is probably the bestseller, quote unquote, hero product. People love it. It goes great in gift boxes, kids love it, adults love it. Every character on the farm is a character on the tin. If you don't recognize this is Bob with his round glasses behind the evaporator.

Jenna Baird (00:45:46):

That's our dog Navis.

Jacob Powsner (00:45:48):

That's literally Navis. She's represented as a dog.

Jenna Baird (00:45:51):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:45:52):

She didn't get another animality. We put the quote from Home Alone on the back. "You filthy animals." Which we haven't gotten a cease and desist letter from them, but maybe we will if this goes on the internet now and it's fun. Yeah.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:46:10):

Cool.

Bob Baird (00:46:10):

Or run with it till you're told not to.

Jacob Powsner (00:46:11):

Told not to. So those metal cans were popular for many, many years, but you could only find them in generic labels for the most part and why people don't do them anymore is because the minimum order quantities are obscene.

Jenna Baird (00:46:29):

We had to order eight-

Jacob Powsner (00:46:29):

10,000 or-

Jenna Baird (00:46:30):

I think it was eight. Eight to 10, 000 of them just for one order and so it was a little worrisome. We were like, "I don't know."

Jacob Powsner (00:46:35):

We're going to Zelle.

Jenna Baird (00:46:39):

But we did the meth last week. We sold about 8,000 of them in a year.

Jacob Powsner (00:46:45):

We've almost gone through our second batch of them.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:46:46):

So did you order them with that label or is that stuff-

Jenna Baird (00:46:50):

Yeah, it's pre-wrapped.

Jacob Powsner (00:46:50):

They get wrapped and-

Andy Chamberlin  (00:46:50):

So you're committed?

Jenna Baird (00:46:50):

Pretty much, yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:46:55):

They make them in England. They were sourcing a lot of them from Asia for a number of years and they had some supply chain problems. So we buy them from a Quebec equipment manufacturer who sources them in England. So they go on a boat. They probably get tariffed like six times to Quebec to pull through Quebec City and then they get driven down to St. Albans and then they get freighted here. Global food packaging supply chain is insane.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:47:22):

So real cheap packaging for you.

Jacob Powsner (00:47:26):

And this is Charlie. Charlie, this is Andy.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:47:28):

Hello.

Charlie (00:47:28):

How's it going?

Jacob Powsner (00:47:30):

Good.

Charlie (00:47:31):

Sorry, it's a little cluttered back here right now.

Jacob Powsner (00:47:33):

Jugs galore.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:47:34):

It's production.

Jacob Powsner (00:47:36):

Charlie often bottles like three drums a day.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:47:41):

Whoa.

Charlie (00:47:41):

[inaudible 00:47:42].

Jacob Powsner (00:47:43):

So they're 40 gallon drums. That's like 120 gallons a day. A lot of it depends on the sizes, right?

Jenna Baird (00:47:51):

Yeah, like these little guys.

Jacob Powsner (00:47:52):

Yeah. Those-

Jenna Baird (00:47:53):

Take a lot longer.

Jacob Powsner (00:47:53):

... little guys from the bottle versus gallons, but so this is typically a dedicated bottling or packing space. And so when we built that room, we knew we needed a better bottling space. And so that's a leaky nozzle on a water jacketed canner. So that keeps it hot at food safety temperatures, right? So you can bottle it and you can take a nice lunch break and then come back. Wesley puts his quesadilla on top to heat it up on there. And this is the main part of the sugar house.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:48:33):

Oh yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:48:37):

And so it's a mix of old school and new school. Up where you're from, you can go into some real fancy sugar houses. People spend money on the infrastructure and the aesthetics of their sugar house. We could show you some old photos, Jenna has old photos right there. There's grandpa.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:48:57):

That's a photo book.

Jenna Baird (00:48:59):

Yeah. So that's my great-grandmother's sugar house and then this is the one that was built in the same spot.

Jacob Powsner (00:49:08):

In the same spot.

Jenna Baird (00:49:09):

That's the one dad said. He's really proud that he built it for $30.

Jacob Powsner (00:49:12):

He's really proud they bought it... And he got these free telephone poles and-

Jenna Baird (00:49:19):

We do a woods walk every October. That's what this is. So we bring people out to the sugar house just as a different tour than what we normally do.

Jacob Powsner (00:49:27):

It's a foliage tour.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:49:28):

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jenna Baird (00:49:29):

You can see the sap buckets drying and there's dad.

Jacob Powsner (00:49:35):

Bob might have run 3,000 buckets, two to 3,000 buckets on any given year.

Jenna Baird (00:49:42):

[inaudible 00:49:41]. But yeah, you can see like this is where the store is now in the bottling rooms here. So yeah, there's-

Jacob Powsner (00:49:48):

Yeah.

Jenna Baird (00:49:49):

I put it together because all the visitors like to see the history. There's the pumpkins. But yeah, so we do a lot of events. So we do the Maple Open House weekend, which is coming up and we do a big pie contest, in the summer it's maple pie contest. Just try to get people here in the summertime too.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:50:15):

That's cool. That's a good idea to have a photo book on display.

Jenna Baird (00:50:18):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:50:19):

Yeah. People have offered to buy it.

Jenna Baird (00:50:22):

Yeah, people want to buy it and [inaudible 00:50:23].

Jacob Powsner (00:50:22):

How do you say [inaudible 00:50:24] that? No, see the customer's not always right.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:50:26):

No, it's not for sale.

Jenna Baird (00:50:28):

But yeah, it's just fun to flip through, there is when we first built the store and stuff.

Jacob Powsner (00:50:32):

Yeah, that's the addition in 2017.

Jenna Baird (00:50:35):

Of course, there we are.

Jacob Powsner (00:50:36):

So we could follow the flow of this up. Those lines that from the pump houses, they're pumping up here and they come out of the ground. We've buried a lot of mainline on this farm, which not every maple farm does because it's kind of insane, but a lot of the big operators now bury a lot of their infrastructure. It's less maintenance over time and if you bury a line three feet deep, hopefully it doesn't freeze underground too. And so we pump up those lines. We have 25,000 gallons of liquid storage. There's tanks up here. There's two tanks here. There's a tank behind the wall. Oftentimes during tours, we show people tanks, like people get a kick when you see the sap coming in. We have all this new tools in tech. We hinted around it, but like we have tank sensors now. So like I can open up an app on my phone and-

Andy Chamberlin  (00:51:28):

And see how full they are.

Jacob Powsner (00:51:28):

And see how full they are.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:51:30):

It's so nice.

Jacob Powsner (00:51:33):

This evaporator that we're looking at is not a new fancy evaporator. This is like a PT Cruiser almost. It's no longer fashionable to be seen driving, but like it runs. It's from '97 is the main body of it. We're part of the Vermont State Certified Sugar House program. Have you heard about this program? It's about modernizing sugar houses in the state of Vermont, so they're compliant with FDA rules and regs around the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2007. So we got a grant to get a brand new steam away. And so everything that touches sap here is food grade plastic or stainless steel, essentially. And so this machine is not boiling at these super high temps. We like to concentrate the sap up to around 20-ish bricks, and then we run a pipe into this thing and it boils and it bubbles and steams.

(00:52:34):

We're parentally open to the public here. So oftentimes there's tourists in here watching us boil or there's neighbors trying to drink beer and we're like they're-

Andy Chamberlin  (00:52:43):

Doesn't work in here.

Jacob Powsner (00:52:45):

Yeah. There's two types of sugar houses. There's sugar houses where they drink beer and the sugar houses where there's no beer.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:52:49):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:52:50):

Yeah. And so we pull drums. We get a draw tank, so we might get a batch that's like, we might get like 30 gallons of finished syrup. We're measuring the densities with hydrometers getting exact. We force it through filter presses. And here we like filling 40 gallon stainless drums. This holds the syrup quality the best versus those stainless epoxy line drums or people still fill syrup and plastic drums, but that's on its way out. Syrup and plastic drums tends to spoil or ferment if you keep it for any length of time. And then at the end of the season, we will make a decision about what we need for retail and wholesale and what we can't afford to bulk. And the bulking out of syrup is really nice because you can make one phone call and they come with a tractor trailer and they cut you a check and-

Andy Chamberlin  (00:53:48):

Done.

Jacob Powsner (00:53:49):

... done. That's why a lot of people do it. Jenna's dad, Bob, wanted to. Before we came back to the farm, that was his retirement plan was just sell bulk syrup and have fun.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:54:00):

Take the marketing out of it.

Jacob Powsner (00:54:02):

Take all the marketing out of it or the fun out of it.

Jenna Baird (00:54:04):

And we basically did the opposite.

Jacob Powsner (00:54:08):

Bob sometimes calls this place The Content Farm. This space, we're slowly outgrowing. We need to build a better space for the bottling and for all of the product. We have a room, the old syrup room that we used to sell out of... that's full of product, finished product. We have half of a barn up there that has just empty jugs, empty, all those tin cans, there's just a lot of warehousing needs that we need to address in the next year or two. That's all in the forecast ahead.

(00:54:47):

Yeah. Sugar houses are all built in different ways. There is a real need in the industry. And I was talking to Mark Isselhardt about this. In veg berry world, there's all these like, "You got a template for a wash pack." You can laugh and snigger at it, but at least there's tools and templates. In Maple World, there's nothing, right? So there's no best management... There are some from Cornell or University of Vermont about guidelines on about how to syrup can syrup or pack syrup, but there's no like, "Here's an ideal layout for like a bottling facility or something like that." Anyways.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:55:26):

I wouldn't know anything about that sort of thing.

Jacob Powsner (00:55:31):

We often do tastings at the end of every tour. There's a thousand ways of trying to get people to leave the room with a jug of syrup. Every once in a blue you have somebody who signs up for the free, free, free tour that doesn't buy anything, but we're set up to ship things and so that's often a big hook, especially if they've flown in. We have like travel sizes, like 100 milliliter sizes, right?

Andy Chamberlin  (00:55:58):

You can put this in your pocket or take a business card and order it.

Jacob Powsner (00:56:01):

Yeah. Well, we try to get them to order here-

Jenna Baird (00:56:04):

We try to get them before they before they leave.

Jacob Powsner (00:56:05):

... before they leave, otherwise they're out the door.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:56:07):

Absolutely.

Jacob Powsner (00:56:08):

We have other fun things that, I don't know, our buddy helped us design lots of recipe cards.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:56:14):

Oh wow.

Jacob Powsner (00:56:14):

So those are all free. And so some folks really cook off recipes and so they see like the kebabs with the spruce tip syrup and they're like, "I need to have the spruce tip syrup."

Jenna Baird (00:56:30):

We try to make them relatively basic recipes so people aren't afraid to try to tackle them.

Jacob Powsner (00:56:39):

We try to gilt trip them too, you know what I mean? The Franklin effect, you know this one? Where if you give them a free experience, they will feel indebted to you for a week.

