STiR coffee and tea magazine

STiR coffee and tea 15 NEWS tea sells for just 4 cents per cup. Now, consider Hawaiian-grown Big Island Tea sold recently at Harrods for $4,130 a pound. A pound will make at the very least 150 cups of tea at $27.50 per cup. Is it worth it? Yes, to some people because it ticks all the boxes for specialty tea: story, origin, transparency, rarity, prestige. It is an example of hand-picked, artisanal processed, certified organic tea with Harrods' endorsement. This is specialty tea at its most extreme. Nigel Melican doing field work The spectacular growth of the specialty tea sector in the last 30 years is largely due to decisions by consumers―first a few and increasingly a flood—to go down the road of quality rather than low price. Other mainly developed countries are following the trend: Europe, the United States, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, even China, and India are seeing growth in the high price, high-quality tea sector STiR: Growing tea is resource intensive. It requires a lot of land and immense amounts of water. It takes more energy per kilo to produce than the same amount of steel. Melican: Only one-third of the world's land is farmed and two-thirds of that is pasture. Just 28% produces all our cereals and vegetables and only 3% is used for permanent crops-orchards, vineyards, nut crops and the caffeinated beverage crops. Tea is tiny. There are only 15 million acres globally. The inevitable pressure for land to feed a fast expanding population will be felt by growers cultivating luxury crops – like tea.. And tea needs quarter million metric tons of nitrogen that is manufactured every year from non-renewable oil resources, 138,000 metric tons of potassium dug up from fossil sources, and 27,500 metric tons of the world's fast-depleting reserves of phosphorus. Conventional farming has the tools to deliver the goods, but the supplies are fast running out. Peak phosphorus comes in 2030. However, just to emphasize one of the problems of organic farming— it would require 100 million metric tons of fresh cow manure per year to grow all our tea organically. Sustainable systems favoring renewable and carefully husbanding non-renewables would be the preferred choice rather than unsustainable farming – but with so many more mouths to feed it's a big ask. STiR: You quote China's Chairman Mao's 1969 edict that "The only way forward for agriculture is through mechanization." Melican: So, China mechanized―and is now 46% mechanized. China has 19% of the world population, India contains 17%. India struggles to feed its smaller popula- tion from 11% of the world's cultivated land while China feeds its population adequately from 7% of the world's cultivated land according to data from the CIA World Factbook. As soon as 2030 we should see around 85% of world's tea being mechanically harvested, just 15% will be hand-plucked for specialty tea. Hand plucking will be 10 to 20 times as expensive as machine harvesting. There will be polarization into distinctly separate camps. Industrial tea production will be increasingly mechanized and automated for precision farming but will need volume and scale to survive on slender margins. It will increase tea yields and reduce cost of production, but at the expense of tea quality. Industrial tea products by 2050 will be unrecognizable – leaf extracts, tea impregnated substrates, and particles fabricated from tea dust. The specialty tea camp will retain its traditional values while embracing green sustainable credentials - the savvy producers of 2050 will build on the distinction between specialty and industrial tea – and specialty tea consumers will willingly accept high price for quality. This will be the natural province of the artisanal tea farmer. Savvy producers will diversify and innovate to provide novelty with a high quality of both the product and of customer service. This is the future of tea.

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