Tea-Growing: Managing the Response to Climate Change

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By Peter Keen

At the macro level, climate change is a scientific, political, societal, policy, and planetary issue. For the tea industry, it raises questions about the future and, perhaps, even its survival. At the micro level, it is a practical and immediate management problem for tea farmers. There is no area of the world where it is not a current, imminent, or emergent factor. Examples of major shifts already apparent are sustained drought in East Africa and Yunnan, disruption of seasonal rain and monsoons in Darjeeling, temperature increases in Assam and Japan, and soil erosion in Sri Lanka.

Tea farmers can’t do anything to change these powerful macro forces, but they can adapt their management practices to at least protect their own smallholding or specialty tea garden. Some of these require aid and investment funding. Most take 1-3 years before the benefits become fully apparent.

Here are some examples of effective action. They are illustrative and selective, highlighting some features that apply across many related objectives, methods and achievements:

1. Water: drip irrigation versus spraying, soil water infiltration mapping (satellite and sensor identification of water absorption/lack within areas of a field);

2. Soil: fertigation, organic fertilizers, compost, shade trees to shelter fields;

3. Energy: biomass fuel to replace wood and fossil fuel, fuel-saving stoves;

4. Waste: manure fertilizer, gasification of, for example, sugar cane and tea leaf waste to form briquettes;

5. Trees: reforestation, shade-tree cover;

6. Biodiversity: bio-corridors, multi-crops; and

7. Genetic variety: clonal seedlings

These all follow a path that is not so much moving forward as getting back on track. Basically, dealing with climate change at the grower level begins with the rejection of monoculture. This is the highly efficient growing of a single crop, with a focus on chemicals to maximize soil productivity and yields, minimal loss of harvest from crop rotation, and an industrial manufacturing and distribution approach to production. The new refocus is on biodynamic management.

Water

Irrigation methods are key to the effectiveness and efficiency of water use. Drip irrigation has become an essential here. Spraying stresses the soil in dry seasons, adding to erosion. In wet ones it produces water logging and runoff. Overhead sprinklers are hit-or-miss. Netafim, the largest Indian irrigation service firm, reports that flood irrigation reaches only 30% of the land, sprinklers 60%, but drip irrigation 90%.

Drip irrigation and its combination with fertilizer feeding — fertigation — uses pipes controlled by software and sensors to deliver the exact water need at the optimal time. In South India, one extensive tea garden increased its yield from 3,500 kilos to 5,000 in 4 years and to 7,000 in 9. The owner reports a visible improvement in the health of the plants. A Sri Lanka three-year development doubled yields. In Tanzania, drip irrigation at Igoda farm increased yields — more “crop per drop” — while cutting water waste by 30%

Soil

Monoculture has contributed to the growing problems of soil erosion, contamination, and overreliance on chemical fertilizers for nutrients. The new priority is to substitute biomass to enrich the soil and encourage long-term fertility. Crop residues, manure and organic decomposition are examples.

Energy

Energy management is a major immediate target of opportunity. Electricity and fossil fuels comprise a large proportion of operating costs for pumps, fans, boilers, and tea drying.

There are many examples of crop waste being turned into biofuel. In Kenya, one small organization collects sugar cane waste from outside a factory where it has piled up for decades, then dries and mills it before pressure-compacting it into briquettes. These are smokeless and generate 50% more energy than equivalent sizes of logs.

The Mokomboki factory in Kenya initiated a program that shows the scale of direct energy savings by replacing firewood with briquettes made of biomass waste. Its energy expenses fell from $542,000 to $295,000. It has entirely eliminated the use of timber.

Waste

Tea making generates plenty of waste, from the farm to the factory to the discarded used tea bag. One study states that 190,000 tonnes of India’s 860,000 tonnes of production are waste, mainly leaves and fragments.

Lipton’s massive Jebel Ali factory in Dubai produced 450 tonnes of waste annually, taking up 30,000 square meters; this amounted to 5.4 kilograms per tonne, a figure Lipton has reduced to 0.09. Nestle’s plan goes beyond getting rid of waste to turning it into an economic, social and environmental asset. Tea waste is packed with the compounds that make for a superior fertilizer: nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus. These improvements come from applying well-established quality management methods from manufacturing.

Tea generates wastewater that remains untreated. It builds up organic matter that decomposes without oxygen being able to aerate it; separating waste and storm water transforms the waste into refreshed water via screens, sediment tanks, gravel beds, and wetland treatment methods.

Trees

Deforestation has been endemic in modern times. In crowded Taiwan and Japan, tea farms are being surrounded by housing developments that reduce trees. The scarcity of land encourages their removal. Many tea experts regard restoring shade trees as core to sustainability. They add to wildlife biodiversity, provide protection and are emission sinks for carbon. Planting by drone, community action programs, and careful selection of native trees are part of the growing emphasis on teas plus trees as the basis for a productive farm.

Biodiversity

Bio-corridors link separate locations so that animals, insects, and flora can move freely between them. This helps offset the intensity of monoculture fields, housing, and other developments built on fenced off land previously open to farming and many other impediments to diversity. Dilmah is credited with implementing these paths in Sri Lanka and points to the resulting increase in variety, mobility, and number of dragonflies, for instance, many of them rare. Xishuangbanna in Yunnan Province,  China has made corridors the base for intercropping, support of wildlife, and enriching of flora and fauna. Biodiversity is the opposite of monoculture in its aims and methods. It increasingly extends the principles of organic farming to add, not remove, nature from the tea fields.

Genetic variety

Stress-tolerant tea clones are an important, long-established adaptation aid to farming. India’s Tocklai Tea Research Institute has developed 33 tea clones, plus 150 vegetable and flower clones and a dozen seed stocks. These vary in their characteristics — yield, level of drought resistance, suitability for marginal land and soil with poor drainage, etc. They also help extend the genetic variety of tea bushes that monoculture has narrowed down. Biogenetic molecular science seems sure to speed up and extend clonal methods: gene profiling, genome mapping, and micropropagation in the interests of sustainability and reduction of vulnerability of a small set of seedings.

Biodynamic management

Bio-management is organic farming, with or without formal organic certification. “Organic” applies only to pesticide-free farming. Bio-management is everything natural, whereas the organic label addresses pesticide-free and bio-fertilization farming. It adds to  soil renewal, irrigation, biodiversity, multi- versus monoculture crop choices, tree shading, and use of natural nutrients. Whether these and other examples of management activism in responding to climate and related environmental threats will succeed over the long-term is uncertain. But the approach of “wait it out” or “that’s a government policy problem” is self-defeating. Something must be done at the grower level and in the fields today.