Jenna Baird (00:56:47):

Oh yeah. Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:56:51):

Yeah. And so we move a lot of syrup out of this tiny little room. We probably have, if you include those events like open house and the pie contest, we get thousands of visitors here every year, but for the regular tours, we certainly get hundreds. The tours have been a big driver, and did you ever do sugar house tours explicitly when you were running the old syrup room out of the back of the house?

Bob Baird (00:57:16):

No, not in an organized way like you do, but we did bring people down and show them around. Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:57:21):

Yeah.

Jenna Baird (00:57:22):

Well, ours started in a not very organized way. And then we started listing tours as an option. People would then email you to schedule a time and then, it grew so much that that wasn't feasible anymore. It was just like people were like, "But I'm leaving Woodstock at this time and I can't get there until... but then we want to have lunch." And then I was like, "Okay."

Andy Chamberlin  (00:57:47):

You got to write in the paper.

Jenna Baird (00:57:47):

So then I created a booking app so that they could just schedule and you could list the time that we're available to do it. And that's where-

Bob Baird (00:57:55):

COVID really took off, didn't it?

Jenna Baird (00:58:00):

Yeah. Yeah. The October during COVID was busy.

Jacob Powsner (00:58:04):

It was weird. It was waves of different things. You probably saw this at your farm Sam, people did a lot of pickup things and there was a lot of out of staters up in Vermont, but then you would have the whatever, the Delta or the Omicron variant, and then people would close down again and then you had different tolerances of basic health safety too, so-

Jenna Baird (00:58:29):

It was difficult because we did a lot of tours even in that year in October and people-

Jacob Powsner (00:58:34):

Yeah, people from Florida, where like-

Jenna Baird (00:58:34):

You had to manage... yeah.

Jacob Powsner (00:58:34):

... "COVID, what's that? Is it a government law?"

Jenna Baird (00:58:34):

Oh yeah, like people that might refuse to wear a mask and we were requiring masks inside and this small little space with like 10 people in it.

Jacob Powsner (00:58:47):

And then we get like people in Tyvek suits too.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:58:49):

Of course.

Jacob Powsner (00:58:50):

And they're right next to each other and you're just navigating it in between. But yeah, the tour business has been a lot of organic growth and it's probably why this business has grown so much in the past 10 years. That and like Google reviews and a lot of the Google reviews come from the tours.

Andy Chamberlin  (00:59:08):

Interesting.

Jacob Powsner (00:59:09):

And so that feeds the [inaudible 00:59:10].

Jenna Baird (00:59:10):

We're really potential about that. Every tour group that books, I email after asking for a review and not on every order, like right now we packed a ton of orders today and I didn't write on everyone asking for a review because it was just too much. But on the days where it's slower or whatever, I might take time and ask for and then we have one of these that's in every box that has a QR code that links to our Google page to write a review and then the social media stuff on the back. So it's just a good way to keep people-

Bob Baird (00:59:39):

[inaudible 00:59:41].

Jacob Powsner (00:59:40):

Yeah. But those are important, unfortunate for better or worse. And sugaring is like the original agro-tourism. Not everybody wants to go and muck out of a stall, but lot of people want to see a sugar house and way back when, I'm sure you were showing your neighbors, right? The sugar house-

Bob Baird (01:00:02):

Yeah.

Jenna Baird (01:00:03):

When you were boiling-

PART 2 OF 5 ENDS [01:00:04]

Jacob Powsner (01:00:03):

I'm sure you were showing your neighbors, right? The sugar house when you were boiling and stuff.

Bob Baird (01:00:04):

Yeah, they'd all show up.

Jacob Powsner (01:00:06):

It naturally lends itself to agritourism in a way-

Andy Chamberlin  (01:00:09):

It was a social event.

Jacob Powsner (01:00:10):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:00:11):

[inaudible 01:00:11] It's a social thing.

Jacob Powsner (01:00:11):

Yeah.

Jenna Baird (01:00:12):

Yeah, that's true.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:00:13):

When do you do the most of your tours? Is it all year round?

Jenna Baird (01:00:17):

We do them all year round. October is by far the busiest because of foliage. And then, we generally take a break from them because we are exhausted on talking for a month. But usually right after foliage, early November, pre-holiday, we'll take a break. This year we did do some tours during holiday season, but not a lot, because we're just very busy with shipping and packing. And then we bring them back usually in first of the year. And right now they're slow. Skiers-

Jacob Powsner (01:00:53):

There's one tomorrow.

Jenna Baird (01:00:54):

Is there? Yeah. We're close to Killington, so we got a lot of skiers and people that are looking for something to do on whatever. If they don't ski in their family skiing, or if their kids are skiing, or if they want a day off from that. And then, March, I would say March gets busy with tours again because people know it's maple season. And then the summer months is a lot of families.

Bob Baird (01:01:17):

Then they have a Mountain Top Inn. Did you mention that?

Jenna Baird (01:01:22):

No. Mountain Top Inn is right over the hill from us, and they do a ton of weddings.

Jacob Powsner (01:01:24):

They do a big wedding business.

Bob Baird (01:01:25):

[inaudible 01:01:26] 200 a year.

Jacob Powsner (01:01:27):

Yeah.

Jenna Baird (01:01:27):

Yeah. We're doing event there tomorrow.

Jacob Powsner (01:01:30):

Yeah. We try to build those relationships so at least the front desk, or whoever's in charge of guest services, know that it's a value-add thing for guests, but we also sell them a bunch of wedding favors. Yeah. There's some maple farms that just sell wedding favors, that's their main business. Why are you shaking your head?

Jenna Baird (01:01:52):

Little tiny bottles.

Jacob Powsner (01:01:53):

Those little tiny bottles you're [inaudible 01:01:54]-

Bob Baird (01:01:53):

... four or $500 a gallon.

Jacob Powsner (01:01:56):

Price per ounce is very high. It's not worth it. We're always looking at ways of innovating or making the SKUs more profitable, or ways of making the whole business more efficient. And some things are very inefficient here, and some things we're just finally learning how to do right after 10 years. Yeah.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:02:21):

That concludes part one of the conversation. Now we switch mics, pull up a stool, and sit down for part two of the conversation.

Jenna Baird (01:02:30):

My name is Jenna Baird, and we are at the Baird Farm in Chittenden, Vermont. It's my family's farm that's been in the family for over 100 years, and we make and sell maple syrup.

Jacob Powsner (01:02:41):

I am Jacob Powsner. I am Jenna's other half. I'm not a Baird. They mostly just tolerate me here. And Jen and I returned to this farm about 10 years ago. And I think this year will be our 10th season making syrup on the farm.

Bob Baird (01:03:00):

Yeah. And my name's Bob Baird. And I've been on here... I guess I've been here since I came home from the hospital in 1951. So I've been here a long time. My grandparents bought the farm, and they were both born on this dead end road and wanted their own place, and they were on farms farther up the road. And they bought the place in 1918.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:03:29):

Let's run with that. How did you get started farming? You were born here, so where did it go from there?

Bob Baird (01:03:38):

Well, I lived with my grandmother most of my childhood and she was the matriarch of the farm. My grandfather was in the military, so he was gone a lot. She mostly ran the farm. They originally made milk cows here and made butter, peddled it in the city. Then my father made bulk milk that went to Boston. And eventually we milked cows here until 1996, and sold to Agrimark, which owned Cabot, which is still around today.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:04:14):

But cows are not on the property here today.

Bob Baird (01:04:17):

No. When we stopped milking, we expanded the maple business. We had been making syrup here. My grandmother made it. My father made it. But we've expanded a lot, especially after the dairy cows were sold.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:04:32):

Jenna gave me a hint, but what do you say today? When did you start making maple?

Bob Baird (01:04:39):

I tell everybody it started when I was about three years old. Is that...

Jenna Baird (01:04:46):

I said two. And then I said usually every time somebody asks it's earlier and earlier earlier.

Bob Baird (01:04:50):

Well, I'm glad I didn't say one. Yeah, we had a kerosene stove in the kitchen. If you put a pot of sap on it at night, it would simmer away and steam all night. By morning, it would be down three-quarters. Never burned on there, but just steamed away.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:05:12):

That's good.

Jacob Powsner (01:05:14):

You probably had to re-wallpaper a lot.

Bob Baird (01:05:16):

No, we didn't get that much steam. Plus we made five or six gallons sometimes, just because we had five or six maple trees on the lawn and we'd make a gallon from each one.

Jacob Powsner (01:05:27):

And would your grandmother sell syrup?

Bob Baird (01:05:31):

They used to, but not when I was a kid. No. We had a tour. Aside from the dairy herd, she took summer borders from New York City and Boston, and that helped make ends meat, especially during the depression. Yeah.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:05:50):

You said when you were selling your milk and butter, you'd sell it at the city. What city would that be?

Bob Baird (01:05:57):

The big city of Rutland.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:05:58):

Okay.

Bob Baird (01:05:59):

Yeah. Which at that time was the second-biggest city in Vermont. Yeah.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:06:03):

Yeah.

Bob Baird (01:06:04):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:06:04):

I wasn't sure if you were sending it down to Boston or New York.

Bob Baird (01:06:07):

No. Originally, they would just go with a horse and a cart, because they didn't have a car.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:06:13):

Yeah. Well, my podcast here is mainly about sustainable agriculture. We are a farm in the forest here at Baird Farm. What does sustainable agriculture mean to you, and what are you doing to achieve it?

Jacob Powsner (01:06:30):

If you're running any kind of business, sustainability is about growth, like perpetual growth. With farms, especially family farms, oftentimes the sustainable goal is to be able to farm the next year, be able to have the next generation be able to farm. For Bob, I guess that's a big success that his daughter's back here on the farm. And this past month we drilled holes into trees that Jenna's great-grandmother tapped, 1918. So that's pretty sustainable.

(01:07:04):

There's lots of things we could talk about when we talk about the maple industry, specifically in sustainability. These are all wild trees. We're not really planting trees, but we're using forest management as a way of growing healthy sugar bushes. There's a whole slew of value-added certifications here. We're certified organic. We have to meet more conservative or stringent guidelines when it comes to tapping practices, tapping guidelines, the forest roads, the length of the drop lines. There's a lot there.

(01:07:36):

We're certified bird friendly now with the Vermont Audubon. There's a lot there in terms of sustainability. Isn't just about the business and keeping the business running right, but it's about the sustainability of this entire area and ecosystem, and the woods and the fields, and everything that keeps this place running.

Bob Baird (01:08:00):

Yeah. And I'd add land conservation to that mix too. Because one choice we don't have here is to split the land up and sell it into house lots. Maybe that makes us be a little better managers. I don't know.

Jacob Powsner (01:08:16):

Yeah. We're big believers in land conservation. And Bonnie and Bob conserve most of the land here in the... What-

Bob Baird (01:08:25):

1996. It's been 30 years this year.

Jacob Powsner (01:08:26):

Yeah. And you worked for the Vermont Land Trust and helped conserve a lot of other farms.

Bob Baird (01:08:32):

Quite a few. Yeah.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:08:35):

That's an important part of Vermont agriculture. I think that is a sustainability metric that keeps farms farming is selling those development rights to keep it open in agriculture.

