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It may be only February, but some Indiana forest owners are ready for harvest. Maple syrup harvest, that is.

The season runs from February through March and some syrup makers, like those at Rutherford Sugar Camp in New Castle, have already produced gallons of the sweet treat.

Rutherford Sugar Camp owner Dave Hamilton said his sugar camp has been around for almost 100 years. The camp started in 1911 when Lewis Rutherford began making syrup. Lewis’ son, Bill Rutherford, continued the business after Lewis’ death. Bill died in 1977, and in 1978, Dave and Carol Hamilton, Bill’s daughter, purchased the camp and continued the tree tapping.

“It got in my blood. I started making it with my father-in-law, and it’s kind of keeping tradition alive, keeping history alive,” Hamilton said.

The camp has come a long way since the days when Lewis and Bill ran it. Rather than using buckets to collect sugar water, Hamilton has state of the art equipment, including a tubing system under vacuum and a stainless steel, oil-fired evaporator. The camp also has an automatic draw-off and a pressure filter. After the sugar water is collected from the trees through the vacuum tubing system, it is put into the evaporator where it is heated and condensed down into syrup.

Sugar water normally has a sugar content of two percent. The camp is currently working on a reverse osmosis system to condense the sugar water even further. After the system is put into use, the water the evaporator receives will have a sugar content of eight percent. This will not only save the camp fuel to run the evaporator, but it will save the workers time when condensing the water into syrup.

“He’d be amazed at the tubing system that we use, the vacuum, the new evaporator and the reverse osmosis,” Hamilton said when asked what his father-in-law would think about today’s technology. “I’m sure he wouldn’t have a clue that that ever existed.”

Dave and the workers at Rutherford’s said they never really know how much syrup they will produce each year, it all depends on the weather. Hamilton said weather conditions are the key to making a good batch of syrup.

“The best conditions are you have moisture in the ground and you have fluctuating temperatures, a 25 degree night and a 45 or 50 degree day, and we have all kinds of sugar water,” Hamilton said.

The syrup produced at Rutherford’s has been shipped to states as far away as California. The syrup has also been sent to every continent except Antarctica.