When he started tapping trees for the 2025 sugaring season, Paul Zononi of Paul’s Sugar House in Williamsburg was shocked to find that the sap came at a trickle — and with only half of its typical sugar content.

“I’ve been doing this over 50 years and I can’t remember another time I’ve seen this,” said Zononi, a first-generation sugar maker who has been making maple syrup since he was 8 years old.

His current operation has about 3,300 taps, which typically produces around 1,400 gallons of syrup a year. But this year, things have been off to a strange start.

Usually, it takes about 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup, and that sap has a sugar content of roughly 2%. But recently, Zononi has been seeing sugar contents closer to 1%, meaning it takes double the amount of sap — about 80 gallons — to make just 1 gallon of syrup.

“It’s double the labor, double the time, double the sap for the same amount of syrup,” he said.

Not only that, but Zononi’s sap has been running slower than usual, and because some of his trees look particularly unhealthy this year, he isn’t even tapping all of them.

Zononi isn’t the only one who has seen some different trends in his sap this year. Chip Williams of Williams Farm Sugarhouse in Deerfield said the season has gotten off to a slow start. Throughout February, trees were not producing as much sap and the sap that was produced had half the sugar content needed. Sugar content has risen to where it needs to be in recent days, but the Deerfield sugarhouse lost about a month of production time.

“I’m hoping that we have a good month of March,” Williams said on Friday. “In years past we’ve made over half our stock in February. We didn’t do that this year so we’re going to need a strong March.”

Williams said you can never predict how a season will go, and in a good season Williams Farm Sugarhouse can produce between 1,000 and 1,600 gallons of syrup. They typically begin tapping trees in January, but this year they have not collected enough sap until recently and are behind on production.

“We boiled last weekend, but we’ve got a long way to go,” Williams said.

Steve’s Sugar Shack in Westhampton and North Hadley Sugar Shack in Hadley have seen the change as well — a slower flow of sap and about a 1% sugar content compared to the more typical 2% sugar content.

Steve Holt of Steve’s Sugar Shack said that, while it varies from year to year, he had produced 161 gallons of syrup by this time last year, and has produced just 24 gallons this year.

While the restaurant side of Holt’s business has still been booming, he said more syrup will be needed, because his customers go through 8 gallons of syrup each week even though the restaurant is only open two days per week.

Holt said he assumes the recent drought conditions in the region have something to do with this change in sap trends. He noted that this year, the leaves “turned brown and fell off early.”

“The trees basically shut down early,” he said, meaning they had less time to photosynthesize and make sugar.

Zononi also has a few theories as to why his sap harvest might be struggling this year, and they have to do with changing weather patterns. Namely, rain early in the season and pervasive drought conditions may have impacted the health of his trees and the amount of time they had to photosynthesize and create syrup. This pattern of weather may also be the culprit for a fungus that appeared on the leaves, giving them a spotty appearance and limiting the amount of green surface area where the leaves could take in sunlight for photosynthesis.

Zononi also noted the unpredictable temperatures that have been at play this winter. For a good syrup season, sap has to freeze at night and thaw completely in the morning for optimal flow. But with some of the warm spells and cold snaps that have touched the region on and off for months, Zononi said that cycle may have been disturbed, and he believes the ground and the trees might still be a bit too cold for a good sap flow.

Holt has a similar theory for what has been at work in his own trees.

“That freeze-thaw cycle hasn’t been happening continuously, so sap hasn’t been flowing as well,” he explained.

While this year has been different so far, Howard Boyden of Boyden Brothers Maple, a fourth-generation maple sugaring business in Conway, is not too worried. Rather, he sees this year’s weather patterns as a return to “a traditional New England winter,” and a more traditional sap harvesting season, which he said used to have an early March start and run through about mid-April.

“We got off to a late start in comparison to the past few years, but throughout my lifetime we’ve historically started the season in March,” Boyden said.

Boyden said he does not think droughts have had much impact. In Franklin County, the only major drought that occurred was in the late summer. He said the trees he’s seen look healthy and he believes the challenging start to the season has been a result of changing weather patterns. This year, however, freezing conditions remained.

“We need the warm days and the cold nights to get the sap to flow,” Williams said. “This year was much more of a typical winter. We tapped mid-February and didn’t get much sap till recently. I think the trees are still frozen.”

With the freezing weather, production started slowly, but has begun to pick up in the past few days. Boyden said so far he has produced 150 gallons of syrup in Conway. Boyden Brothers Maple typically produces 1,000 gallons of syrup each sugaring season.

“The sap is flowing now and we’re doing good,” Boyden said. “I’m confident we’ll reach that (1,000 gallon average) as long as the right weather conditions remain.”

Williams said he is hopeful the weather cooperates and they are able to recover from the slow start.

“It’s been a slower start, but it’s been warm the past few days,” Williams said.

Zononi also reported that sugar contents have begun to rise in the sap harvests as of Thursday.

Boyden added that this weekend is Massachusetts Maple Weekend, and despite the slow start to the season, sugarhouses across the state will be open to visitors and showing off how they make their maple products.

“If you drive around and see smoke and people around a sugarhouse,” Boyden advised, “pop in and get a tour and a sample.”

Alexa Lewis can be reached at alewis@gazettenet.com. Reach Madison Schofield at 413-930-4579 or mschofield@recorder.com.