When you buy organic tea you support the organic tea movement. Full stop. What is it that you’re supporting? Your purchase supports organic farmers who have the integrity of the earth in mind. Ideally, they care for their crops, they care for their land, they care about the people down the food chain who end up consuming their product and they care about their own health. This is the energy that goes into raising their tea, and your purchase says you support that!
For us, in considering tea farming, we draw the line at chemical inputs. So long as the tea is surviving from the organic life in the soil itself, and so long as weed and pest control are conducted in ways that do not harm the earth, we like to support those farmers, certified or not. Word of mouth is good enough for us when relating directly to the farmers. Though the tea may be propagated from cuttings, though it may be planted in dense rows, though it may be treated as a commercial crop, this type of plantation tea, lacking any chemical input, plays a very crucial role in our world. Why? Because there are a lot of tea lovers out there! It is well known that tea is the second most consumed substance in the world, next to water of course, and that means if people are to receive the message tea has to offer on such a large scale, it needs to be made available on an equally large scale. And this type of tea is capable of meeting that demand without forgetting the importance of sustainable, clean farming practices while still accounting for all the tea lovers. That’s why it’s great to buy and support tea of this kind: It can reach a large audience while still upholding the integrity of the Earth.
When purchasing this type of tea you are also supporting a future where clean, healthy and sustainable tea is available. Whereas conventional methods of agriculture might yield higher quantities of tea now, they lack the dimension of time simply because when you force the land to give more than it has to offer and then try to make up for that depletion with large chemical inputs, you have an unsustainable system on your hands. Mother Earth can only sustain so much abuse before having nothing left to offer in terms 
of fertility. Organic plantation tea is available in both time and space, meaning it’s available now and into the future and in a quantity sufficient to heal us all without compromising the health of our planet. The only reason to compromise from Living Tea to plantation tea is to make more available to tea lovers, since there are so many of us. And inorganic tea doesn’t do that, since it doesn’t take future tea lovers into account!
Here, you are supporting earth-conscious farmers, sustainable, clean agriculture practices, the earth itself and even future tea drinkers! But what about yourself? Buying organic tea suggests that you not only care about others but that you also care about yourself and your own health, which in turn can be shared back again to others!
Indirectly, we are also supporting smaller-scale farmers and cooperatives because, while organics probably can be maintained on quite large scales, the whole philosophy of going organic and being a steward of the land lends itself to small-scale agriculture practices; Just as the spirit of gong fu tea is better suited to smaller groups of tea lovers. Inorganic tea is one of the most destructive crops in the world, being farmed on unimaginably large scales on mountaintops. Deforestation, heavy chemical inputs, monoculture and greedy harvests result in chemical runoff and water contamination, landslides, ecological imbalance, loss of soil fertility, short term farming, and tea so far removed from its natural state of being we might even call it something else altogether. In Taiwan, there are still lots of small-scale tea farmers and cooperatives that support each other through trying times and they also need the support of people like us so that they can continue offering their services.
This post was first published by Global Tea Hut in August of 2013.
Global Tea Hut has generously granted permission to T Ching to publish past articles from their publication each week. These will appear on Wednesdays.
I am a huge supporter of organic or organic compliant teas. I realize that some smaller farmers might not have the funds to get certified but if one takes the time to investigate the crops, it’s easy to see signs of insect life among the tea leaves.
I was really taken by your observation and way of explaining it…. “When you force the land to give more than it has to offer and then try to make up for that depletion with large chemical inputs, you have an unsustainable system on your hands” It is so true.
“It’s easy to see signs of insect life among the tea leaves.” Absolutely! If you look closely, you can also see that organic farms have a wide variety of insect life (and simply LIFE!), while conventional farms often have an infestation of one kind of insect–one that’s resistant to the pesticides they use and that has nothing left in the ecosystem to properly balance it out.
Something I see rarely discussed, if ever, is there needs to be online tea vendors that sell high quality organic tea at very *competitive* prices.
It’s all well and good to promote organic tea, but if you can’t easily find vendors that sell it, then the incentive to purchase it drops.
Finding vendors that sell organic oolong is particularly challenging. And so, someone who wants to drink Taiwanese oolong tea, but can’t find any organics for sale, will be pushed to buy conventionally grown oolong.
If you’re living in Taiwan, and it’s easy to find organic oolong that’s worlds different from being a tea lover living in another land and struggling to find organic oolongs from online vendors sold at competitive prices.
Ah, you’ve raised some good points, Ryan. You’re right–there DO need to be more good online vendors for high quality organic oolong tea (and organic tea in general!). We help vendors and tea lovers who visit Tea Sage Hut in Taiwan to connect with organic tea producers in order to help make this happen.
As for price, that’s another issue, and it gets into questions of value and quality.
Organic tea usually costs more, due to both higher production costs and to scarcity. For us, it’s a price we’re glad to pay. We’d rather know that the tea we drink supports the earth rather than harms it, and is good for famers and for us, too. (In other words, we place a higher value on tea that does good, so we’re willing to pay more for it.) Also, we’d rather a higher price be an incentive for more farmers to transition into organic tea production than to save a little on our tea. (In other words, we value the power of the money we spend, and would rather spend more on tea and skip buying something else than to buy tea that we don’t support on an ethical level.)
The second issue is quality. When people say “high quality oolong”, they’re talking about something subjective, and what they really mean is pretty vague. “High quality” for a newbie tea drinker is totally different from “high quality” for a Taiwanese tea snob, and totally different from high quality for us. For a simple parallel, look to cars. For a teenager getting a first car, a decent used car could be high quality. For a car snob, a Bugatti (the world’s fastest luxury car) may be “high quality”. For someone who cares about the environment and about a good drive, a Honda Accord Hybrid is likely of much higher “quality” than a fast luxury car. And for those last two categories of car buyers, price doesn’t have so much to do with the purchase. If you really want great quality tea, it’s similar. You can buy “artisan” teabags from a supermarket, a super-rare tea that is damaging to the environment and exorbitantly expensive, or high quality organic tea that is more expensive than the comparable conventional tea. Each is considered by some to be high quality. What you choose depends on how you define quality.