Jacob Powsner (01:08:48):

There's a lot there. Yeah. In some ways that's like being threatened, right? Vermont, for many years, they said it was 80% forested and 20% developed. But now that those numbers are taking back, mostly because I think of housing and development greater Chittenden County. But we just passed a law the other year that's... What is that, 30 by 30? Did you follow that?

Bob Baird (01:09:14):

50 by 50 too.

Jacob Powsner (01:09:14):

50 by 50.

Bob Baird (01:09:14):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (01:09:16):

Yeah. Big goals.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:09:23):

What's a time that you felt really challenged farming? Or a day when you're questioning, why are we doing this?

Jenna Baird (01:09:33):

I think early on when we first came back was when I felt that the most. I remember a conversation with Jacob in the woods when we were pulling out the old tubing from the big woods, and we just like... I remember having a conversation of, "Are we making the right decision? What are we doing? We could just leave and do something else." I think every now and then you have those harder days like that. And especially in the beginning when we didn't really have a structured business model, the potential for failure of having this huge farm and legacy to carry on, and that we might not be able to do it. But I think we had the support systems to be able...

(01:10:34):

My parents have been incredible supporters of what we've done. Yeah, I don't know, we've made it work. But there were definitely some points when we were... Like the blueberries, it was that phase when were researching, "Are we going to grow blueberries? Are we going to do hops?" Which we know nothing about growing.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:10:57):

Just because you weren't sure that maple could have legs on its own for you?

Jenna Baird (01:11:02):

Yeah. And I think that was certainly a stressful thought.

Jacob Powsner (01:11:10):

I don't remember that conversation at all.

Jenna Baird (01:11:12):

Well, I guess that's good.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:11:14):

It's pivotal [inaudible 01:11:15] for us.

Jacob Powsner (01:11:19):

... you or me. One way is like Jenna said, there's a lot of people that have helped out to make this farm possible and work and succeed. And another question would be asked. We've been very, very lucky to come home to a family farm that, for the most part, the books were in order and the infrastructure was in order. And we've applied for all these grants and found support and found customers and boosters. It would be hard for us not to succeed, is another question, right? We're not first generation farmers. There's a huge amount of privilege there. And there is this weight of carrying on a legacy of making the farm work, which we are doing. I'm thinking about what challenge...

(01:12:10):

A date that challenged me was in the middle of COVID, we make a junk free maple ketchup as a fun little value-added thing. And one time, I don't know what... I must have ordered it late at night, but I ordered a pallet. I usually I buy a pallet of tomato paste. But it wasn't tomato paste, it was tomato sauce. And there was no way to get these people to take this tomato sauce back. And then I called everyone in the state too. I was just trying to get rid of it. I was calling the Vermont Food Bank and everything. No one would take the tomato sauce. And I had a whole pallet of tomato sauce.

Jenna Baird (01:12:47):

Didn't we donate it to migrant justice? Or, no-

Jacob Powsner (01:12:49):

No, Food Not Bombs in Burlington. It must make a lot of spaghetti.

Bob Baird (01:12:57):

Yeah. I think going back in the history of the farm, when my grandparents first came here, they were only milking cows for a few years and they ended up slaughtering the whole herd because they had TB. That was a pretty low point. They didn't really know whether they could make their payments even though they didn't pay much, but there wasn't much income there. That was probably a bad time. And even when we were milking, we had our ups and downs. But I've always felt when things are going really good, that's usually when things start going bad. So keep that in mind.

Jacob Powsner (01:13:34):

[inaudible 01:13:33]. What about when they changed the bulk tank laws? Was there any consideration of stopping milking?

Bob Baird (01:13:39):

No, I was just a little kid then, so I don't really know. But they added on a milk house and put in the tank, and we had-

Jacob Powsner (01:13:47):

It must have been a big deal.

Bob Baird (01:13:48):

Yeah. And we had enough cows and enough land so that the Home Quest milked up there too, but they never put in a bulk tank, so they were done. They were milking 30, 40 cows here, so there was enough volume so they could justify modernizing a little bit.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:14:08):

Is that what you were milking, 30, 40 cows?

Bob Baird (01:14:10):

Oh, no. At our peak, the most... Jake was talking about sustainability and growing and everything. We set a maximum, because that was what our barn where we milked would hold. We never milked more than 59.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:14:24):

Oh, okay.

Bob Baird (01:14:24):

Yeah. We didn't grow bigger and bigger and bigger. We just stopped at 59 and kept our overhead as low as we could.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:14:34):

That seems like that's what the average Vermont farm was back in the day, 50 cow barns.

Bob Baird (01:14:40):

Yeah. At our peak, that was the average, but it didn't take long before the average was 100 cows.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:14:48):

Right.

Bob Baird (01:14:49):

We didn't go there.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:14:50):

Yeah, the average is much higher now. Yeah. I think I recently heard that Vermont has more cows and is producing more milk than it ever has.

Bob Baird (01:15:00):

Yeah. I don't think it has more cows.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:15:02):

But we have the least number of dairy farms.

Bob Baird (01:15:05):

Yeah. Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (01:15:07):

How many dairy farms left? 500, 400 something?

Bob Baird (01:15:10):

Less. Four something, I think.

Jacob Powsner (01:15:13):

To bring it back to maple, they made just almost as much maple syrup in 1919 as they did in 2019. And production dipped in the mid-century way, way down. But 100 years ago, and Vermont, nearly every tree in Vermont was being tapped. Yeah. Do you think we should get smaller, Bob, start pulling some taps out there, become more efficient?

Bob Baird (01:15:40):

No. Based on what I just said, I'm not a big believer in getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. You get a level where you can make a good living and be happy with it. That's my philosophy. But everybody's got different goals.

Jacob Powsner (01:15:57):

Sustainable happiness.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:15:59):

From your perspective, is there still a lot of growth and interest in small scale maple? You mentioned you're mid-scale. Or is it more conglomerating and getting bigger?

Jenna Baird (01:16:16):

I don't know. What do you think?

Jacob Powsner (01:16:20):

I think that both. Both are true. I think it's more expensive to get into maple than ever before. But that's a thing with farming in general, right? Because cost of land and cost of infrastructure. Getting into maple is spendy because it's like starting a winery, right? We looked at a bunch of stainless steel, shiny things, right? And now there's even greater requirements when we talk about food safety and food regs. You can't just really go on Craigslist anymore and find a lot of lead buckets and make syrup really cheap and dirty anymore. But I do think it is a strong area that a diversified small farm can make a buck, or can pay for another crop or pay some bills early in the year.

(01:17:07):

And you're starting to see the really large maple farms get pretty competitive for land and for sap. And so, you see this dynamic that happens sometimes in crop farming too. There's a lot of sap only producers now that will sell to a sugar house that will boil down the crop. And there's a lot of profitability just there alone, just to tap trees and sell sap, whether you're hauling it or not. And folks like Mark Cannella and others at the UVM have sap calculators in all of these tools to help folks pull apart those numbers. Have you seen those?

Andy Chamberlin  (01:17:48):

Yeah. I was actually asked to video their forester training workshop where they were talking about sap only businesses. I, oddly enough, have heard about that. And it does seem to make a lot of sense, because you don't have the overhead of the evaporator and stuff in it. And it may pencil out to have a truck and haul it yourself.

Jacob Powsner (01:18:09):

Yeah.

Bob Baird (01:18:09):

Sugar house is expensive.

Jacob Powsner (01:18:11):

Sugar houses are expensive. There's a huge amount of growth. And just like we're talking about the diversity of sizes and shapes and the hustles and veg farming, right? The same thing exists in maple world. There's a lot of ways of making a buck. And for the most part, the macroeconomics are really, really strong. Demand continues to grow, and it's probably not going to change anytime soon. Yeah.

Bob Baird (01:18:34):

I've always felt maple syrup was an easy product to sell. You guys agree?

Jenna Baird (01:18:40):

Well, the beauty of it is that it's shelf stable, unlike vegetables.

Bob Baird (01:18:43):

That's unlike [inaudible 01:18:44]-

Jacob Powsner (01:18:43):

Carrots.

Bob Baird (01:18:44):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (01:18:45):

Mixed grains.

Bob Baird (01:18:46):

Or milk even.

Jenna Baird (01:18:47):

Yeah. So, I mean, it's got that going for itself-

Jacob Powsner (01:18:49):

Doesn't require a walk-in.

Jenna Baird (01:18:52):

And it's sugar. People like sugar.

Bob Baird (01:18:53):

Yeah. And-

Jacob Powsner (01:18:54):

It sells itself.

Bob Baird (01:18:55):

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the tourist industry in Vermont is pretty big. And more tourists leave Vermont with maple syrup than any other product.

Jacob Powsner (01:19:07):

Right. Is that true or are you just-

Bob Baird (01:19:09):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (01:19:09):

... making stuff?

Bob Baird (01:19:10):

No, I believe that's true.

Jacob Powsner (01:19:12):

It sounds true.

Bob Baird (01:19:13):

I believe that's true, and-

Jacob Powsner (01:19:15):

I'm just thinking about beer and wine, but-

Bob Baird (01:19:17):

No. When you ask tourists, what's Vermont known for, I bet you'd hear maple syrup more than cheese or beer or wine, or anything else.

Jacob Powsner (01:19:29):

That's true in the States. Yeah. A lot of people think cheddar, they think Wisconsin. But then when we get international travelers and you talk about maple syrup, they just think it's a Canadian thing.

Bob Baird (01:19:38):

Yeah. Yeah. But Americans, because Vermont makes more maple syrup, makes about half the maple syrup produced in the United States.

Jacob Powsner (01:19:47):

53%.

Bob Baird (01:19:48):

53% last year.

Jacob Powsner (01:19:50):

If you believe the numbers. A lot of people are hiding their numbers because they think the taxes are going to come get them or something. The numbers are notoriously under reported. They don't have a good idea of how many taps are actually out there. Yeah.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:20:04):

Well, and then I was hearing from UVM that number of taps isn't necessarily a great way to measure the scale of a maple business, based on how much vacuum you're running and the trees and the location and the size, and the density of the woods. It's a metric that's used a lot, but...

Bob Baird (01:20:27):

And I think most producers would be more willing to tell you how many taps they have than they are willing to tell you how much syrup they make. Because as soon as they tell you how much syrup you make, it's this [inaudible 01:20:39]-

Jenna Baird (01:20:39):

... more than a job they're doing or not.

Bob Baird (01:20:40):

Yeah. There's the judgment about how good a producer you are, how efficient you are, how much money you've made. So they don't like to say that.

Jacob Powsner (01:20:49):

It's a little uncouth. And if you're in the bar to ask somebody how many gallons they made. If you ever bump into a sugar maker, the question to ask them is how many gallons per tap. Or the big boys, they say, how many pounds per tap? And sometimes they'll share those numbers. And then the really big farms, they try not to share the numbers. Yeah.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:21:08):

You could do a little bit of mental math, but they don't give you the big numbers.

