WILTON – Darrell Fisk has decided it is time to retire – but only from the meat processing business he has run for the past 28 years. He will stay in the business he was in long before that – making maple syrup, this time with his nephew Ben Fisk at Ben’s Sugar Shack in Temple.

Fisk, 63, is a Wilton native and began his career as a meat cutter at the former Vilolettes Supermarket in Milford, which closed in 1990.

“When they closed I bought some equipment to go out on my own,” he said, “and became Big D’s Professional Meat Cutting. I started with doing game. (My wife) Susan’s family were hunters, and some of my family hinted. Some people raised a beef or a pig, but the main focus was wild game.”

When he moved to his present home on Dale Street he added a cooler. He only processed the meat, he said. “I don’t kill animals.”

As one of the few game processors in the area, his business grew until “we were doing up to 300 deer in a season.”

In the past he did a few bears. He doesn’t care for bear meat, he said, “but some people think it’s great.”

But he was getting tired, developed a problem with his leg, and was finding it hard to find help.

More people are getting into raising their own beef and pork, he said. They want to know where their food is coming from and are afraid of the talk about anti-biotics.

“If we’d seen that trend coming, we might have gone another way, but I want to take it a little easier.”

The problem now, he said, is where will hunters take their game? “There aren’t that many places around. Someone I know is fixing up a place in Antrim. I don’t know any in Wilton or Milford.”

And, he added, “everyone is having trouble finding help.”

Right now, he said, at Ben’s Sugar Shack he’s making maple cream and sugar. “Ben’s (business) is growing all the time. I help with the boiling during the season and he’s opened a second house in Newbury.”

In an interview in 1989 when he was living in Hancock, Fisk said he had started in the syrup business with his parents, William and Joyce Fisk, “when I was about four.” He was in high school when his parents bought commercial equipment. He started his own syrup business in 1975 and made up to 200 gallons a year, using a sap house near the corner of Dale Street and Curtis Farm Road in Wilton.

Fisk was a member of the first graduating class from the new Wilton-Lyndeborough Cooperative Junior-Senior High School in 1972 and is a graduate of Thompson School of Agriculture at UNH. He worked for many years with his uncle, dairy farmer Richard Greeley of West Wilton and tried a number of jobs, including with Mike Frost at Mike’s Ice Cream in Wilton and Blue Seal in Milford before going to Violettes.

Working with his nephew is a lot less time consuming than meat processing, Fisk said, which tended to run late into the night. “I can’t do that any more.”

He helps with the boiling during the season, he said. “But Ben keeps growing all the time.”

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