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Speaker 1: This season, we're bringing you stories about people finding their
Speaker 1: professional stride by virtue of who they know, whether it's
Speaker 1: breathing new life into an age old profession, taking the
Speaker 1: reins in a family business, forging your own path with
Speaker 1: a new idea, or landing the perfect job doing something
Speaker 1: you'd never before even considered. Today reporter Otis Gray ventures
Speaker 1: out into the deep woods of rural Vermont to meet
Speaker 1: the Stuart family. Vermont is a state historically known for
Speaker 1: its agrarian businesses, but a lot of these jobs have
Speaker 1: faded away over the last few decades. In this iconic
Speaker 1: New England landscape, the Stuarts run a high stakes operation
Speaker 1: that is totally dependent on each other, the community, and
Speaker 1: the environment they live in. Here's Otis. So for the
Speaker 1: Stuart family, today is a big day. Yeah, today is
Speaker 1: game day, if not the super Bowl. So we're doing
Speaker 1: the thing. That's twenty three year old Tanner Stewart and
Speaker 1: he says super Bowl because running the Stewart's business is
Speaker 1: like running a football team if the off season were
Speaker 1: ten to eleven months long. His brother Elliott and his
Speaker 1: dad Mark agree, Yeah, Yeah, it's that's exactly what it is.
Speaker 1: It's like the playoffs every day, and if you lose
Speaker 1: the super Bowl, that sucks. You've got to think about
Speaker 1: it for a year. And that's basically what happens. It's
Speaker 1: a lot to take on, but at the same time,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of good rewards. The reason the stakes
Speaker 1: are so high is because the family is in the
Speaker 1: third year of running Stewart maple. Maple syrup is a
Speaker 1: huge commodity in the Green Mountain State and is a
Speaker 1: big part of its identity, kind of like how wine
Speaker 1: is to Italy. But the window for harvesting maple syrup
Speaker 1: usually lasts only three to five weeks. So unlike most
Speaker 1: businesses where if you have a bad month you just
Speaker 1: try to do better the next one, the Stewarts have
Speaker 1: to make enough money in just one month to support
Speaker 1: them and their business, and no matter how much they
Speaker 1: prep in the off season, a lot of their success
Speaker 1: is totally dependent on the weather. Yeah, yeah, exactly, And
Speaker 1: that's I guess that's the uniqueness of it all, is
Speaker 1: that we really are are on a small window from
Speaker 1: that winter to summer range where we gotta make everything.
Speaker 1: We're gonna be following Elliot today, but it's important to
Speaker 1: note that the whole family has gone all in on
Speaker 1: Stuart Mable. I'm Taras Stewart again, Elliot's brother. My name
Speaker 1: is Elissa Turgeon. I'm Elliott Stewart's fiance. Ah, I'm Mark Stewart.
Speaker 1: Elliot's dad, all right, Paul Stewart, his uncle, I'm Gina,
Speaker 1: and of course his mom Gina Stewart, who Elliot says
Speaker 1: is the unsung hero of the business. Oh, that's really nice.
Speaker 1: I make cookies. That's the most important part. She's being modest.
Speaker 1: She runs the finances of the business and a million
Speaker 1: other things, while the rest play pivotal roles as well,
Speaker 1: from sales to social media to the actual boiling of
Speaker 1: the syrup. Yeah, every single person in our family plays
Speaker 1: a huge role in the business, and there's not really
Speaker 1: one person that could be replaced. Having grown up in
Speaker 1: Vermont myself, I know that every winter is completely different
Speaker 1: and you never know what it will bring. But for
Speaker 1: the Stewarts, that unknown is directly tied to their livelihood,
Speaker 1: and every year around March it always comes down to
Speaker 1: one question, will the sap run. It's a beautiful sunny
Speaker 1: March day, snow on the ground, and Elliott Stewart is
Speaker 1: trying to start our snowmobile so we can go out
Speaker 1: into the woods. Boy that doesn't run. Probably, to make syrup,
Speaker 1: you first drill a hole into a maple tree and
Speaker 1: you tap a little pipe into it. When it gets
Speaker 1: about freezing the tree, sap drips out of the tap,
Speaker 1: looking kind of like water. You collect it and then
Speaker 1: you boil it down to make it more pure and syrupy.
Speaker 1: But it takes a lot to make a little. About
Speaker 1: forty gallons of sap will make one gallon of syrup.
Speaker 1: So the Stewarts have to tap a lot of trees
Speaker 1: to make a profit. And this year they've tapped twenty
Speaker 1: thousand trees. And one of Elliot's jobs is to go
Speaker 1: around the woods and make sure that all of those
Speaker 1: taps are working just the way that they should. We're up,
Speaker 1: so I'm on the back as Elliott takes me through
Speaker 1: the winding trails of the Stuart's Sugar Bush, jugar Bush
Speaker 1: being the twelve hundred acres of land and maple trees
Speaker 1: that the family has tapped to collect pure maple sap.