Jacob Powsner (01:21:13):

We believe in radical transparency. But you're right, the income does not equate to size. And this is with any other farm, right? Some farms are very profitable and they're very small. You have micro dairies out there making artisan cultured butter that are doing great, and they got a dozen cows. And same thing with maple. Yeah.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:21:38):

I know there's... In the weeds, there's a lot of talk about wood fired sap versus steep oil. What are you thinking?

Jacob Powsner (01:21:47):

If we gave you a sample of each of them, you think you could pull apart which one's wood fired?

Andy Chamberlin  (01:21:53):

Do you have wood fired and not?

Jenna Baird (01:21:54):

No.

Jacob Powsner (01:21:55):

No, not here. Only ours.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:21:57):

Wood fire is getting harder to find.

Jenna Baird (01:21:58):

I know. You sell it at your... Isn't the...

Andy Chamberlin  (01:21:58):

No, they just switched over.

Jenna Baird (01:21:58):

Oh, did they?

Bob Baird (01:22:06):

I say you can tell if it's wood fired if it tastes smokey. But other than that, I don't think it was.

Jenna Baird (01:22:12):

But then according to Mark is a heart, that's an off flavor.

Jacob Powsner (01:22:16):

It's an off flavor. A lot of people are like, "I like wood fired syrup because I like that smokiness." And then you're like, "Yeah, but that's an off..." If you tried to [inaudible 01:22:26] sell that in bulk, you would get less pennies per pound.

Jenna Baird (01:22:28):

And then there's people say RO versus non-RO, [inaudible 01:22:32] you can tell the difference. I don't know.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:22:34):

I have not done the taste test.

Jacob Powsner (01:22:37):

There is something to be said that the duration of the caramel... They're just getting into the weeds and the nerdiness. But the amount of time that the syrup is on fire is important for overall flavor and color, to a certain extent. We're talking about large producers. The largest farm in the state of Vermont tap almost half a million trees, and they're boiling off steam fired evaporators. They boil this really even heat. It's impossible to burn the pans. And they make syrups so fast. I said earlier we make 40 gallons every 45 minutes. They might make 300 gallons an hour, and they pull drums off every two minutes. And so it's all really light like golden. Even later in the season, like closer to April, May, we got strawn off-flavors at the end of season. Some people call them woody or sour, or buddy syrup, if you've heard of buddy. They call that late season steam fire to syrup Bud Light. You hear it in the house.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:23:41):

Good industry terms.

Jacob Powsner (01:23:43):

[inaudible 01:23:43] on that.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:23:45):

No, this is going to be fun for all the veg farmers that are listening, getting some inside terminology. That's great.

Jacob Powsner (01:23:53):

Yeah. But folks have woods in the back, as you know, maple syrup sells well at a farm stand. And even if you can't sell it yourself or process it yourself, there's probably someone in your area that is looking for sap to boil down. Would you buy sap, Jenna?

Jenna Baird (01:24:11):

I think what I value about our farm is that it's all made here, and the connection of having it from here. And then, to get into like more technical, we're certified organic. So if you're buying sap, that sugar bush has to be certified organic. So there's a lot there. So probably not.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:24:35):

I am unfamiliar, but what are some of the key metrics that makes sugar woods organic? It seems like they would be by default.

Jenna Baird (01:24:48):

Yeah, that's a question we get a lot, especially on our tours from people. Tree size, you want to tap trees that are at least 30 inches in diameter or bigger. Amount of taps that you're putting in per tree. Distances between old tap holes and new tap holes. The length of the drop lines so you can make sure you're not... You can have room and areas, different areas on the tree to tap it. What else? As far as in the sugar house, the defoamer that we use is a big one.

Jacob Powsner (01:25:27):

Yeah. Half of it has to do with what happens outside in the woods, and that's everything Jenna's talking about. And for the most part, the rules and regs for organic maple match the same rules and regs like if you have enrolled in current use, or-

Andy Chamberlin  (01:25:42):

Best practices.

Jacob Powsner (01:25:42):

Yeah. Basically best practices. They are a little bit more conservative. And then half of it has to do with what happens inside the sugar house. Everything from traceability to...

Jenna Baird (01:25:54):

Cleaning substances.

Jacob Powsner (01:25:55):

Cleaning. But the defoamer is a big one. Most producers, if you talk to them about the difference versus organic and conventional syrup, is organic folks, for the most part, are using organic safflower oil. And 99.9% of that is boiled off or filtered out, but you get a very trace amount. It's supposed to be less than 20 parts per million of any defoamer that you're using. And conventional producers are using Atmos 3000. And Atmos 3000, Bob will tell you, is a miracle.

Bob Baird (01:26:28):

It works much better than... We used to call it Atmos 300.

Jacob Powsner (01:26:34):

Well, it's 300, it's 300K or something.

Bob Baird (01:26:35):

Maybe it's on steroids now. But it does defoam much more efficiently than safflower oil. But safflower works pretty well most of the season, but at the very end it's a challenge to control the foam, at least with the methods that we boil.

Jenna Baird (01:26:54):

And everybody has different foam sensitivity.

Jacob Powsner (01:26:56):

Everybody has different foam sensitivity. They've measured this at UVM Proctor Maple Research, Abbey measured it in a study. And there's different ways of dealing with the foam. Way back in the day, they used to drip bacon.

Bob Baird (01:27:11):

Hang a chunk of salt pork over the foam.

Jacob Powsner (01:27:13):

Salt pork, cream in the pans. Nobody's doing that anymore. For the most part, all the syrup you would ever find anywhere is all a single ingredient, vegan product. And the Vermont statute law has it as a single ingredient product, otherwise it's adulterated syrup. But organic syrup has been a huge area of growth for NOFA and VOF, and Vermont as a whole. I think it's their largest sector of growth. They have over 200 certified organic producers. When we came back to this farm, Jen and I were WWOOFing out West, if you know about the WWOOFing product that's... I don't even know what that acronym stands for.

Jenna Baird (01:27:52):

Worldwide Opportunities or Willing Workers, I've heard both, on Organic Farms.

Jacob Powsner (01:27:56):

Willing workers.

Jenna Baird (01:27:57):

Have you heard that?

Jacob Powsner (01:28:00):

It sounds so nefarious when it says willing workers.

Jenna Baird (01:28:03):

I would say the worldwide.

Jacob Powsner (01:28:06):

And we knew organic maple was a thing growing in Vermont, and we tried to convince Bob. And all Bob had to see was the premiums. Right, Bob?

Bob Baird (01:28:15):

That's all it took for me.

Jacob Powsner (01:28:17):

Because you do get paid anywhere between an extra 10 to 25 cents, depending on who you're selling to, per pound. If you're selling a gallon of syrup, it adds up.

Jenna Baird (01:28:29):

It didn't really make sense for us though, because we were buying it from him at the price that he could sell to Butternut. When we first came back. Because my parents still in the production business and we were just running the retail, so we were buying drums of syrup from them at the organic price, right?

Jacob Powsner (01:28:49):

Yeah.

Jenna Baird (01:28:49):

But then we were selling it as organic, but I don't think that our customers were really... For the most part, every now and then people are seeking out organic maple syrup, but I think for the most part, people are not.

Jacob Powsner (01:29:01):

Some people care. Most people I think don't. Right now we're leasing to own the business. Before that, it was a family farm that split its business in two. And so, they were selling us syrup that we were selling. Reselling.

Jenna Baird (01:29:19):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (01:29:19):

And so, you took this family business, you split it in two as part of a vehicle for farm transitions, and now we're in the process of almost smashing the two businesses back together.

Jenna Baird (01:29:29):

It got to be a bit of a challenge, because the two businesses were pulling at each other. Where we were working for my parents, tapping trees, walking lines, making sure-

Jacob Powsner (01:29:41):

Getting paid by the hour.

Jenna Baird (01:29:43):

Getting paid by the hour. And then we'd be in the woods, but then we'd see on our nest camera that we had customers here and we'd want to leave the woods to come here to wait on them. But then it was like, what's more important when they're... I don't know.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:29:57):

It feeds off each other. But, yeah, your business is the selling side.

Jenna Baird (01:30:00):

Right. But now it's...

Bob Baird (01:30:01):

And then I'd be in-

PART 3 OF 5 ENDS [01:30:04]

Jenna Baird (01:30:01):

Right. But now it's-

Bob Baird (01:30:02):

And then I'd be in the sugar house making syrup and somebody would come to buy syrup and they'd want to-

Jenna Baird (01:30:09):

Tour.

Bob Baird (01:30:10):

... tour or they'd want me to make change. And so it was complicated, but not so much anymore, right?

Jacob Powsner (01:30:19):

Now we're figuring out new problems.

Bob Baird (01:30:21):

Yeah, a different complication.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:30:24):

Yeah. Was that split intentional, like a trialing it out sort of thing? Like a stepping stone?

Jenna Baird (01:30:31):

I think sort of, but also, at that point in your life, you still wanted the income from the production.

Bob Baird (01:30:38):

Yeah. I mean, it was a combination of a lot of things, but I think it was some was a test for you guys to see whether you really wanted to do it. I mean, if they were only back for a year or two and they didn't like it, was easy for them to-

Jenna Baird (01:30:54):

Like when I had my moment in the waves. It just failed.

Jacob Powsner (01:30:57):

You were just testing us. That was actually a test.

Bob Baird (01:30:58):

Yeah. Yeah. But easy for you to pack your bags and leave. I mean, you had no commitments, but when you started ... Well, at one point the business grew so much, we couldn't have the store in our personal home anymore.

Jacob Powsner (01:31:13):

Yeah, we told them you kicked us out.

Bob Baird (01:31:14):

Yeah. And I didn't want to add a store down here because I didn't really like retail. So that's a complicated process, but overall it worked out well I think. That was maybe the first commitment financially.

Jacob Powsner (01:31:32):

There was a lot of leaps of faith, right? Because the question is, do you want to add onto this building that you don't own?

Andy Chamberlin  (01:31:37):

Yeah.

Bob Baird (01:31:38):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (01:31:38):

Do you want to spend a lot of money pouring a foundation and putting in big windows and putting in a big electrical service to this building that you don't own?

Bob Baird (01:31:48):

That was their question. And my question was, do I want to add onto a building that I own for something that I don't want to do?

Andy Chamberlin  (01:31:56):

Like, "Well, I guess we'll try to see if we can sell a few jugs from this product." I guess you were out of the back porch, so you knew you could sell retail.

Jacob Powsner (01:32:04):

We knew. Yeah.

Jenna Baird (01:32:04):

It was growing for sure.

Jacob Powsner (01:32:07):

The business model had proved itself out, but there's always quirks and kinks to figure out along the way.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:32:13):

Yeah. No, and that makes sense too from the trialing thing, because you don't want to hand over the keys to the entire kit and caboodle to a couple of young people that are just starting out, but you got to give them something where they can do it on their own and make their own decisions too.

Bob Baird (01:32:32):

Yeah. And I mean, I sort of went through that with my father and grandmother. And so I understood the position they were in because we reached a point here where if they weren't going to sell the farm to us, we were going to go look for a farm somewhere else. And you guys had that same choice too, really. It was a little easier maybe back then because farms were cheap. You could go out and buy a couple hundred acre farm for $50,000. Not today.

