Tea Time?
The path to tea cultivation in the South
In the fall of 2012, Brookhaven, Mississippi, residents Jason McDonald and Timmy Gipson walked into a Mississippi State University Extension Service office with a big idea. “You’ll think we’re crazy,” McDonald recalled saying, “but we want to grow tea.”
McDonald and Gipson knew that all true teas come from one plant: the evergreen Camellia sinensis. If the name sounds familiar, it’s likely because the tea plant’s ornamental cousins in the Camellia family can be found blooming in glory in many Southern front yards. The requirements for growing tea are a warm and humid climate, acidic and well-draining soil, and an annual sixty to eighty inches of rainfall. Experts point to the plant’s resilience in the face of hurricanes (as long as the soil adequately drains), and its ability to happily produce in similar conditions as blueberry bushes and thrive alongside timber forests. On top of all that, a tea plant can grow for hundreds of years.
It seems that many farmers simply didn’t realize tea could grow so well in the South, so they hadn’t thought to try.
The U.S. Government and many individuals attempted commercial tea production up until the early twentieth century; most ventures failed for a few reasons, but mostly due to a lack of labor solutions at that time. South Carolina boasts some of the oldest tea groves in the country—the Charleston Tea Plantation claims to be the only tea plantation in North America. If that were ever true, it’s no longer the case; but as of yet, no Louisiana-grown tea exists on store shelves.
In fact, until recently, few farmers in the Deep South have considered growing tea on a large scale due to the levels of risk involved. The financial and labor investment is substantial: it takes quite a few plants, and traditionally a lot of precision labor, to harvest and process a pound of tea. The turnaround time is also substantial, because tea plants reach maturity at three to seven years. And it seems that many farmers simply didn’t realize tea could grow so well in the South, so they hadn’t thought to try.
“Nobody knew that this area could grow tea,” echoed Tim Lantrip, owner of The English Tea Room in Covington—a business that purveys one of the most extensive tea menus in the state, if not the country, and even sports a single towering tea plant on its property.
A brand new market
Over the last twenty years, domestic commercial tea production has seen much technological innovation and has entered a boom period. Tea is now grown in seventeen states.
With the advent of the local food movement and aided by the craft beverage surge, domestic tea consumption has grown as well. As more people aim their consumer choices at local producers, and with innovations such as mechanized harvesting to cut enormous labor costs from a large tea operation, what once may have been a risky investment is now perhaps more promising. With the help of agricultural extensions and a few farmers who are willing to work together and take a gamble on a new crop, tea is now looking like a viable industry in the South.
It takes a village to create and sustain a viable tea farm, and that village needs to include plant science, a hefty dose of market research, and maybe a little generosity.
“Fifteen years ago, tea consumption in the U.S. was basically Lipton,” said Lantrip. “Tea consumption in the United States has exploded. It’s a brand new market.”
The request at the MSU Extension Office got McDonald and Gipson into an annual MSU producer meeting, where they met Professor Guihong Bi. Bi had been suggesting tea research for years, but without a producer interested in growing tea, her suggestions fell on deaf ears. Together, the three edited Bi’s proposal and were able to secure funding through the USDA Specialty Block Crop grant program to begin research. They put the first tea plant in the ground of The Great Mississippi Tea Company in October 2013.
Great Mississippi Tea processes about two hundred fifty pounds of tea per year, a relatively small amount aimed at a global market, and they usually sell out. Gipson plucks and processes the tea while McDonald is the all-purpose problem solver, and at the peak of their planting season, they might have eight people total for the task. The couple’s tea has earned two silver medals at the Global Tea Championship for two years running, and their teas are available at both The Cultured Cup in Dallas and Fortnum & Mason’s Rare Tea Line in London. Soon, they’ll branch out to plant a hundred acres in Hawaii, where winter hardly ever visits.
[Read this: The steep beginnings of sweet tea in the South.]
In Poplarville, Mississippi, Jeff Brown and Donald Van de Werken added seventeen hundred tea plants to their blueberry farm in 2007, seeking a new revenue stream for J&D Farms. After years of tea experimentation, plus the addition of mechanized farming equipment and pizza ovens to wither the leaves, their tea wing, Pearl River Tea Company, now boasts a large commercial operation. The farm has ten thousand plants, yielding a few thousand pounds of tea and tea blends per year, and stocks their tea at farmers’ markets and on branded shelves from Hattiesburg to New Orleans.
