Students enjoy a sweet treat with pancakes and French toast
TINA L. SCOTT
EDITOR
“I always try to do a farm-to-school project each year,” said Laura Krause-Zastrow of Taher, Inc., and the Food Service Director for Merrill Area Public Schools (MAPS). “This year I thought maple syrup would be a good idea. We reached out to the Schleif family, and they gracelessly donated four gallons of syrup.”
As a result, students at all MAPS schools were treated to real maple syrup in December. One gallon was used at each elementary school with their French toast, and it was served with pancakes at Merrill High School and Prairie River Middle School, Krause-Zastrow said.
Schleif Sugar Bush began in 1984 when Dennis and Joan Schleif tapped 25 maple trees on their Town of Pine River property, collecting the sap in buckets with covers, and then cooked the sap down in an open flat pan in their backyard. Over the years, they increased the size of their operation to 750 trees and upgraded to cooking sap in a wood-fired evaporator.
In 2015, their son, Darrin, and his wife, Chelsey, took over the maple syrup business and grew the business into a larger industrial operation, installing a tubing and vacuum system instead of traditional buckets on the 40-acre parcel, upgrading to a new propane-fueled evaporator, adding a reverse osmosis system (which separates water from the sap prior to cooking to reduce the time it takes to boil down the sap by 75-85%), increasing their own tree tapping to 1,350 trees, and buying sap from neighbors to bring their total production to cooking sap into syrup from 3,000 taps.
The third generation of Schleifs is also involved in the maple syrup business. Darrin and Chelsey’s three young children (McCoy, Mayvree, and Lincoln) are the official taste-testers, and nine-year-old Lincoln taps 35 trees at his grandparents’ house next door, collecting the sap in bags, then dumping it into buckets in a sled he pulls behind his four-wheeler, and hauling it to the sugar shack, to earn some money of his own.
Schleif Sugar Bush produced 1,100 gallons of maple syrup in 2021 and sells their product in bulk and also locally at Clark’s Cup & Cone, Heartland Coop/convenience store, and County Market in Merrill, as well as direct to customers. For more information, call Darrin at 715.218.7294.