Jenna Baird (01:33:05):

I think it was good too though that with the retail business, you and mom weren't super attached to. Where the production, I think you were much more. And so I think they were easily like, "Here, this is yours. Do what you want with it. We don't care." Not that you didn't care, but it was something that we could own and make it ourselves, like you were saying, and get creative with and build it. And I think it was easier for you guys, correct me if I'm wrong, to just let that go.

Bob Baird (01:33:40):

Yeah. Well, if they hadn't come back, we were expanding the number of trees we tap. Our plan was to eventually, if we tap more trees, get out of the retail business, then at the end of season, make one phone call and say, "Come and get it," and be done with it for the year so we could do other things. But you guys like retail, right?

Jacob Powsner (01:34:03):

Yeah, most days. Yeah. There was a lot of proving the techniques. And then Bob would see that things are working and then he would nod his... I remember when we first came back, Jenna wanted to do email marketing, start a newsletter. And Bob thought it was the craziest-

Jenna Baird (01:34:20):

And build a new website.

Jacob Powsner (01:34:21):

... thing that you would send out an email every month.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:34:25):

Young hot shots of the technology.

Jacob Powsner (01:34:31):

So there's stepping stones for sure.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:34:33):

Did you guys plan to be sugar makers or did you consider other careers?

Jenna Baird (01:34:39):

No. I majored in social work in school. I don't know. I maybe thought that I might do that. And after school we traveled quite a ... That's when we were doing the WWOOFing. And like we mentioned before, I worked for Jon Satz at Wood's Market for a long, long time, and I loved that.

(01:35:01):

And then we did similar things while we were WWOOFing. And then we got to the point where we were living out in Oregon thousands of miles from home. We really missed home. We ended up coming back and we didn't know what we were going to do with our lives. We were at that point where things were very unknown and we needed jobs. So Dad needed extra help in the woods. And Jacob and I just started working for him for, I don't know, that one season and things fell into place. And we started packing syrup and doing the retail part and enjoyed that.

Bob Baird (01:35:37):

When you first came back though, you both had jobs off the farm.

Jenna Baird (01:35:41):

We did, yeah. So I went back to work for Jon. I don't know if I was working full-time there, and then Jacob worked at Four Pillars Farm in ... What town is it?

Jacob Powsner (01:35:56):

Whiting.

Jenna Baird (01:35:56):

Whiting. Yeah. We were both working off farm, but ended up making it work to be here full-time.

Jacob Powsner (01:36:04):

I think when we came back, we knew we wanted to farm.

Jenna Baird (01:36:07):

Yeah, sort of. You know me. I don't know if I did.

Jacob Powsner (01:36:13):

I remember specifically a conversation with my brother. And basically, we finished college. We had only worked farm, I worked some restaurant jobs with farm and food-

Jenna Baird (01:36:18):

Farm and food.

Jacob Powsner (01:36:18):

... and hospitality, which is pretty much what we do now. But, like we were talking about earlier on the walkabout, there was a big question about whether maple was going to be the crop. Bob was really skeptical that we didn't want to do something with grass because Bob says, "This farm's good at two things, trees and grass."

Bob Baird (01:36:44):

Yeah. I mean, I don't know a lot about raising vegetables on a commercial scale, but our land is stony, steep.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:36:54):

Yeah, hilly.

Bob Baird (01:36:55):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (01:36:56):

You got some flat spots. You got some good soil. A good vegetable farmer-

Bob Baird (01:36:59):

It's good soil.

Jacob Powsner (01:37:00):

... could make a good farm here.

Bob Baird (01:37:02):

Yeah. Well, and maybe someday it will be. With lots of water.

Jacob Powsner (01:37:10):

Yeah.

Bob Baird (01:37:10):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (01:37:13):

Never floods all that bad.

Bob Baird (01:37:14):

Nope.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:37:15):

That's good.

Jacob Powsner (01:37:16):

And your spring hasn't dried up even in this past summer.

Bob Baird (01:37:21):

No, I mean, the spring has been running over 100 years, never dried up on us. To feed three houses and over 100 head of cattle.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:37:33):

That's a pretty good spring there.

Bob Baird (01:37:34):

Yeah, it is. It is.

Jacob Powsner (01:37:35):

What else do you need to farm?

Bob Baird (01:37:36):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:37:39):

Was there any major lessons learned or takeaways you got while working with Jon or WWOOFing?

Jenna Baird (01:37:55):

I mean, I'm sure. I think now that we have employees, being a boss, what I would do, what I wouldn't do, how to make it a fun environment that people actually want to show up to work every day and are enjoying it. Hopefully our employees would say that they feel that way. That was, I think, one of the big things just to put you're all into it.

(01:38:29):

And I think one of the things that we've spent a lot of time with is just the branding, the feel of the place, to make your customers like your employees want to come and have a fun time here. I think we do a good job at that. And I think Jon, people loved just going to the ... the experience of going to go shopping at the farm.

Jacob Powsner (01:38:58):

Jon wasn't a big market ... I mean, he ran a big, successful, booming market, but he wasn't a big marketer, was he? Or he was and he wasn't?

Jenna Baird (01:39:09):

No, I don't think that piece as much, but I think he was kind and made a point to talk to his customers. The employees there were working in the farm stand and we were really the people that were ... You'd see if you came in, but if you were a regular there, you would get to know the farmer. And I think, I don't know, that piece of just creating a community space. And that goes along the lines of some of the events that we do here and giving back to the community, the pie contest that we do. We support the Farmer Food Center in Rutland and fundraise for that. Yeah. I don't know. I think about-

Bob Baird (01:39:54):

I think you made a good point, Jenna. My other daughter worked at Wood's Market Garden for Jon Satz also. she's almost 40 now. And a couple years ago she was here with a bunch of friends and I asked them all, "What was the best job you ever had?" And Jenna's sister, she's worked for JP Morgan Chase. She's now worked for PayPal. She's worked in Africa. She's had all these jobs and she said the best job she ever had was working at Wood's Market Garden, which I thought-

Jacob Powsner (01:40:22):

That's pretty cool.

Bob Baird (01:40:23):

... if you could have your employees feel that way, money's not everything, and she makes a lot more money at these other jobs, but working at Wood's was her best job. And then she said, "It was the best job I ever had, and we had so much fun it was like a family." And then she said, "Then my sister came to work with me, and it was even better."

Jenna Baird (01:40:46):

Yeah, I miss him a lot. He got me crying. He was like a father figure to me, and I think about him every day. Sorry.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:41:06):

No, all good.

Jenna Baird (01:41:06):

I wasn't expecting to cry on a podcast. He was a really good person.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:41:07):

He impacted a lot of people in the community.

Jenna Baird (01:41:11):

Yeah, and I think he took a chance on people. And a lot of my friends growing up, we were kids working there. And I try to remind myself of that sometimes because, I mean, not that we haven't really hired any really young people, but he went out on a limb in high schoolers. And I just think of how much that impacted me as a human and going forward in my life and building confidence. And he was really good at just being a friend too. And so I try to ... With our employees, I really value the friendship I have with him. Sorry.

Jacob Powsner (01:41:57):

That's okay to be emotional. He was a good farmer too, right? And he was experimental. He did a lot of different things from sunflowers and he was doing hemp. He was doing hemp in the later years and was not afraid to take risks, I think. And yeah, that's probably a good lesson. I think we are definitely more willing to experiment and put ourselves out on a limb. Bob's probably more risk averse than we are, but maybe you were probably more of a risk-taker when you were our age.

Bob Baird (01:42:30):

I would agree. You'll see as you get older, you get more risk averse. Would that be right?

Jacob Powsner (01:42:39):

Yeah. I don't know. I'm all spun around.

Bob Baird (01:42:42):

There's a double negative in there somewhere.

Jacob Powsner (01:42:43):

There's a double double something. Yeah. So I don't know what-

Bob Baird (01:42:51):

We did some things here my father thought were crazy. His big thing was planting corn and alfalfa, and we plowed up all the fields and planted orchard grass, which he was trying to get rid of. So that didn't go over too good with him, but it worked out well for us.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:43:07):

Oh, that's great. Yeah. Yeah. Things that drove your dad nuts. That's always great to hear a generation back. Are there any other mentors or influences you guys have had building this business?

Jacob Powsner (01:43:24):

Other than Bob and Bonnie, who's not sitting at this table, who have taught us basically everything there is to know about keeping the gears turning here. Sam Smith, who we mentioned earlier, was huge help. Mark Canella, who we also mentioned earlier, who for years helped us pull apart numbers in our books. And he runs a maple benchmark program, which is pretty cool. You can see how your numbers relate to other people's cost of production numbers. Those have all been very helpful.

Jenna Baird (01:44:04):

I think there's been a lot of people along the way that have just been really helpful. And I think of Dave Marvin from Butternut Mountain Farm. When we first came back, my parents took us up there and we toured around their facility. He brought us to their sugar house. We had a call with him, I don't know, I think it was in the fall about a project we're thinking of expanding, like Jacob was talking about, our bottling space and making a place to pack syrup. And I think people like him who have just been open and taking the time to sit down with us and deep dive into things like that and share their knowledge. I know there's been others. I'm not thinking off the top of my head but-

Jacob Powsner (01:44:51):

Chase from Whiskey Creek.

Bob Baird (01:44:54):

Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned Dave because he's been a mentor for me too. I've known him a long time, but I mean, I think he was excited when he first met you. And often when I see him, he keeps track of what you guys are doing. And he's always been very supportive. And I think he still wants to come down and see what your latest idea is. And he's a busy guy. He works with a lot of people, but he seems to care about the producers. And sometimes I think he cares about them more than he should, but he really wants to be a good person and support people that are getting into the industry too. And I don't think he sees them as competitors at all.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:45:44):

That's good.

Bob Baird (01:45:44):

Yeah.

Jenna Baird (01:45:45):

Yeah. One thing I admire about him was, and they haven't been here in a bit, but they do try to visit the sugar houses that they're buying from, which I think says a lot and just getting to know their producers.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:46:01):

Yeah. What was easy when you were starting your career versus what might be harder now in the industry?

Bob Baird (01:46:14):

That's a good question. I mean, we were selling bulk milk, which can't get any easier than that. And back then, we were guaranteed a market. So it's changed today. If you want to start a dairy farm, you might not have anybody to buy your milk. But back then, anybody that's starting into farming could not only guarantee to market, but double your size, you're still guaranteed to market. Quadruple your size, still guarantee to market. It's not that way. Although bulk maple syrup, if you quadrupled your size, you wouldn't have any trouble selling it.

Jacob Powsner (01:46:54):

Yeah. It's because it's a growing market still and for the most part collaborative. And not so much competitive.

