Naturally grown tea is good for the environment, but is it feasible on the commercial market?

In Nantou, Taiwan''s biggest tea-producing county, there''s a group of tea farmers who are taking a different approach to producing tea, doing away with pesticides and fertilizers in an attempt to give their product a more natural and authentic taste. But selling their tea has proved more difficult than anticipated. Is there a public appetite for naturally grown tea, and any chance for it to be commercially feasible? Our Sunday special report. These tea-pickers haven’t even been on the job for half an hour today, but they’re already struggling trying to pick leaves from trees taller than they are. It’s a natural tea plantation, which looks quite different from fields filled with orderly rows of low bushes that might ordinarily spring to mind.These tea trees were planted and grown under the care of Hsieh Wei-min, a tea farmer in Nantou County. Hsieh used to farm using pesticides and fertilizers.Hsieh Wei-minNatural Tea FarmerIn 2006, when my brothers were each growing their own teas, I stopped spraying pesticides on one of my fields. I wanted to keep some land clean, for the sake of health.A dried-up well in the field together with these caterpillars appear as evidence that Hsieh neither irrigates this land, nor does he use pesticides, or even fertilizer.Hsieh Wei-minNatural Tea FarmerEven if the amount of tea I produce is small, I still want to give it a shot. Without fertilizer, I can make tea of the highest quality.Hsieh’s tea plantation is located on a hillside in Nantou, 1300 meters above sea level. At this site, with a suitable moisture level and enough nutrients in the soil, he’s able to let his plants grow in the closest possible approximation to their natural environment.At another tea plantation in Nantou, Liu Ming-sheng is trying a similar approach. Liu, like Hsieh, switched over to more natural agricultural practices after ditching fertilizers. Now, she comes to this plantation every day to monitor her fields.These two tea growers, both converts to a more ecological set of farming practices, were both influenced by Wang Yuan-shan, a native of Nantou and an intellectual who returned to the county after the 921 earthquake in 1999 to help rebuild the region’s tea growing industry. Wang’s mission was to use natural farming to produce tea that reflects a productive coexistence between humans and their environment.But the choice not to spray pesticides means that farmers must find other ways to deal with insects.Wang Yuan-shanNatural Farming ConsultantOne time I asked them, the damage from these insects is pretty severe; don’t you want to spray pesticides? But before even a minute had passed, they took a seat and said, “no.” But in adopting that approach, there’s a host of real-world difficulties to be overcome. Hsieh Wei-minNatural Tea FarmerThe second season after we started not to use fertilizer, our total output plunged. My wife was really concerned that we wouldn’t make enough tea to get by.In switching to natural farming, the quantity of tea leaves that Hsieh Wei-min was able to produce fell to a tenth of what he was able to manage before, leading to a sharp drop in income. Their hard work and perseverance was also something of an inspiration to Wang in thinking of how to market and sell their natural tea leaves. Wang found a fellow member of his college hiking club, Tsai Ming-ying. Tsai, a native of Taipei, took his employees on monthly visits to tea growers in the area, touring their plantations and buying quantities of their product at a cost of 10 to 20 times above the wholesale price.Tsai Ming-yingNatural Tea SellerAll our plantations are like this, covered in clumps of wild grasses. That’s because our aim is for the plantations to be an environment hosting many types of life, not just tea.But after taking on the job of selling tea, Tsai Ming-ying, who continued to manage his existing cloud computing business in Taipei, fell on hard times, and was forced to close two of the four tea stores he had initially opened.Tsai Ming-yingNatural Tea SellerI blew through my paid-in capital, for which I really owe an apology to my stockholders. I put in about NT$10 million of my own money, and we’ve lost a total of at least NT$40 or 50 million. However, even after his considerable losses over several years in the tea business, Tsai remains unwilling to set a point at which his losses become too great. He believes his investments are tied directly to the livelihood of his fellow tea farmers.Tsai Ming-yingNatural Tea SellerWe have the right attitude on this. We’re willing to stick with it. The people are good, we’re going in the right direction, and it’s a good thing to do. It’s just a question of time.Tsai has traveled a long and bumpy road while waiting for the market to recognize the value of his product. But he has no choice but to keep pushing on if he wants to continue support his fellow natural tea fa...