These Mississippi operations have seen success, but turning a profit with tea can be difficult. “The thing about tea plants is it’s a slow growing plant,” said Van de Werken. “If you think you’re gonna plant this year and make money next year, you’re wrong.”
It takes a village to create and sustain a viable tea farm, and that village needs to include plant science, a hefty dose of market research, and maybe a little generosity.
The Village
Lucky for these tea farmers and the universities they work with, all parties seem to be entering this new industry with a collaborative nature. MSU’s grant, secured in 2013, initiated the Mississippi Tea Project, the objectives of which include creating a Mississippi tea plant, and mapping standards for propagation, labor, and pest management. Bi and graduate student Judson LeCompte have collaborated with The Great Mississippi Tea Company and J&D Farms to achieve some of those goals.
McDonald and Gipson have created a community within the region’s tea circle, because a high tide raises all boats, so to speak.
At LSU AgCenter’s Hammond Research Station, Professor Yan Chen began collecting tea cultivars and propagating the plants in 2013. Her good-faith efforts were finally funded in 2017, through the USDA Specialty Crop Block Grant program and Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry. The resulting program, titled “Evaluation of Tea, Camellia sinensis as a New Specialty Crop for Louisiana,” has three fairly straightforward goals: to develop and release at least two tea cultivars for commercial production in Louisiana, to research consumer preferences in order to help direct future tea farmers, and to promote tea farming and consumption by way of workshops and tastings. To these ends, the LSU team also inspects prospective growing sites and gives advice to farmers.
Collaboration has been key among the pioneers of Southern tea cultivation as they build an industry from a simple outline. McDonald and Gipson have created a community within the region’s tea circle because a high tide raises all boats, so to speak. “People can be, and are being, led astray by bad information in the U.S.; it’s damaging for the industry as a whole,” said McDonald. “We try to give up-to-date and relevant information, alongside [annual] various experiential tea-making and growing workshops on the farm... Nothing beats seeing it all in real time.”
LSU AgCenter has offered new Louisiana tea farmers guidance on topics from fertilizers to pruning techniques, encouragement when something doesn’t work, and access to the wider tea growing community, which translates to opportunities to further their knowledge. And LSU has certainly benefited from their collaboration with The Great Mississippi Tea Company. “We have shared genetic material with [MSU, LSU, UGA, and Texas A&M],” said McDonald. “We also make sure they get seeds from our imports of seeds. That way, we are all working together.”
In the spirit of collaboration, Robert “Buddy” Lee—the same Buddy Lee credited with creating the Encore Azalea in the 1980s—has no financial stake in the tea business, but he’s been giving away rooted tea cuttings and collecting tea plants since the late ‘70s. You could call him the South’s tea fairy, or “more like tea ogre,” according to Lee.
“I didn’t even know tea plants grew here."
Lee met McDonald at a Master Gardener event, and they’ve both been helping farmers and universities get a leg up in tea farming ventures ever since. He gives cuttings to Master Gardeners, agriculture departments at LSU, MSU, and Texas A&M; and anyone who is interested. “I’d like to see the industry get going,” said Lee.
He has always intended to start his own tea plantation, but it hasn’t been in the cards just yet. “I just don’t have time,” Lee lamented. “I just was given these plants. I just help wherever I can.”
Chen explained that the biggest obstacle facing a Louisiana tea industry is not necessarily how to grow the plants, but finding the right finished products for the market. “Because most of the prospective growers getting to know about tea production are already growing vegetables or fruits, the field production part needs some learning but is not the biggest challenge,” said Chen, who has made progress in enlisting Louisiana farmers with an interest in growing tea. “They would be more concerned about tea processing and what final product will meet the demand of the market they would like to target.”
Tea can make quite a few finished products. There are as many tea blends as there are stars in the sky, incorporating fruits, herbs, and flavors of all kinds, and even fermentation. Pearl River Tea Company is entering the ready-to-drink bottled tea market, which introduces a myriad of FDA and consumer challenges such as proper labeling and sweetener choices. Outside of tea itself, there’s an entire sector of agricultural tourism, or agritourism, wherein customers can visit a tea farm and pay for a tour or purchase gift shop merchandise.