Bob Baird (01:47:01):

For some reason, if maple syrup sales collapsed, it would be challenging, but the way you're marketing your syrup, you're growing your own market, which we didn't have to even think about. That might be the biggest difference really.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:47:19):

No, that's a huge reflection because we always talk about, or you hear people talk about, "Oh, back in my day, things were different." And we're faced with a different set of challenges now. I can't even imagine what we'll be saying in another 30, 40 years.

Jacob Powsner (01:47:37):

Seriously. Financing, sometimes we talk about, right? Back in the day, if you went to Farm Credit East or it was I assume if you were trying to start a maple operation, very, very rare, right?

Bob Baird (01:47:50):

I would, yeah. Not today, but back then it was.

Jacob Powsner (01:47:53):

And now they do a huge amount of lending in maple, again, because there's so much capital upstart costs and it's proven to be a good growth sector and people have gotten better, more stable, consistent crops. The industry has almost proved itself number wise. So financing is a big thing. There's a lot of new maple farms that take on financing.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:48:20):

Do you see the climate as being a big threat or do you see that as more opportunities to get those early runs?

Jacob Powsner (01:48:28):

Oh, boy.

Jenna Baird (01:48:34):

I mean, I think I see it as a threat.

Jacob Powsner (01:48:38):

Yeah. I mean, it's a threat to much of life on earth. Yeah. So just putting that step forward, and specifically with the maple industry, it is highly vulnerable, right? Because we're talking about sensitive habitats, mostly wild things that aren't planted. The maple production area is supposedly going northward by something like 15 kilometers or 15 miles every year.

(01:49:08):

At the same time, it's not going to all go kablooey if we have a two centigrade change to a warmer world, but there's a lot of things to be very, very, very worried about with the changing climate. And it's something I think ... I mean, we feel like we've seen it in our lives, and I'm sure you've seen in your lives now-

Andy Chamberlin  (01:49:32):

Yeah, I guess that's more of the question is what have you seen?

Jacob Powsner (01:49:35):

Tapping trees earlier, for sure, is a big thing.

Jenna Baird (01:49:38):

Less snow, less snow pack.

Jacob Powsner (01:49:40):

Less snow, less snow pack, which affects the trees. Droughts, right? Which in the summertime will stress out the trees so they change how they store their energies and give up energies in the springtime.

Jenna Baird (01:49:52):

It's already anxiety-provoking at the beginning of the season, not knowing what your season's going to be and knowing that what we do relies so much on ... It can even just be a few degrees difference that can change things drastically, I think.

Jacob Powsner (01:50:12):

Yeah. I mean, listeners might not be super familiar, but hot weather kills a season. So all the vegetable growers are happy when you get a 70 degree day in March, but sugar makers are pulling out their hair because that will kill a season. And a short crop really hurts a lot of people. It hurts the entire industry. And there've been other adaptations too with climate change, right? So now almost everyone also taps red maple trees, and that's largely seen as a way of adapting to climate. What were you going to say, Bob?

Bob Baird (01:50:44):

I mean, the winters are clearly warmer and we're getting more and more sap runs in January and February than we used to. But you guys haven't really seen ... The worst seasons I've seen in my lifetime were 1981, when the last week of February, the grass greened up and the flowers started blooming and we didn't even think we would tap. And then the worst year was 2010 when we had three or four days where it hit 80 degrees.

Jacob Powsner (01:51:18):

Is it 2012?

Bob Baird (01:51:20):

You're right. I think it was 2012.

Jacob Powsner (01:51:22):

2012. It was a notoriously bad sugaring season. People talk about it.

Bob Baird (01:51:26):

2012. Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (01:51:29):

2021 was a short crop for many producers in Vermont.

Bob Baird (01:51:34):

Not like disastrous, like 2012.

Jacob Powsner (01:51:37):

What about the ice storm of '99? Where were you?

Bob Baird (01:51:40):

Fortunately, it didn't affect us here, but we did have one of the really warm season that ended quite early, so you never know what you're going to get, even with normal weather patterns. And since you guys have been back, we haven't had what I'd call a really bad year here.

Jenna Baird (01:51:58):

Don't say that yet.

Bob Baird (01:51:59):

But-

Jacob Powsner (01:51:59):

Karmic cycle, Bob.

Bob Baird (01:52:03):

... it's going to come. I guarantee it.

Jacob Powsner (01:52:05):

So were you just saying store up our syrup and our stainless steel drums for a rainy day?

Bob Baird (01:52:09):

Yeah. Or save a little money in the bank for rainy day.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:52:15):

That's what I was thinking next is it challenging to manage inventory with this yo-yo of make it in the spring, sell it in the fall but then you want to offload it all because you're going to make more? Or it's a different selling cycle of versus the veggies I'm used to.

Jenna Baird (01:52:34):

Yeah. Well, Jacob does a lot of the numbers on that at the end of the season, crunching of what we project our sales to be, what our projected growth is, and then figuring out what we have left to bulk sell, which is becoming less and less and less, which I guess is a good thing. And now we're at the point where we wholesale some syrup, we do sell to restaurants, but at a certain point, maybe that we shouldn't be doing that. We should be retailing that syrup at a better margin. Not that we're not taking on more wholesale accounts, but I guess we just aren't actively seeking them like we were before as much.

Jacob Powsner (01:53:21):

Yeah. The decision making is easy now. It's save every good tasting drum of syrup we make. But five years ago, even it was much difficult because we had tighter books and so you really do need to think about, "How much can I cash flow? Or how much bulk syrup do we want to bulk out versus save retail?"

(01:53:44):

And at the end of the day, like many maple businesses kind of have a escape ramp, which like we could buy in syrup if we wanted to, and many maple farms do, right? I'm thinking of several, half a dozen maple farms on the main drag that look like they retail more syrup than they make. They are definitely retailing more syrup than they make. They're just buying in drums of syrup.

(01:54:07):

And it's like everything else in farming, the economics are broken. Many maple syrup farmers will tell you it's cheaper to buy syrup than it is to make it, which is kind of crazy. And so the folks are financially incentivized almost to be like, oh, we'll just buy in the syrup and build our business that way. There's a lot there we could pull apart.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:54:30):

Yeah, that's a whole nother deep diving conversation.

Jacob Powsner (01:54:35):

Yeah.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:54:39):

You've leaned into retail and you mentioned a lot of the tourist traffic. And tours you give has been a big leverage for growth, but what do you think really got you into shipping and going beyond the neighbors that drive down the road and [inaudible 01:54:59] people traffic?

Jenna Baird (01:55:00):

My parents were shipping a decent amount. I mean, I don't know what your numbers were, but we were already set up to do that. And then, I don't know, I think building the newer website and then building an even newer ... We've rebuilt the website twice-

Jacob Powsner (01:55:19):

Yeah, something like that.

Jenna Baird (01:55:19):

... I think, since we ... So I think just because we were already set up to do it, we just expanded on it.

Bob Baird (01:55:27):

Yeah. I mean, when I first tapped more than 100 trees, that was back in 1973, the first year we started shipping syrup. And my grandparents used to ship it. So it's-

Jacob Powsner (01:55:42):

Your grandparents would ship syrup?

Bob Baird (01:55:43):

Yep.

Jacob Powsner (01:55:45):

They taught you how to do it.

Bob Baird (01:55:45):

Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. Yeah. So because there's so much syrup in Vermont, you got to get it out of state, really.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:55:54):

How did you do marketing without the internet back then?

Bob Baird (01:56:02):

When people would come here, we'd get their name and address. And then I think since the mid-'70s, we had a farm newsletter once a year that we'd send out either just before Thanksgiving and-

Jenna Baird (01:56:17):

Snail mail.

Jacob Powsner (01:56:17):

A newsletter.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:56:17):

A newsletter.

Bob Baird (01:56:17):

And then-

Jenna Baird (01:56:17):

It's a lot cheaper to do it by email.

Bob Baird (01:56:23):

That's for sure. That's for sure. And then I think we peaked at maybe we're sending out 3,000 of them.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:56:28):

Whoa.

Jenna Baird (01:56:29):

As kids, actually, it was always fun. We would stamp and label for them.

Jacob Powsner (01:56:36):

Because you didn't pay the extra couple pennies-

Jenna Baird (01:56:42):

The labor to do it.

Jacob Powsner (01:56:42):

... to get them labeled at the mail house. You had the hand. And we were still doing this, Andy, up until three years ago.

Jenna Baird (01:56:46):

Couple year ago.

Jacob Powsner (01:56:46):

And we might bring it back. Print advertising is back on the rise.

Jenna Baird (01:56:50):

I love print advertising, but it's expensive.

Jacob Powsner (01:56:53):

It is expensive.

Jenna Baird (01:56:54):

And I don't know, the last time we did it, we were doing a full on brochure thing that folded out. It was really pretty. There was photos and winter update on the farm and everything. And then after that, that was really expensive. Then we switched to just doing a postcard and then I was like, maybe if we put a discount code on it-

Jacob Powsner (01:57:16):

You can track.

Jenna Baird (01:57:17):

... we can actually see how many people are buying because of this card. And the numbers just didn't really add up.

Jacob Powsner (01:57:26):

No, one of the best lines, Jon Satz. We did a workshop with Jon Satz. Do you remember what he said?

Jenna Baird (01:57:33):

Mm-mm. I don't think so.

Jacob Powsner (01:57:37):

He was going on about like, "Oh, if you think about starting to grow whatever, butternut squash or cabbage, and you look at the numbers, the numbers oftentimes they don't make any sense at all. And so what do you do? You just change the numbers." Don't remember him saying that?

Jenna Baird (01:57:56):

No.

Jacob Powsner (01:57:57):

Oh, it's a good line. Very memorable.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:58:00):

Just make it look good.

Jacob Powsner (01:58:01):

Yeah. Make the numbers work.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:58:10):

Yeah, that's just interesting that you've been in the selling of maple nationwide for a long time.

Bob Baird (01:58:17):

Yeah. And we actually had one of the first maple websites from a-

Jenna Baird (01:58:21):

See, told you.

Bob Baird (01:58:23):

I think it was back in the '90s we went to a workshop to learn about the internet and how to get hooked up and how to do a website. I think we did three different websites before you guys came back. And the first one was pretty rough with dial up. And it didn't work very well, but we tried it. I think we paid somebody $1,000 to set us up back in the '90s, early '90s.

Jacob Powsner (01:58:52):

That's a price of a home in the '90s.

Bob Baird (01:58:56):

Close.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:58:57):

So you've got some real Google ranking because your name's been out there for-

Jenna Baird (01:59:00):

Yeah, I guess so.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:59:01):

... 30 years.

Jacob Powsner (01:59:04):

Maybe that's it. Maybe that's because we pay them. Yeah. And people have been selling syrup like that. It's an age-old story, at least in Vermont, selling syrup out of the farmhouse, shipping syrup. I mean, I think it's a way that has kept farms in Vermont going for a century.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:59:23):

Is it all organic growth or are you using paid advertising too?

Jenna Baird (01:59:30):

There's some paid. Jacob, answer that question.

Jacob Powsner (01:59:31):

Yeah, sometimes we pay Google Ads. I don't know. We're bad at that kind of stuff, but it's mostly to experiment with it and try to learn. You know what I mean? Sometimes you have to dance with the devil to understand the music.

