KINGSLEY -- It looks and feels like the dead of winter at the Olds family's snow-covered farm south of Kingsley.
But it's toasty inside the farm's three-decade-old sugar house, where a sweet aroma of fresh maple syrup offers an unmistakable hint of spring.
The season's first batch of syrup boiled away on a bitterly cold day, and a cloud of steam enveloped Jim Olds as he stirred a concoction that began as thin sap and transformed into golden brown maple syrup.
"It's our first day -- March 11, my daughter's birthday," Olds said. "We're about five days earlier than we were last year."
The first days of maple syrup season are a sign of spring's imminent arrival, dovetailing with longer days and robins hopping in yards. The freeze-and-thaw cycle of winter's waning days creates pressure in the old sugar maples and unlocks the watery sap.
The sap harvest is a tightrope act for those who practice the art. Warm weather can't arrive too soon, or it undermines the season, an event that happened here two years ago. Too warm, too fast means surging sap, but also prompts trees to begin to bud, an action that turns sap bitter and marks the end of syrup-gathering season.
"A slow warm-up is better than a rapid warm-up for syrup," said Jim Olds' brother Dick.
The Olds Brothers farm is among nearly 700 commercial maple syrup producers in Michigan. Another 2,000 hobby or home-use producers similarly toil, according to data from the Michigan Maple Syrup Association. Maple syrup is regarded as the year's first crop in Michigan, and harvesters receive no government subsidies or crop support payments.
Maple syrup production is surging in some parts of the country, fueled by escalating retail prices created in part by dwindling Canadian reserves following a poor syrup season in that country last year.
"Syrup is in short supply," Dick Olds said. "Canada had a bad year."
Retail prices are soaring to $60 or more per gallon in syrup hotbeds like Vermont because of tight supplies and consumers' taste for fresh syrup. But Dick Olds said he won't follow suit, calling such price hikes "greedy" and unacceptable in these tough economic times.
"Even though it's in short supply, we're not going to do that," he said, adding he expects his prices to stay around $40 per gallon. "I want to make it affordable for everybody to buy."
But there's no denying maple syrup prices are on the rise. Wholesale prices in Michigan were at $29.50 per gallon in 2007, according to federal data, up almost 11 percent from 2006.
Last year was a good season for syrup production in Michigan after a wobbly 2007 harvest. Syrup production totaled about 100,000 gallons last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said, the highest production since 1964, and up 67 percent from 2007.
Michigan ranked fifth in U.S. syrup production last year and generated about 6 percent of the country's total volume, trailing Vermont, New York, Maine and Ohio.
Russell Kidd, a district forestry educator with Michigan State University Extension and a maple syrup expert, said the number of syrup producers in Michigan increased more than 20 percent over the past five years. But there's plenty of room for continued growth, since maple stands are plentiful.
"When you look at the industry, we have maple trees all over the state," Kidd said. "We have the resource to support it."
At the Olds farm, sap is stored in tanks before it's run through a reverse osmosis machine that removes about 70 percent of the water. Prior to installing those units a few years ago -- they cost around $10,000 to $12,000 new -- the brothers had to boil sap almost around the clock and burned significantly more wood to make syrup.
Sugar water that remains after that step is run through a large evaporator that further boils it down through a series of channels in the wood-fired unit. Jim Olds calls it a "fire-breathing dragon" as he loads the device with wood, and it belches steam out of the top of the building.
The liquid reaches a temperature of around 215 degrees before it drains from the evaporator, and the last remaining water is boiled off in a gas-heated finishing pan to give the operator more control over the finished product.
Once the proper temperature and consistency are reached, the syrup is pressed through a series of paper filters to remove sugar sand and other impurities before it's bottled or stored in barrels for future packaging.
The Olds brothers tap around 9,500 trees in the hardwoods south of Kingsley. Most are on their property, but demand for sap is high so they also rent land for more trees. The farm produced 2,850 gallons of syrup last season, more than a four-fold increase from the Olds' first season in 1978.
Strong prices and solid demand mean only Mother Nature stands in the way of a sweet syrup season in northern Michigan. The Olds brothers are cautiously optimistic, as the short-range weather forecast calls for cold nights and daytime highs ranging in the 40s into midweek.
"The weather forecast looks pretty favorable," Dick Olds said. "We don't need no 50s or 60s -- 20s at night, 40s during the day, that's when the conditions are good."
Michigan maple syrup production
Year, Volume
2008, 100,000 gallons
2007, 60,000 gallons
2006, 78,000 gallons
2005, 58,000 gallons
2004, 80,000 gallons
2003, 59,000 gallons
Source: Michigan Agricultural Statistics Service
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