Speaker 1: The lines go eight thousand feet in each direction from
Speaker 1: the sugar house. It's about a little over six hundred
Speaker 1: acres of lines that flow to the sugar house, so
Speaker 1: it's it's quite a bit of ground to cover. The
Speaker 1: land itself is shaped like a bowl, a little valley
Speaker 1: surrounded by mountains covered in maple trees. Light blue tubes
Speaker 1: that collect sap run like phone lines through the woods
Speaker 1: and along the trail. It's tough to ring. And we're
Speaker 1: riding along a trail that looks down at an alarming
Speaker 1: steep ravine on the left hand side the main lines
Speaker 1: on our left here there are two inch pipes and
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's a long ways down to the river
Speaker 1: down below. So you're climbing down in this ridge. It's
Speaker 1: like well like sixty degrees trying to get the taps in. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's steep. It's definitely. There's some spots where you're
Speaker 1: just like you're hanging on you know, you got to
Speaker 1: climb with your hands in some spots, and those are
Speaker 1: those are always fun days. Nobody wants to go to
Speaker 1: that section of the woods. You break your ankle. You're
Speaker 1: on your own on a snowmobile, riding through some of
Speaker 1: New England's iconically beautiful woods. You might get kind of
Speaker 1: jealous that this is Elliott's day to day job. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's definitely. I mean, I'm not mad about it. It's definitely.
Speaker 1: It's it's not too bad of a thing. Fair weather,
Speaker 1: it's all good. It's the nasty days that are hard.
Speaker 1: It is an all sweet, delicious syrup and Robert Frosty
Speaker 1: and landscapes. The business end of Stuart maple Aside. Their
Speaker 1: success is highly dependent on mother nature, so there are
Speaker 1: a lot of variables and the stakes are high. Most
Speaker 1: of their days are taken up just maintaining the lines
Speaker 1: between fallen trees and leaks or bad taps and animals
Speaker 1: biting the lines. Anything could interfere with the SAP running.
Speaker 1: If you don't take things day to day, it's very overwhelming,
Speaker 1: you know, when you think about the woods as a whole.
Speaker 1: We have twelve acres of land with trees down everywhere.
Speaker 1: And if you're like, if you wake up in the
Speaker 1: morning and you think you're gonna get it done that day,
Speaker 1: like you're gonna drive yourself crazy. You gotta take a
Speaker 1: day to day and do one step at a time,
Speaker 1: and as long as you're working hard and getting something
Speaker 1: done every day, it's one step in the right direction. Anyway,
Speaker 1: just being out here in the woods all the time,
Speaker 1: you're out in the fresh air and you can think
Speaker 1: so clearly, and so that honestly, it kind of helps
Speaker 1: me to be able to process things where you have
Speaker 1: like five million different things going on, but you can
Speaker 1: you can easily kind of just go through everything in
Speaker 1: your head because there's no distractions. You're out here in
Speaker 1: the woods. There's no noise, it's just cold, and you're
Speaker 1: just you're just out there hiking. By the time you
Speaker 1: get tired or you're cold, you go back in and
Speaker 1: you do it all again the next day, and there's
Speaker 1: no there's no weekends. You just do it any day
Speaker 1: the weather is good. It's relaxing in a sense. So
Speaker 1: that's what you don't want. So that's a that's a
Speaker 1: big leak, so that what that does. You can see
Speaker 1: in the line. Each one of these blue lines connects
Speaker 1: to many trees. They all run down to the sugar
Speaker 1: house below where we started our ride. The lines are
Speaker 1: airtight and pull the SAP through a vacuum system through
Speaker 1: the woods. But if there's a leak like this one,
Speaker 1: there's no vacuum pressure and any trees behind that leak
Speaker 1: will be stopped from running as well. Again, this is
Speaker 1: one of twenty eight thousand taps that they have to
Speaker 1: keep an eye on. This one's a pretty steep one
Speaker 1: right here, riding down one of the trails and we
Speaker 1: have to duck under a big treat that felt right
Speaker 1: down over one of the main lines. A pretty common
Speaker 1: nuisance that becomes a serious problem with big storms like
Speaker 1: this past fall November December time. There we had that
Speaker 1: crazy heavy wet snow that blanketed the trees, snapped branches,
Speaker 1: and so we just had we had quite a mess
Speaker 1: on our hands. It looked like a bomb went off
Speaker 1: in the woods. Like, oh, man, we had all these
Speaker 1: lines all cleaned up ready to go, and then oh
Speaker 1: we got to go back through more chain, said work
Speaker 1: for a couple of weeks. Elliot's twenty five now. He
Speaker 1: spent a year at college before deciding he wanted to
Speaker 1: come back home and go full time into sugaring. He
Speaker 1: eventually convinced his brother Tanner, who's now twenty three, to
Speaker 1: do the same. And this is unique here. A lot
Speaker 1: of young people are leaving Vermont to go find work
Speaker 1: in bigger cities and lesser sticking around to carry on
Speaker 1: the agrarian businesses that have long been a big part
Speaker 1: of the culture. Yeah, we definitely are on an island.
