MAPLE PRODUCTS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 June 1940, Page 9

MAPLE PRODUCTS

MODERNISATION OF INDUSTRY IN CANADA. LA BORATORY DEVELOPMENTS. OTTAWA. In Ontaria, Quebec, and the Maritime Provinces, approximately 50.000 farmers are now harvesting one of their most profilable woodlot crops maple syrup and maple sugar. Last year’s production of maple products in Canada, expressed as syrup, amounted to 2,592.200 gallons and brought a revenue of 3,443,900 dollars tn the farmers at the time of year when there is little other activity on the farm. Prosnects are good for the 1940 season owing to favourable weather conditions.

Canada is now the world's largest producer of maple products. The industry which, is’one of the Dominion's most primitive, being practiced by the Indians long before the coming of the white’ man, is organised on a sound and profitable basis. The makers have been educated; basic standards of quality have been evolved and adopted; stringent pure-food ■ laws have been framed and enacted and a system of registration and inspection developed for their effective enforcement. Modernisation of the industry has not been confined entirely to the maple sugar bush where metal spiles, metal covered pails and evaporators replace open kettles and wooden pails. The processing plant is equipped today with modern bottling machines where the syrup is automatically fed into bottles or metal jars. But is is in the laboratories where most work on the modernisation of this industry has been done. In the chemistry division of the National Research Council here, work has been going on to develop a non-mottling cast maple sugar brick, on maple icing sugar, on a concentrate of true maple flavour, and on a super flavoured maple syrup. As maple products have been increasingly used in the confectionery business, these developments are important to the maple sugar industry. The non-mottling brick is considered a factor in increasing the sale of maple sugar bricks which will now keep longer in their original pure colour. A considerable part of Canada s maple sugar crop has gone in recent years to the tobacco industry, where maple products are used to sweeten the curing processes of cigarette tobacco. Despite the progress which has been made. Canada still has an estimated reserve of three to four untapped trees to each one now being tapped. Of come 70 varieties of maple trees found in the world, only one, the famous hard or sugar maple, whose beautiful leaf is Canada’s national emblem, yields sugar in commercial quantity, and it is estimated there are some 70.000.000 of these trees in Eastern Canada.