There have been many efforts to introduce tea growing into the US, starting in 1772, near Savannah, Georgia. A government farm in South Carolina ran for four years in the 1880s and has been kept alive by its plants being purchased personally by Thomas Lipton, then through contracting with Sam’s Club and, after bankruptcy, being bought by Bigelow Tea. It’s now a showcase tourist attraction. A more successful development has been in Hawaii, where a number of small farms are producing fine white teas.
Now, a group of 20 growers and traders in Oregon is making plans to establish its Willamette Valley area as a specialty tea center. They met in early 2020 and laid out their case for building a type of statewide cooperative with pooled investment.
Oregon is a flourishing food production hub, particularly around Eugene, known for its beers, craft coffee, and wine, with hop and malt barley production consistently increasing. The climate zone is well-suited for tea farming: mild, with favorable patterns of precipitation and areas of high elevation best suited to fine tea growing and a factor missing in the Carolinas where early ventures had struggled and fizzled. There is a need to plant seed varieties that can survive Oregon winters.
Oregon wines provide an encouraging precedent. Angela McDonald, the owner of Oregon Tea Traders and one of the two leaders of the January assembly, states that “Wines here never got much recognition until they started to differentiate taste. They were just bad mimics.” She and Jason McDonald, the founder of the Great Mississippi Tea Company (they are not related), laid out the opportunities for teas that would have a unique regional flavor, just as Willamette Valley pinot noir wines do, with angles for agritourism. She asks, “Can you imagine a yoga or meditation retreat on a tea farm? A farm-to-cup drinking experience? I can.”
Oregon already has an established small tea grower, the Minto Island Tea Company, that first planted its half-acre plot in 1988, with production starting in 1992. Jason McDonald calls tea a “hundred-year crop.” Growers have to burn cash for the first six years before the plants produce harvestable leaf. He presented figures derived from his own experience from around six years of tea growing. He says, “Honestly, growing tea is like having a money-printing machine if you do it right.” The case rests on a small acreage that produces a distinctive specialty tea. One acre is the largest an individual can manage, with around 4,750 plants. Most small growers in Oregon have only hundreds of bushes.
McDonald estimates that the revenues are at least $42,750 for a one-acre operation. That is the equivalent of 4.2 acres of blueberries and 26 to 35 of ryegrass. A cooperative of 25 growers would provide the critical mass to share seed purchase costs, develop a skilled labor pool for harvesting, build a central processing facility, and scale marketing and selling expertise. As a collective, they would promote an Oregon tea brand.
The figures seem optimistic especially in that they do not address distribution. Minto Island tea is not sold online or available via Amazon. The only largescale national brand is Oregon Chai in Portland, which manufactures chais, concentrates, sweeteners, lattes, beverage mixers, and flavoring sauces. It doesn’t grow anything and is owned by Kerry, a very large Irish firm.
The logic of the tea cooperative is small and unique. That has its pluses and minuses. The likelihood of it producing some first-rate Oregon-branded teas seems quite high.