By: Charity Meier | Novi Note | Published April 9, 2026
NOVI — MapleFest at Michigan State University’s Tollgate Farm in Novi, which was held March 7-8, celebrates the farm’s maple syrup harvest while educating the public on the process required to make maple syrup, as well as the other things that the farm has to offer.
“We make our own syrup here. So, I think it was just a way to celebrate our harvest and our syrups made here,” said Barbie Kellner, Tollgate Farm program manager.
Festival attendees take a short wagon ride to the woods located on the north end of the farm and then take a guided walk along the “Maple Trail.”
The Maple Trail features several educational stops that showcase different facts about maple trees, sap collection, harvesting techniques and equipment, and it ends at the Sugar Shack, where the sap is made into pure maple syrup.
“Sugar maples have 2% sugar in their sap, which is uniquely high for trees, which is why we use them for syrup,” said Sam Graham, extension program worker.
She said one can get syrup from other trees, such as walnut trees, but they don’t have as high of a sugar content, so it takes hundreds of gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup as opposed to the 40 gallons it takes to produce a gallon of syrup with the maple trees.
Kassie Lavigne, program coordinator, said that while sugar maple trees have 2% sugar content, silver maples have 1.5% and beech trees only have 0.5%. So, while it takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup from a sugar maple tree, It takes 60 gallons of sap from a silver maple to make a gallon of syrup and 80 to 100 gallons to make a gallon of beech syrup.
Lavigne said that is why pure syrup is so expensive. She said that although she has not had beech syrup, as it is so expensive, she has been told it has a vanilla-like flavor.
Sap has all the nutrients the tree will need to thrive. During a season, a maple tree can accumulate more than 20 gallons of sap in its vascular system. Graham said the sap is able to flow when the temperature is above freezing at night, but below freezing during the day.
“The freeze-thaw action is what allows the sap to run. So the freezing and thawing creates this pressure differential that literally forces all of that sap up through the sap wood, up through the vascular system of the tree, and that is what we tap and harvest from,” she said.
She said that they are only able to collect 1 to 1.5 gallons of sap per tree, which does not hurt the tree. As soon as the weather warms up, the tree utilizes its sap to form buds and bloom.
Tollgate Farm has around 300 sugar maple trees, of which the staff taps about 225 to 250 annually, according to Lavigne. She said the number of taps on each tree depends on its diameter. The bigger the tree, the more sap they have to give, Lavigne said.
“The yield of sap we get is pretty dependent on the weather,” Lavigne said.
Lavigne said that in 2025, the farm was not able to yield very much sap as the trees budded early because of the warm weather. However, this year she said they pulled nearly 1,100 gallons of sap during the festival.
“So, we almost doubled our yield in the last three days, which is awesome, especially for it to happen during MapleFest,” she said.
After harvesting the sap, it is taken to the sugar shack, where the sap with 2% sugar content is transformed into maple syrup with a 67% sugar content. The volunteers have to add 390 gallons of water to the sap for every 400 gallons of sap to make 10 gallons of syrup, and the mixture of sap and water is heated at extreme temperatures for around 16 hours, or about five hours utilizing reverse osmosis to help speed up the process of syrup production.
“It’s very labor-intensive,” said Gayle Gullen, who has volunteered at the farm for over a decade.
Clay Ottoni has been volunteering at Tollgate Farm for years and is one of the founders of the farm’s maple syrup harvest program. He said that a group of three people, including himself, started it because it was something they could do during the winter.
“When there’s snow on the ground, it’s a fun thing to do,” said Ottoni
As of March 8, they had collected nearly 3,000 gallons of sap this season, which they began tapping in mid-February. The sap is processed on-site, and while some of it is sold at the farm, the majority of it goes to the volunteers who spend a great deal of their time and energy making it.
“The idea is that the money we make goes back into the project,” said Ottoni.
He said he is glad to see the festival grow so much, as it educates people and helps children learn to appreciate the outdoors.