CUMBERLAND HOUSE, Sask.ÑA white cloud, the sweet scent of cooked sugar and the wail of a generator fill the air in this northeastern Saskatchewan town cut out of the bush.
On a sunny spring morning, Joe Glaves is enshrouded in steam from vats of birch sap that is processed and cooked inside a small shed for domestic and international markets. He produces birch, box elder and birch elder syrup with garlic sauces under the name CJ’s Pure and Natural Syrups.
“The first batch I made would have knocked you out, it was so bitter,” said Glaves, who has been tweaking his processing techniques since 1998.
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He has also experimented with recipes in an adjacent building he owns called CJ’s Family Restaurant and Groceries.
Glaves has already invested $100,000 for reverse osmosis and vacuum evaporator equipment to extract 70 percent of the water from the sap and cook up a new product from the native stands of birch trees.
It’s a 24-7 operation during the three weeks when the tree sap is running, said Glaves, who can process about 360 litres an hour.
He gets help from five full-time employees and a handful of sap collectors who sell him the liquid for 10 cents a litre.
The collectors drill holes into about 2,200 trees that are at least 25 centimetres in diametre. They insert plastic taps in the holes and hang buckets on the taps.
On a spring morning, workers stop in to consult with Glaves as they gear up for the steady stream of customers in the store or prepare to head out to the forest to collect.
He pays a small fee for the use of trees on crown land each year and is careful to ensure the trees will produce year after year.
“The key is not to take too much, it’s like giving blood,” he said, noting trees are checked each summer for signs of stress. Collectors are out of the bush before birds begin nesting, he added.
Glaves prefers this use of living trees to logging.
“Once they’re down, they’re gone,” he said. “We’re not upsetting nature in any way.”
Birch syrup is well known in Eastern Europe and Asia, where it is used as an energizer.
Canadian aboriginals traditionally drank the sap in spring for the same purpose.
“If you ever get tired, drink birch sap and you’ll feel energized,” he said.
It takes 100 litres of birch sap to make one litre of syrup, compared to the 40 to one ratio for the syrup he makes from local Manitoba maples.
Water is extracted from the sap in the shed, with the finishing work done in the restaurant kitchen.
His restaurant offers Glaves’s own creation, Ribbilicious Ribs, a dish flavoured with a hint of lemon and garlic or a blend of maple and birch syrups. Up to 120 pounds of these ribs are consumed in takeout or eat-in orders each day, he noted.
The syrup is sold in bulk to restaurant chefs at a wholesale price of about $38 per litre.
He also packages syrup and syrup-based sauces in bottles for the retail trade. A 50-millilitre bottle costs $5.
The syrup sells well to locals and visitors, said store manger Cheryl Crane.
“It goes pretty good,” she said, noting a bottle or two sells each day from the small grocery store.
Glaves can sell all the birch syrup he makes. Maple syrup does not fare so well, because most people have grown accustomed to eating cheaper artificial varieties, he said.
Glaves, a native of Ontario, bought the business here in 1995 after a 14-year stint as a police officer in Cudworth, Sask. That town’s cafŽ owner taught him to cook, he said.
The father of four adult children splits his time between life in a trailer behind the store and an acreage in Nipawin, where he does much of the marketing work for the syrup on the internet.
His wife Connie works for the Kelsey Trail health district, but also does the books for CJ’s.
In the future, he hopes to work with a university researcher in Saskatoon to identify the syrup’s health benefits. He wants to develop a lower temperature evaporator to produce a syrup more palatable for pancake toppings.
Glaves also sees potential in refining the sap into a concentrate to add to other food products like health drinks.
“My brain never stops,” he conceded.
Glaves will attend a conference in Victoria this August to learn more about agroforestry opportunities.
“The whole of northern Saskatchewan is sitting there to be developed,” he said. “I think we’ve just touched the tip of the iceberg in tapping jobs for northern Saskatchewan in non-timber forest products.”
He estimated there is $2.5 million in maple syrup and close to $500,000 in birch syrup to be made in the north. Alaska already has a well developed industry in birch syrup, while Saskatchewan has CJ’s and some smaller scale operations.
Glaves looks forward to creating a co-operative with six or seven others who will not only collect, process and market syrups from greater numbers of area trees, but also explore markets for other forest products like mushrooms and fiddleheads, young coiled fern leaves that are a gourmet addition to salads and other dishes.
The goal is to create employment for the local community of First Nations and Metis.
“Once it’s a co-op, we will all share,” he said.
“We need to create an industry and a self-sustaining industry.”
Gerry Ivanochko, northern agriculture specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture in LaRonge said a co-operative could be a low cost way to deliver the most benefit to local people.
“A co-op is the best way to start
entrepreneurship at the community level,” he said.
Non-timber forest products are also a good fit with the northern lifestyle where people are familiar with the bush and can access products like fiddleheads and wild mushrooms, said Ivanochko.
“It’s a chance to make a little bit of money and enjoy the chance to take the family out and pass on their knowledge of the outdoors,” he said. “It fits well with aboriginal culture.”
He cited Northern Lights Foods, run by the LaRonge First Nations band, as an example of successfully marketing northern products. It started with wild rice and has expanded into wild mushrooms.
Clarence Shaboyer has collected sap for Glaves for six years and plans to join the co-operative.
Interviewed atop the ATV he uses to tow a large white tank of syrup out of the bush, he said the area is rich in natural resources.
“It would create employment for me and others,” said Shaboyer, who lives in town with his wife and two children.
“It’s a chance to do your own work and work at your own pace.”
