Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
By ZACHARY MARANO
Hurley – The community has been invited by the Hurley School District to see their new maple syrup operation in action in the school parking lot from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.
“This will be a ‘soft’ open house where you can observe students boiling sap, filtering, and bottling maple syrup in their new sap shack. There may be syrup available for purchase,” a release from the school says.
The students who will be making the maple syrup are high schoolers in the Northwoods Manufacturing program, a student-run enterprise based out of Hurley K-12 Schools that offers products and services to area businesses. The students are taught by Northwoods Manufacturing’s wood department instructor, Roger Peterson.
The maple syrup operation at the school includes a small sugarhouse, sap evaporator, reverse osmosis machine and supplies for collecting sap in sugarbushes.
Materials for the operation were provided through a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Acer Access and Development Program. The school received a portion of a grant that provided maple syrup-making systems to schools in the upper Midwest. This grant is being facilitated through Michigan State University in Lansing.
According to the release from the school, Wisconsin is the fourth largest maple syrup-producing state in the country and producers in the state made over 300,000 gallons in 2021. It also says that Iron and surrounding counties have some of the highest densities of maple forests in the world.
Extension Agriculture Educator Darrin Kimbler of the University of Wisconsin-Madison – Extension Iron County will also be present at the event on Friday and Saturday with informational materials about making maple syrup.
The open house was originally planned for March 25-26 but was postponed until this weekend due to cooler-than-expected weather and insufficient amounts of sap.