Eddie Romero’s You-Pick Orchard
Eddie Romero is no stranger to agritourism. Tourists from around the world and locals alike flock to his orchard in New Iberia to pick their own blackberries, blueberries, figs, persimmons, pears, peaches, and other in-season delectables. Romero, who is on the Louisiana Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association board of directors, planted twenty-five tea plants in his orchard last year, helped along by Chen. “I’m starting slow,” said Romero. “[The orchard] is my 401k.”
Romero used to farm five thousand acres of soybeans, rice, and sugarcane, plus cattle and crawfish with his brother Daniel, and he knows what grows in South Louisiana and what doesn’t. He says his interest in growing fruit began during lulls in his workdays at the Department of Energy back in the ‘80s, and he learned his lesson buying fruit trees from mail-order catalogs and big box stores early on.
[Read this: A sustainable Louisiana—how our state must change to survive.]
“They don’t grow here,” explained Romero. “I went to a Tractor Supply and they were selling apple trees. I told those people, I’ll give you a hundred bucks for every apple that grows on that tree, because they’re not gonna grow here. They were upset.”
His mostly-organic orchard’s bounty is a product of years of agricultural experimentation—a skill he’s been honing since he retired in 2006. “I planted thirty-five varieties of figs, narrowed it down to about four, and I’d only recommend two of those for South Louisiana,” said Romero, also noting he’s currently doing blueberry research in his orchard for the USDA Research Station in Poplarville, Mississippi.
Romero mentioned that his brother Daniel has planted three hundred tea plants on his own acreage. “He’s planting that for his grandchildren, so they’ll have something,” he said.
As for his own tea plants, he doesn’t plan on processing the leaves himself, but he’s found a market for the raw material. “I’m gonna get the Mississippi tea growers—they have an organization that comes out to pick the tea,” said Romero, noting that they would pay him between $400 and $600 per pound. [Editor's note: Romero is speculating here and has yet to select a grower to pick his tea. An earlier version of this article stated the market for tea leaves was "between $400 and $600 per pound picked," but that rate is in fact for processed tea, not raw.]
That said, Romero does know how to process tea, thanks to Professor Chen. “Dr. Yan [Chen] showed us how to do it,” said Romero. “I’m gonna make me some tea for me to drink, and if it’s profitable to grow it to sell, then I’ll turn it into a couple acres.”
[Read this: Growing a new crop of organic farmers in Louisiana.]
Fleur de Lis Tea Company
In the small town of Amite, in Tangipahoa Parish, former machinist David Barron lives on a 160-acre pine tree farm that he dubbed Plantation Pines. It wasn’t supposed to be a tea farm.
“This property was totally covered with pine trees, so thick you really couldn’t walk through it,” said Barron.
A few years ago Barron’s friend, Buddy Lee, asked Barron if he’d like to grow tea, saying he had about a thousand plants he’d grown from seed to give him if Barron was interested. “I didn’t even know tea plants grew here,” said Barron. “It sounded interesting and like a challenge, and I immediately said to count me in. [Lee] explained that LSU was looking for someone to partner with, and I asked him to come over to take a look at the site I had available.”
“Of course they say that drinking tea is very good for you,” said Barron, “but I can tell you, growing it is therapy.”
A drag lane had been cut through the rows of pine trees. The drag lane—cut wide enough for large timber-harvesting equipment to maneuver in and out—was the only place he could find to plant around one thousand tea plants, and Lee thought it would work just fine.
“Funny story about that…” Barron began. Last April, Barron attended a U.S. League of Tea Growers meetup at The Great Mississippi Tea Company in Brookhaven. They all decided to drive to Amite for a look at Barron’s farm, where they picked some leaves to do an early tasting.
“We were all sitting around testing it and comparing it with other teas, and I heard several people say, ‘David’s tea is really great,’ that it had wonderful aroma and flavor,” said Barron. “These are tea experts and enthusiasts.”
Barron said the group’s consensus was that the plants loved the location next to the pine trees, because the trees contribute to acidic soil and also provide shade. “They were saying, ‘He really knew what he was doing when he chose that location,’” Barron recalled with a laugh. “And I’m loving it.”
As Barron found out, where tea is planted matters in the flavor of the finished product. Tea’s flavor profiles are affected by environmental conditions, including (but not limited to) soil pH and nutrient content, humidity, and sun exposure. This is one reason to be excited about tea growing in areas that haven’t attempted it in the past, because at least in flavor, the product will be new to the world.
Chen referred to Barron’s planting approach as urban forestry. “[Barron is] planting between trees, so his tea field gets plenty of shade, but the shade is moving, which is really good,” said Chen. “So the flavor of his tea will be different.”
