Tour Cornell’s ADK sugarhouse, where technology helps make maple syrup
Tour Cornell’s ADK sugarhouse, where technology helps make maple syrup
Publish Date: 2026-04-02 07:29:00
Source Domain: www.northcountrypublicradio.org
Apr 02, 2026 —
Making maple syrup is simple- you tap a tree, collect the sap, and boil it down. But it’s more complicated for large-scale producers who collect thousands of gallons of sap per day. To keep up with demand and adapt to the seasonal swings driven by climate change, producers have continued to innovate and rely on advanced technology.
Cornell University’s Uihlein Maple Research Forest in Lake Placid tries to be on the cutting edge of those innovations.
Director Adam Wild says key advancements, such as reverse osmosis and sap chilling, are saving maple syrup producers time and energy. He gave Emily Russell a tour of the facility where the sap is turned into syrup.
The sap is vacuumed into the sugarhouse at Cornell University’s Uihlein Maple Research Forest in Lake Placid. Photo: Emily Russell
ADAM WILD: So this is where the sap is actually coming into the big releasers or separators. So they’re under vacuum right now, and they function kind of like the dust collection cup in a vacuum cleaner, but we’re not collecting dust. We’re collecting the sap so that the sap settles to the bottom, the air gets sucked off the top, and then when that sap fills up inside the barrel, there’s a little float kind of like the back of the toilet that goes up, and that tells the submersible pump to turn on. It sucks the sap out of that barrel; it actually goes through flow meters so we can monitor the production in real time and goes out into our big collection tanks.
EMILY RUSSELL: This is cool. So just describe what we’re looking at here.
WILD: So we’re looking in our big maple sap collection tanks. We have two tanks. They’re each 3,000 gallons a piece. So we have the ability to collect at least 6,000 gallons of sap and in a general sap run day, we can fill both of these tanks within one day and that’s not a 24-hour period, that’s more like an 8 to 10-hour period or shorter….
