Tap lease pricing
Three ways to price a lease on someone else’s trees, worked side by side: what the landowner earns and what it costs you per tap and per pound of syrup.
01 · Inputs
Enter the taps, the syrup you expect from each, and the bulk price, then fill in whichever methods you want to compare.
Your multi-year average if you have one. Starts at the manual’s conservative planning figure: about 4 lb with modern collection, 2.2 lb with buckets and other traditional methods.
What a packer pays you this season.
03How this is calculated
The North American Maple Syrup Producers Manual says there is no industry standard for pricing a tap lease. It calls a price per tap agreed between the two sides probably the most equitable, and works through two ways to arrive at one: from local land rent, and indexed to the bulk price. For a flat rent, the landowner’s income is the rent times the taps, and your cost per pound is the rent divided by the syrup you expect from each tap.
The land-rent method divides the local farmland rent per acre by the taps per acre. Because the taps cancel out, the season’s rent always comes to the land rent for the acres. The manual suggests it for stands with more than 60 taps per acre. Its example ($100 an acre, 20 acres, 1,760 taps) works out to exactly $1.1364 a tap and $2,000; the printed $1.13 and $1,989 come from rounding the rate down.
The bulk-price method turns an agreed rent into a share of each tap’s syrup value, bulk price times pounds per tap, then applies that share as the price moves, so the landowner and the producer share the risk. In the manual’s example a $1.00 rent at $2.25 a pound and 3.9 lb a tap is 11.4% of the syrup value, and at $3.00 a pound the rent becomes $1.33. The manual prints 12% and $1.41 because it rounds the share up; this calculator does not.
Whatever the method, the manual recommends a written lease that sets out what the landowner and the producer each expect.
Sources
- Ch. 11, "Tap Rental" (price per taphole, the land-rent method, and the bulk-price-indexed method; rates of $0.50 to $2.00 per taphole as of 2020)NAMSPM 3rd ed. (2022)pp. 11-18 to 11-19
- Ch. 11, "Income Potential" (plan conservatively on about 0.35 gal or 4 lb of syrup per tap with modern collection, 0.20 gal or 2.2 lb with traditional methods)NAMSPM 3rd ed. (2022)p. 11-7
Keep each leased sugarbush on its own map
In Sapline you can map a leased woodlot as its own location, with its tapping zones, and log its collections there. The rent goes into cost tracking under Property & Lease, next to the rest of the season’s costs. Land Link, Sapline’s landowner matching, is in beta in Vermont and New York.
Start free