PHILOSOPHY
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If farmers work for profit only, degradation on many levels is bound to come. Farmers are artists and their canvas is the soil.
—Rajah Banergee
This website is a natural outcome of my interest.
I confess I'm far from knowing everything. I’m not into competition here, I just want to share the teas I love, from places with pure environment and beautiful, goodhearted people.
Although for me most important is the feeling that particular tea brings me, I’m also trying to share here as many details of origins, cultivars, picking seasons, as I can possibly get.
I have for many years a very sensitive stomach for pesticides and chemical fertilisers in fruit in tea.
This led me to do my own field research and eventually became friends with many local organic farmers around Taiwan.
I'm also learning how to process tea and sometimes I offer samples of my own hand made micro batches.
Natural farming takes much more time and effort than conventional one. Price of land and salary for tea pickers is the same for both. Harvests are fewer and yields considerably lower. This all affects the final price of tea. Positive side is a thriving ecosystem with strong tea trees, healthy farmers and their families who can sustainably grow tea for generations to come, and of course pure and healthy and more delicious dew in your cup. That is the price I'm willing to pay and I'm happy that interest in pure, natural tea is still growing and it's often coming from the west. Sometimes farmers ask me “why all the foreigners asking for Organic tea?” I'm happy to be part of this growing trend that I believe will soon become normal and that in the future we will look at this agrochemical experiment as a dead end. What we can do right now is to support the farmers who already work in alignment with nature.