Barron’s next wave of tea plants will land in another drag lane, but this time, he’s doing it intentionally. His plants still have a few years before they’re harvest-ready.
[Read this: Adventures in Iced Tea.]
The processing building for the future Fleur de Lis Tea Company will be set up soon, and Barron has recruited his son’s girlfriend, Cheyenne Gray, to help full-time with the daily operations. As far as finished products, the sky is the limit for Barron. “After learning the steps in processing, we’re planning to open part of the building as a storefront where we’ll sell tea, and possibly things associated with tea—cups, shirts,” Barron said. “We’ll plan to give tours, too—I have a hundred and sixty acres and some of it’s very picturesque, so we’ll use that as an attraction.”
Outside of plotting his budding business, Barron has taken on a real affection for his tea plants. “Of course they say that drinking tea is very good for you,” said Barron, “but I can tell you, growing it is therapy.”
Bill Luer’s Backyard Option
Dr. Bill Luer is a New Orleans pathologist by day, but when he gets home—especially on weekends between March and October—he’s a backyard tea scientist. Scientist seems to be the right term, as Luer’s thirty-five to forty-plant tea garden has lots of variety, both in plant type and how they’re planted. He has three plants in pots, some in raised beds, and some in the ground. He has a Louisiana variety that was given to him by none other than Jason McDonald.
“I have different varieties from different areas,” explained Luer. “I have Tea Breeze, developed in Vancouver. I’ve got one Darjeeling, one Sochi, some from Japan, some from China... You can tell the difference from looking at them.”
[Read this: Cane and label—A delicious new chapter for Alma Plantation.]
The backyard option is a viable one for Luer, who is married to a Master Gardener and has had his own longtime penchant for gardening. Luer has been growing tea since 2003, which might make him one of the more experienced growers in the state, however small his scale. He knows his way around the common pests, like chili thrips and tea scale, and when to expect them. Luer’s backyard operation nets him between one and two pounds annually—last year, he counted eight hundred and fifty grams—and he processes his own white, green, oolong, black, and pu’er teas.
The next five years
The market is wide open for Southern-grown tea, both on the growing end and the consuming end. Professor Chen has high expectations for future farmer participation as well.
“In five years, we expect to have at least ten growers getting into tea processing, and be marketed as Louisiana tea growers through the LaDAF Louisiana Certified Program,” said Chen.
“Just strolling around the farmer’s market, you see the love for things grown locally,” said Milneck. “I think it could be a win-win, not just for me, but for filling a need locally.”
Louisiana and Mississippi aren’t the only Southern states speculating on tea, nor are they the only states with university-backed support of these growing industries. The University of Florida recently received a grant to explore tea as a diversifying measure in the face of Florida’s declining citrus situation, and that program is in early stages. Dr. Brent Pemberton at Texas A&M is beginning an investigation into a Texas tea industry. In Georgia, Professor Donglin Zhang at the University of Georgia in Athens has created a program with similar goals as LSU and MSU. “Consumption has gone up, prices have gone up and mechanical harvesting techniques have improved,” Zhang said in a press release in the fall of 2017. “This is why I think it could work here.”
Louisiana tea sellers await future local harvests with open arms. Anne Milneck, owner of the tea-purveying Red Stick Spice Company, said there is absolutely a demand for locally-grown tea, and she’s ready to make connections with the farmers. “Just strolling around the farmer’s market, you see the love for things grown locally,” said Milneck. “I think it could be a win-win, not just for me, but for filling a need locally.”
Tim Lantrip at The English Tea Room keeps his ear to the ground for tea news, and is happy to hear that the South is coming into its own tea industry. “It’s been going on for some years now, the farm to market approach,” said Lantrip. “The farmer’s market in Covington is huge. Plus restaurants have been getting this fresh produce, from the farms straight to them. If you can do tea the same way—well, that just makes sense.”
David Barron is excited to connect with local sellers as his first harvest edges closer. But for now, he enjoys the challenges of tea cultivation, and the thought of his present labor providing for future generations of his family. “I obviously will pass this property on to my son,” he said. “He could continue to grow pine trees throughout his life, but [...] tea trees live for hundreds and hundreds of years. If it turns out to be profitable, it might be something that could really help him make the decision to keep the property as a farm, as opposed to a subdivision.”