Bob Baird (01:59:51):

You sold on Amazon too, right?

Jacob Powsner (01:59:53):

Oh, we've done every hustle.

Bob Baird (01:59:54):

Whoa.

Jacob Powsner (01:59:55):

Whoa, yeah. Yeah. Those are the overlords.

Andy Chamberlin  (01:59:55):

That's crossing the line just to some.

Jacob Powsner (02:00:00):

Seriously. I mean, we sold on eBay-

PART 4 OF 5 ENDS [02:00:04]

Jacob Powsner (02:00:03):

Seriously. We sold on eBay, Etsy, not a whole lot of syrup is sold on Etsy, but there is one Vermont producer that does very well on Etsy. We sold ramps and maple syrup on the side of Route 7 with a spray-painted sign. We've tried to sell syrup in every physical possible way, shilling ourselves on the internet.

(02:00:26):

But over the years, we've learned the best thing to do is to control your channel, control the narrative, control the story. Especially on sites like if you try to sell consumer packaged goods or value added food products on Amazon, people buy it and they resell it. So we were having people trying to buy our syrup on Amazon and resell it for $120 and just horrible stuff. And Amazon is a race to the bottom.

(02:00:55):

And a lot of people feel like they need to be on Amazon to get their algorithmic back links up and all of these things. But the only person that wins on Amazon is Amazon. A lot of companies just have it as a loss-leader. And the grocery world is insane. Once we move past the farm, we start talking about grocery stores and slotting fees where you have to pay the grocery store just to be in the grocery store. Selling food in the modern world is broken. So we're happy.

Jenna Baird (02:01:29):

We still have retained some of our Amazon customers that now just liked our syrup so much they wanted to buy a direct.

Jacob Powsner (02:01:36):

Small, few.

Jenna Baird (02:01:38):

Yeah, a few of them. But the numbers just didn't make sense. We sold a lot, especially during Covid. There were a lot of Amazon orders coming in during Covid, but...

Jacob Powsner (02:01:53):

This is kind of a strange business. And then we'd feel it too when we go to a farming conference. We are "farming" here, but it's like half of what we do, it has to deal with all of these other things. Half of farming is making the thing, but half of farming is marketing and selling the thing. And we exist in that world, eight months of the year.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:02:20):

Right. The actual making of the stuff's pretty condensed season.

Jacob Powsner (02:02:24):

It's a pretty short agricultural harvest hustle.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:02:28):

So you're not doing much wholesale of, we'll say retail packages, like you said, to the grocery stores or is that...?

Jenna Baird (02:02:37):

No. With the tin cans, those we did do a lot of sales too. Cold Hollow was selling them. Cabot Cheese sells them, the city market.

Jacob Powsner (02:02:50):

Sell to the co-ops of Vermont.

Jenna Baird (02:02:52):

Yeah. Middlebury food co-ops. So we kind of have a route up Route 7 that we'll do, but those are really like the main tins are the ones that we wholesale. The gallons to restaurants, we ship to like some fancy restaurants out west. I like those because it's like easy. You just put it in a box, you sell. And we've established some really nice relationships with some of the restaurant owners, but definitely not a whole lot of grocery stores.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:03:30):

I think Fair is actually how I found you guys. I found the tin can on Fair. Looking for Vermont products for our store.

Jenna Baird (02:03:36):

Okay.

Jacob Powsner (02:03:37):

A lot of people use Fair. I understand why they use Fair. It's nice and easy, right? You get this whole thing and then you can get it shipped and you can kind of find, you can categorize by localities and zip codes. But I wish people who buy from Fair would just call us and I'd give them a better price.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:03:58):

Right.

Jacob Powsner (02:04:00):

And take Fair out of the equation because Fair's like a middleman. Fair is like an e-commerce aggregator. It's like Amazon for businesses.

Bob Baird (02:04:08):

F-A-I-R?

Jenna Baird (02:04:08):

E.

Jacob Powsner (02:04:08):

E.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:04:11):

Yeah. F-A-I-R-E.

Bob Baird (02:04:12):

Never heard of it.

Jacob Powsner (02:04:14):

And so if you run a cute little cafe in Burlington and you want Vermont products, you could go on it and have a lot of them shipped to you.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:04:23):

Business to business.

Jacob Powsner (02:04:24):

Business to business. Those are the technical terms. Cool. Yeah. No, a lot of people have had a lot of success on Faire.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:04:36):

Do you find social media marketing to be a big driver for you or is that just one of the other things that you also throw your hat into?

Jenna Baird (02:04:50):

I think more so it probably just maintains the customers more. And I think like we talked about just developing relationships with customers. It's a really good way to continue that relationship once they leave the farm. I definitely think it helps sales. I'm not sure how...

Jacob Powsner (02:05:12):

It's hard to track social media, but I don't think many... I think it's very low that people that like see a silly video of Bob dancing on Instagram and then want to buy syrup. But what Jenna's talking about is very true. Long-term customer acquisition, reminding them when their jug is out, "Oh, I see it."

Andy Chamberlin  (02:05:32):

Right.

Jacob Powsner (02:05:32):

A post reminds them maybe to buy more syrup. At least that's what I would hope.

Jenna Baird (02:05:37):

But also the silly video of dad dancing makes them want to come back and keep watching because they're funny.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:05:45):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (02:05:46):

I think for the most part we generally enjoy social media until we're like doom scrolling and realizing it's killing our soul. But like we do social media, I think partially because we like doing it.

Jenna Baird (02:06:01):

I think the events that we do too, like Facebook's a great platform to get the word out about events like the Maple Open House, Bygone Days, all those different things that we've done.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:06:14):

The customer retention is a good point. I think you're right. You're keeping the existing customers interested and not forgetting about you.

Jenna Baird (02:06:21):

And we try to, before they leave here, I showed you those little cards. Often we'll give them one of those to remind them to go follow us.

Jacob Powsner (02:06:30):

You have a seasonal business and I'm sure you post, right? Like sweet corn's ready or like all of these things. We don't really use Instagram like that, but maybe we should.

Jenna Baird (02:06:41):

I think it's a good avenue to story tell with. And I think that's mostly what we use it for and I look at our posts sometimes and I'm like, "We haven't posted about maple syrup in months."

Jacob Powsner (02:06:55):

Not talking about the product.

Jenna Baird (02:06:59):

Yeah. But just storytelling of the family and what's going on the farm and like everyday living, I guess.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:07:07):

And he's part of social media. And do you even know about it? Are you on it?

Bob Baird (02:07:14):

More than I really want to be, but the weirdest thing is when you go to... I go to Rutland... One day I went to Rutland City and just down on the street ran into two people that said hi to me and I'm usually pretty honest, "I'm sorry I don't recognize you." And they say, " Oh, you wouldn't. I've never met you, but I know your name." And then the worst one was that same day, the guy who was almost my age, he says, "Do you mind if I take your picture? My girlfriend's not going to believe I met you in person."

Jenna Baird (02:07:46):

At Harbor Freight.

Bob Baird (02:07:48):

He was at Harbor Freight.

Jacob Powsner (02:07:49):

For all the listeners, Bob is blushing on both cheeks right now. A local celebrity.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:07:56):

Yeah. You got your own merch stickers, T-shirts.

Jacob Powsner (02:08:00):

How does social media work for you? Do you think it helps a lot for customer retention? Are people using Facebook a lot or Instagram?

Andy Chamberlin  (02:08:07):

I think it does for our farm. What I find is that a lot of our customers, our local customers are on Facebook, but a lot of farmers follow me on Instagram. So I'll post the same thing to both, but it's two very different audiences, which I think is interesting because I get a lot more interactions, comments, whatever on Facebook, which is interesting. But I try to use it fairly regularly for like a weekly update and a reminder on that Friday afternoon, "Hey, yep, corn's here. Flowers are blooming."

Jacob Powsner (02:08:39):

Do you segment your audience, like every marketer you've ever talked to, "Oh, you should segment your content for different audience." You do that or now you just throw it out there.

Jenna Baird (02:08:48):

It's time-consuming.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:08:48):

I just throw it out there because in the world of so many posts, if I manage to get three, four posts up a week, that's not spamming the network and you need that repetition. So I think that's fine. I have some YouTube pages too and that is a completely different genre and so that I do treat differently, but Instagram and Facebook, I just repost to both.

Jenna Baird (02:09:14):

We do too.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:09:16):

Let's see. One question I like to ask everybody is, what's something you wish the general public knew about farming, agriculture, the working landscape?

Jacob Powsner (02:09:27):

Bob's got one.

Bob Baird (02:09:32):

I can't help but think of what Jenna has said. People, especially when she's having a bad day, she goes, "People don't realize how hard this is. They look at Facebook and Instagram. They think all we're doing is having fun." But it can be, it's like any job, it can be stressful, very stressful.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:09:53):

Long, tiring.

Jacob Powsner (02:09:55):

Relentless.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:09:56):

A bus just showed up.

Jenna Baird (02:09:59):

I think that the outdoor aspect of it in the wintertime, and I feel like I stress this sometimes in my tour, maybe way more than I should or need to, but to get across that, yes, we're out there having fun, but there are days where it is raining, it's cold and you're out there all day, you comment. I just remember this past season, we were all out there. It was, I think, one of the first big days of the sap run, and it's almost always one of the more miserable days because it's usually things are really wet. There's a lot of snow on the ground, but it's warm enough that your boots just get saturated and it was raining and there was a couple feet of snow on the ground where we were sinking in every step. I don't know if you remember Dad on the Mountain there, up to above your knees, and it just took forever to walk one line. And at the end of the day, we all came in and we rang our socks out into the floor drain. Another farmer, friend of ours from Fox Glove Farm, I don't know if you're familiar, Mark Reischart, was referring to that as we just heard him do a-

Jacob Powsner (02:11:19):

Talk.

Jenna Baird (02:11:20):

He spoke at Acorn's annual meeting and he was talking about it being called type two fun. We're like, "It's not fun in the moment, but it's fun afterwards." But I think to dad's point, just the hard work that goes into it.

Jacob Powsner (02:11:39):

Maple sugaring has its own type of romanticizing. People romanticize farming. People really romanticize making maples syrup. More so than probably thinning carrots and things like that, which nobody's romanticizing that.

(02:11:57):

I think the one thing I would say that I wish the public... I think a lot of people don't think about everything in the world around them, how much work and design has gone into something, right? We are farming vegetables the way we are farming them because of hundreds of years of iteration and experimentation and hybridizing seeds and all. And then same thing with maple, right? People have always made maple syrup, and so we are standing on the shoulders of our ancestors sort of and carrying their tradition forward is an important thing to acknowledge.

Bob Baird (02:12:32):

And I think people understand that better when they do a tour actually. I do think that's one good thing about the tourists.

Jacob Powsner (02:12:41):

Yeah, education.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:12:42):

It always amazes me when you get a customer to hear what surprises them, because they'll be like, "Oh man, this hill is steep." Or something that is absolutely ridiculous for you to think about. "Oh, the cucumber plants are prickly."