Speaker 1: It's definitely. Uh, there's just not a lot of people
Speaker 1: doing like going out on the limb and just hoping
Speaker 1: that it works. And you know, we're fortunately our parents
Speaker 1: have supported us with it. My dad's done a similar
Speaker 1: thing where he was a carpenter all his life and uh,
Speaker 1: and he took went out on the limb with us
Speaker 1: um and did the sugaring full time. UM. So we've
Speaker 1: we've we've basically got to the point where we're like, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: if we're going to do this, we have to leap.
Speaker 1: And I think that's actually what's made us pretty successful
Speaker 1: at it is that we are one hundred percent committed.
Speaker 1: So like when we go home at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, we talk about maple syrup. We wake up
Speaker 1: in the morning where everything is maple all the time,
Speaker 1: and so we have there's about seventy acres of trees
Speaker 1: over there, and so that at times can can be
Speaker 1: a negative because we struggle to shut off from it.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of times where it's just like, wow,
Speaker 1: we've talked nothing about life at all outside of maple syrup.
Speaker 1: In the off season, the steward spend the entire year
Speaker 1: prepping for this month, removing old lines, making new trails,
Speaker 1: repairing damage ones, drilling new trees, finding vendors to buy
Speaker 1: the syrup once they have it. It's a monumental amount
Speaker 1: of work that all leads up to right now, you know,
Speaker 1: you work for nine months, ten months, you don't ever
Speaker 1: make a penny. You get to a point where you
Speaker 1: can start to question what you're doing. You're like, wow,
Speaker 1: I haven't made a single dollar in a long time.
Speaker 1: You have to really have a good mindset with it
Speaker 1: and have to trust that you know what you're doing,
Speaker 1: because if you start to question it, then it's like,
Speaker 1: oh boy, got we got issues. We'll get back to
Speaker 1: the story in a second. First, a word from Express
Speaker 1: Employment Professionals. A strong work ethic takes pride in a
Speaker 1: job well done. This is you. But to get an
Speaker 1: honest day's work, you need a callback. You need a job.
Speaker 1: Express Employment Professionals can help. We'll connect you to the
Speaker 1: right company. We're committed to your success and never charge
Speaker 1: a fee to find you a job. Express Nose jobs
Speaker 1: get to no Express find your location at expresspros dot
Speaker 1: com or on the Express Jobs app. And now back
Speaker 1: to our story. We'll back down in the sugar house.
Speaker 1: You can see pretty quick that after putting in all
Speaker 1: of that work, the payoff can be pretty sweet. That
Speaker 1: is the sound of sap flowing a lot of it
Speaker 1: down at the sugar House. All the lines from the
Speaker 1: woods feed into this big cement box the size of
Speaker 1: a small basement, lined with a food safe plastic. It's
Speaker 1: really good site for you. Yeah, oh yeah, this is exciting.
Speaker 1: This is the excitement that we wait for throughout the year.
Speaker 1: This is what we work for, and it's rewarding to
Speaker 1: see it happened like this. That is a swimming pool
Speaker 1: filled with a sap. I think we'll probably be close
Speaker 1: to eighty thousand gallons of sap over the last like
Speaker 1: forty eight hours, which is a lot. This basement size
Speaker 1: holding tank where the sap runs into it fills fast.
Speaker 1: And now this is when Elliott's dad Mark lets the
Speaker 1: sap flow into a giant boiler that looks like a
Speaker 1: stainless steel train car. And this right here is how
Speaker 1: they make their finished product. They boil out most of
Speaker 1: the water, turning the sap from two percent sugar into
Speaker 1: sixty six percent sugar. So how many gallons are you
Speaker 1: going to be making a day thing? Probably around five
Speaker 1: hundred gallons somewhere in there, five to six hundred gallons
Speaker 1: of syrup a finished product, finished product, yet lots of
Speaker 1: syrup in a short amount of time, with to day
Speaker 1: being game day, I asked the rest of the family
Speaker 1: how they were feeling today is awesome. It's wonderful to
Speaker 1: see the sun come out and the SAP finally run
Speaker 1: and it's a good thing. And how's the Super Bowl
Speaker 1: going today? Not bad? I think we're up at halftime.
Speaker 1: We're doing well right now, so not mad about it,
Speaker 1: that's for sure. The game is strong today. We've got
Speaker 1: a great chance of taking this swan home. Also, the
Speaker 1: steam of the maple syrup smell is pretty good, so
Speaker 1: you're kind of in like a little like maple syrup
Speaker 1: high when you're in there, so the maple bubble exactly.
