Western Producer reporter Mary MacArthur continues her travels across India, exploring the land many say could become the next big market for Canadian farmers.
OOTY, INDIA –Joseph Nicholas, tour guide at High Field, estimates a small tea plantation owner would sell 300 to 500 kg of tea leaves to factories each year.
Owners would need about 500 acres of land before building their own factory for processing and packaging tea.
The first commercial tea was planted in the 1830s in India’s northeast Assam area.
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Tea is grown in the north in Assam, West Bengal and Tripura and in the south in Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
In the early years, northern tea planters needed to bring rifles to the tea fields to protect themselves against tigers, leopards and wolves.
In southern India, early plantations were worked by Chinese prisoners of war.
India has since become the second largest producer of tea in the world, next to China. In 2008, India produced Northern India has only two seasons of tea crops, but the lush climate of southern India allows the leaves to be picked year round. Only the new tender leaves less than 15 days old are picked on the plant.
White tea, the most expensive, is made from the tiny, tender leaf, but it’s only picked before sunrise.
Green tea is made from the same tender bud but is picked after sunrise and can be harvested every month.
The second leaf is made into orange pekoe tea.
All three leaves mixed together are called CTC, or cutting, tearing and curling, and are used for tea bags.
Once the tea is picked, it’s put into a withering trough where it’s dried to about 30 percent moisture using a series of fans.
The dried down leaves are then cut and put through a googy, which is a large rotating machine that gives the leaves their round shape. After coming out of the googy, the leaves go through a fermenting process, which turns them a copper colour. Green tea does not go through this process.
The tea is dried so that it turns black and is then sorted and graded.
Tea plants can last up to 100 years, but are usually removed after 60 years. It takes three years before new plants can be picked. Every five years the plants are pruned to the correct height for picking.
Nicholas said only women pick the tea in the field because “picking tea is like typing, women are faster.”
About 100 staff work in the High Field factory and 400 staff in the 2,000 acre plantation fields.
At High Field, permanent staff are paid $3.50 a day, given a home and receive hospital care.
The children are given access to school.