Jenna Baird (02:13:02):

But maple syrup does not come out of a tree, the classic ones.

Jacob Powsner (02:13:07):

There's a lot of classic ones like that, but you will always be surprised at how disconnected people are from nature.

Jenna Baird (02:13:19):

But it's good because I think that people tend to be really curious and they do want to learn and that's why they're here. So I appreciate that.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:13:32):

I got two final questions. One, the first one is, what do you wish you knew... what have you learned? What do you wish you knew when you got started that you learned now? Or if you could tell your younger self something.

Jacob Powsner (02:13:45):

Build the building bigger.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:13:45):

I was going to say.

Jacob Powsner (02:13:48):

Or do it right. It's probably worth not cutting corners because you will redo it. We just talked about how many websites this farm has built, right, Bob? That's something that needs to be... but I wish we built that bottling room bigger.

Bob Baird (02:14:07):

How would you have done that?

Jacob Powsner (02:14:09):

Built the bottling room bigger?

Bob Baird (02:14:10):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (02:14:10):

More two by fours. Maybe two by sixes.

Jenna Baird (02:14:17):

I don't know. That's the first thing that came into my mind too when you asked the question is just the space. We, on a daily basis, struggle with the space. And I think it's funny because when we built the bottling room in the store, we were so proud of it, as we should have been, I guess, but one of our neighbors came in to check it out and the first thing he said when he walked in is, "Nope, you should have built it bigger." And we both felt kind of insulted like, "Come on, can't you say something positive or whatever?" But he was right.

Jacob Powsner (02:14:55):

He was definitely right. It's about, again, this problem about right sizing, right? And that's a problem around planning and really thinking about where you want to be five to 10 years, and it's really hard to do that.

Jenna Baird (02:15:06):

Well, also the financial aspect of it, we didn't have a lot, and so this was a lot, these two little rooms, and I don't know.

Bob Baird (02:15:17):

You were just getting started, and I'm not sure you were 100% sure you're going to spend the rest of your life here. So how big-

Jacob Powsner (02:15:29):

Yeah, you don't know what the future holds.

Bob Baird (02:15:31):

... how big do you want your first project? One of the first projects I had was building the main building here, because we were going to buy the farm, and then after we got the building done, my father changed his mind and said, "No, I'm not going to sell you the farm." And we had to say, "Well, we're going to leave and you can keep the sugar house." So you never know what the future's going to bring.

Jacob Powsner (02:15:52):

No, you're right. I think when we first built these, we were talking about this addition here, you thought, "Oh, we might seasonally bottle in there a couple of times in the summer." And now we're... there's at least three of us full time in this building. What's your answer, Bob, other than build it bigger? Something you wish you-

Bob Baird (02:16:16):

Oh, wish I'd done different?

Jacob Powsner (02:16:18):

... wish you had known when you were starting out.

Bob Baird (02:16:22):

Of course, we started out with the dairy industry. And interestingly, a lot of the things that I built 40 years ago, some of them 50 years ago, the last 10 years, I've been either mostly tearing them down because you don't know what the future's going to bring. You don't know how things are going to change.

(02:16:45):

Fortunately, we didn't borrow a million dollars to build these structures that everything from manure pits, to silo rooms, to sawdust rooms and the freestyle barn, all those things have changed and you never know what the future's going to bring. So I think you have to be somewhat cautious about the future.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:17:07):

Did you leverage debt or did you do stuff as you could?

Bob Baird (02:17:11):

Of course, my father was very big about not borrowing money. So when we started out, the only payments we had were to him, but then I learned, we paid cash for almost everything, but then I realized if we borrowed money to buy a tractor, then we could take the cash and invest it, and often investments would work out better than farming. So it gave us kind of a cushion.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:17:43):

So would you have invested in the stock market or farm equipment?

Bob Baird (02:17:48):

Land, stock market, something besides-

Andy Chamberlin  (02:17:52):

Out of this industry.

Bob Baird (02:17:53):

A building.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:17:57):

What advice would you give to a beginning farmer or somebody looking to get into sugaring?

Jacob Powsner (02:18:04):

I think my answer would be if somebody's just trying to get into it, try to keep your cost down, be cheap, and sell high. So value what you make, know your cost of production, and pick a number that is at least twice as much or three times as much what it costs you to make it. Value yourself.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:18:30):

What do you mean by that? Like pick a number three, as your goal or-

Jacob Powsner (02:18:34):

If it costs you $20 to make a gallon of syrup, you better be selling it for at least $60.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:18:38):

Oh, I see.

Jacob Powsner (02:18:40):

And there's so many people, sugar makers out there that range from hobbyists to very large producers that don't value their actual numbers, right? That sell syrup too cheap, that don't value their time, that don't pay themselves, or don't work their hours into their actual cost of production like, "Oh, I'm just working for myself. I'm building equity." You got to value your own time. And I say that as somebody that offers free tours to the public nearly every day of the week.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:19:16):

And Jacob, how many hours a year do you spend with tours?

Jacob Powsner (02:19:18):

I don't want to think about it.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:19:21):

That's just chalked up to marketing expenses.

Jacob Powsner (02:19:23):

It's marketing.

Jenna Baird (02:19:28):

I think for me, I guess if it was a sugar maker that wanted to retail syrup, I think just going back to the marketing stuff, the aesthetics of things, sells, having a nice website, I like design. I love doing that. So I think spending the time to do that, even though it is a big cost, building a website can be very, very expensive, but I think that really helps sell the product.

(02:20:01):

And then just the other thing that we've talked about already is building the relationships with the people that are going to be your loyal fans, people that are going to make your business possible and spread the word for you.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:20:19):

Did you hire out a lot of that marketing, graphics, photos, website, or is that all you?

Jenna Baird (02:20:26):

Not really. Most of it... we talked about the recent brand stuff that we hired that out with Andrew. When we first did the new label, we hired that out with 4-9 Design in Burlington. And then the website, both websites I built, in most of the photos, we haven't done a lot of professional photos.

Jacob Powsner (02:20:53):

Not until recently.

Jenna Baird (02:20:54):

Until recently, but we're fortunate to have the Stanley photo shoot they did, professional videos. We have a couple that we got them for free, from Stanley and then some news ones. There's one from The Real Rutland. I don't know if you're familiar with that group, but it's just promoting living in Rutland.

Jacob Powsner (02:21:16):

Chamber of Commerce.

Jenna Baird (02:21:17):

They did one that was really great, and that's how we met Shane. He was the one that did the artwork on the tin can, but he was the guy that filmed that segment for Real Rutland. But the photos, almost all of them, we had taken ourselves. And then just recently, one of our good friends, he's a professional photographer, so we hired him. And now that we're at that point, we can invest money in it. And I think that goes a really long way to show your farm is beautiful and not-

Andy Chamberlin  (02:21:48):

Fanning the flame now.

Jenna Baird (02:21:50):

Yeah.

Jacob Powsner (02:21:52):

But that wouldn't work if we didn't ship products, right?

Jenna Baird (02:21:57):

Right.

Jacob Powsner (02:21:57):

I don't know if we didn't have something to sell online, I'm not sure we would pay money to take photos.

Jenna Baird (02:22:03):

Same with the recipes. Those are all professional photos now. Our buddy Steve and Rutland does those and develops the recipes too, which I'm not going to do.

Bob Baird (02:22:15):

My advice to somebody starting out would be, don't do it unless it's something you really, really want to do. And I use this as an example. I knew a sugar maker in Southern Vermont. I saw him... I didn't see him for about 10 years, and then I ran into him at a meeting and I said to him, "I thought you were retired by now." And he goes, "I am." He said, "I've been retired since I'm 21." He said, "Ever since then, I've been doing exactly what I want to do." It's not work, with any job, if you really enjoy it that much. So that's one of the reasons I didn't want to quit or retire.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:22:59):

That's some great wisdom right there. We have covered a ton, I feel. We've been chatting all afternoon and the evening now. So thanks for giving a bunch of your afternoon. Is there anything else that you guys wanted to or thought you might share on the podcast?

Jacob Powsner (02:23:20):

No. Well, we always will keep listening and thanks for getting out there and sharing people's stories. It at least keeps my mind occupied while we're tapping thousands of trees. I love hearing the stories that you tell, Andy.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:23:35):

Awesome. Well, thank you.

Jenna Baird (02:23:36):

Thank you.

Bob Baird (02:23:36):

Thank you.

Andy Chamberlin  (02:23:44):

And that was the Farmer's Share. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Jenna, Jacob, and Bob at Baird Farm.

(02:23:53):

The Farmer Share is supported by a grant offered by the USDA Specialty Crop Block Program from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets. This funding helps to cover some of my time and travel in order to produce this podcast until March of 2026.

(02:24:08):

The USDA Agricultural Marketing Service supports projects that address the needs of US specialty crop growers and strengthens local and regional food systems. I have no doubt that this podcast will meet those needs and help educate growers to support the industry. If you enjoy this show and want to help support its programming, you can make a one-time or reoccurring donation on our website by visiting thefarmershare.com/support.

(02:24:39):

We also receive funding from the Vermont Vegetable and Berry Growers Association. The VVBGA is a nonprofit organization funded in 1976 to promote the economic, environmental, and social sustainability of vegetable and berry farming in Vermont. Their membership includes over 400 farms across Vermont and beyond, as well as about 50 businesses and organizations that provide products and services of all types to their members.

(02:25:07):

Benefits to members include access to the VVBGA Listserv to buy, sell plants and equipment, share farming information, and tap the vast experience of our growers. Access the community accreditation for produce safety, also known as CAPS. This program is designed for growers, by growers to help you easily meet market and regulatory food safety expectations. You can access the VVBGA's soil health platform, where you can organize all the soil tests and create and store your soil amendment plans and records, access to webinars for growers in the VVBGA annual meeting, an email subscription to the Vermont Vegetable and Berry newsletter. Camaraderie, enhanced communication and fellowship among commercial growers.

(02:25:56):

Memberships are on a per farm, per calendar year basis, and annual dues this year are $80. These funds pay for the organization's operating costs and support educational programs and research projects. These funds also support projects that address grower needs around ag engineering, high tunnel production, pest management, pollinators, produce safety, and soil health. Become a member today to be a part of and further support the veg and berry industry.

(02:26:27):

You can visit thefarmershare.com to listen to previous interviews or see photos, videos, or links discussed from the conversation. If you don't want to miss the next episode, enter your email address on our website and you'll get a note in your inbox when the next one comes out. The Farmers Share has a YouTube channel with videos from several of the farm visits. We're also on Instagram, and that's where you can be reminded about the latest episode or see photos from the visit.

(02:26:55):

Lastly, if you're enjoying the show, I'd love it if you could write a review. In Apple Podcasts, just click on the show, scroll down to the bottom, and there you can leave five stars and a comment to help encourage new listeners to tune in. I'd also encourage you to share this episode with other grower friends or crew who you think would be inspiring for them. Thanks for listening.

PART 5 OF 5 ENDS [02:27:25]