Speaker 1: So it's a good day for the Stewart family. And
Speaker 1: after touring the woods in the sugar house, I could
Speaker 1: tell that the reason for their success is because they
Speaker 1: all rely on each other. Like Elliott said, none of
Speaker 1: them can be replaced, and seeing them work together, that
Speaker 1: is abundantly clear. But just as much as a family
Speaker 1: depending on each other to make a livelihood, a lot
Speaker 1: of their business depends on the community too. There's a
Speaker 1: a lot of hoops to jump through, a lot of
Speaker 1: different roadblocks along the way, but with the support of
Speaker 1: the community, you know, uh, it's made it all happen.
Speaker 1: In return, they've actually given opportunities to their neighbors that
Speaker 1: didn't even exist before, like the Stewarts leasing trees from
Speaker 1: their neighbors each year at a dollar apiece. It kind
Speaker 1: of gives landowners of Avenue to make a little money
Speaker 1: off their property. And you know, adds up fast as
Speaker 1: a least payment, so they appreciate a check in the
Speaker 1: spring and in a gallon of stirrup or whatever, and
Speaker 1: so like it's a kind of a new way to
Speaker 1: make a little income off of a property. I also
Speaker 1: I have to mention a few other buy products of
Speaker 1: the Stuart's Maple business that really blew my mind. First,
Speaker 1: right next to that swimming pool sized tank filled with
Speaker 1: SAP is an equally big tank filled with crystal blue water.
Speaker 1: This year, we'll produce a million gallons of water a
Speaker 1: million gallons. That's because they actually on the sap through
Speaker 1: a reverse osmosis machine before they boil. Basically, it's just
Speaker 1: a machine that helps separate the water from the sugar
Speaker 1: so they can save a little bit of money on boiling.
Speaker 1: That separated water is pure beautiful water that they can
Speaker 1: sell to a bottled water company that specializes in just that,
Speaker 1: and we have a contract with them to start selling
Speaker 1: it as tree filtered organic water. Pretty cool. Second, all
Speaker 1: those trails that they've made to work on their lines
Speaker 1: are now open to everyone as a public hiking trail system,
Speaker 1: which I think is just amazing. And lastly, they've inadvertently
Speaker 1: become environmental warriors of sorts. That's because the way that
Speaker 1: the Stuarts are growing and the more land that they occupy,
Speaker 1: it means that they play a big role in the
Speaker 1: landscape around them thriving. So they regularly work with a
Speaker 1: forester to always make sure that they're tapping responsibly and
Speaker 1: with the leasing that they do for their neighbors. Elliott
Speaker 1: preaches the long term economic value of sugaring versus cutting
Speaker 1: down a tree for its lumber. If we can promote
Speaker 1: the value of the woods, they won't be cut down
Speaker 1: because there's more value to keeping them standing. Like sugaring
Speaker 1: is really tied to the forest health real heavily, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we're really reliant on a healthy woods, which
Speaker 1: is what we're trying to always work to achieve that.
Speaker 1: Just as the maple syrup that they make now is
Speaker 1: a perfect representation of the land. They are becoming a
Speaker 1: big part of the area's identity, and with each other
Speaker 1: to rely on, they only have plans to keep growing.
Speaker 1: You know, we've grown the o our business to where
Speaker 1: our business kind of our sandbox is a lot bigger
Speaker 1: than it used to be. I guess is a simple
Speaker 1: way to put it. Giant playground. I mean, we're always
Speaker 1: in the woods and building forts in the woods. Our
Speaker 1: hands are always dirty, our clothes are always dirty. We
Speaker 1: are always outside. And you know, this work is literally
Speaker 1: no different than my childhood. You know, it's literally the
Speaker 1: same exact thing where it's the same hill. You know,
Speaker 1: it's the uh the same area, and uh, you know
Speaker 1: I can get out there and enjoy it literally what
Speaker 1: we did as as kids, you know, and uh it's
Speaker 1: it's fun. We're on the job my modus Gray. Wow,
Speaker 1: thanks for listening to On the Job, brought to you
Speaker 1: by Express Employment Professionals. Find out more at Express pros
Speaker 1: dot com. This season of the Job is produced by
Speaker 1: Audiation and dread Seat Ventures. Our executive producer is Sandy Smallens.
Speaker 1: Our producer is Otis Gray. The show is mixed by
Speaker 1: Matt Noble at The Loft in Bronxville, New York. Find
Speaker 1: us on iHeartRadio and Apple podcasts. If you liked what
Speaker 1: you heard, please consider rating or reviewing the show on
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We'll see you next time.
Speaker 1: For more inspiring stories about discovering your life's work, audiation