The Tea Trade Interview
In the Footsteps of Fortune
© 1998 Tea Trade Press, LLC–used with permission

Not since the legendary 19th century Scottish adventurer Robert Fortune has a Westerner journeyed to China to buy tea directly. American David Lee Hoffman speaks about his travels for Silk Road Teas.

"There's a serious problem in China. China has eight million tea farmers."
"The solution is to start feeding the soil, it's very simple."
"If they have a better quality tea, they will get a much higher price for it, and if they can grow it organically, they get still an even greater price."

EDITOR'S NOTE: To study tea cultivation and acquire tea in China's hinterlands without official blessings or even speaking the language is an exploit few have attempted since botanist Robert Fortune immediately after the Opium War. Following sometimes literally in those footsteps, my friend David Lee Hoffman is another intrepid visionary whose contributions will prove historically significant, and of benefit, to China and all tea lovers. James Norwood Pratt

TT: How did you get your start in tea?

D: This goes back 25 years. I was living in Asia, and of course everyone drank tea. Traveling across Asia you have tea wherever you stop. I got my start in Morocco, in North Africa, where we drank mint tea, green tea, mostly Gunpowder, with mint and sugar. It's a delicious drink, but it wasn't tea, as far as what I know tea to be now. Then heading out through Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Afganistan and you get into the black tea country. I got my start drinking tea on a regular basis in India. It was nice tea but always masked with milk, spices and sugar. But it was with the Tibetans that I got my real introduction to tea. Tea with character, tea that had a personality. I noticed there was a great difference in the quality of tea I drank with nomads from that which I enjoyed with the Dalai Lama or his teachers.

I came back to this country and I tried to sustain my tea drinking habit and there was nothing out there. I went to Chinatown and systematically combed through every shop trying to find tea and occasionally would find some good teas but that was my start. In my quest for finding better teas I started going to China about five years ago and I brought back tea. I found there was great interest in the tea I was bringing back and the business grew.

TT: What did you learn on your first trip to buy tea?

D: On my very first trip I found some very wonderful teas but I couldn't get them out of the country except through the post office which is ridiculous, because you have to jump through hurdles just to send 10 kilos of tea. You can't run a business on such a small amount. I started learning about the politics in China. I got a good introduction to the bureaucratic difficulties, not in buying tea, but in getting it out of the country.

D: Yes! Each one has its own restrictions. The central government has established certain guidelines for controlling the export of tea, but in fact it's really up to the local provinces to put these laws in effect. Often you encounter great obstacles in working through the system. As far as I know I'm the first foreigner ever to go to China and start buying tea directly from the farmer. This was unheard of–the locals don't even do this. No one wants to deal with the farmers. That's the reality. They don't want to go out and be in the dirt and the hard conditions and smell the sweat of the farmers. They'd rather go to the nice clean shop and have it delivered to them in neat packages, which is how they do it. The tea brokers buy from manufacturers or from the collectives.

TT: What role does China Native Produce and Animal By Products Corporation (the official government export agency) play in tea today?

D: At one time, all tea pretty much came through their hands, but I haven't really dealt with them that much. At one time you could actually find really high quality teas from them, but it only was by chance. They collect teas from many different farms, and if you got tea from a good farm, the tea was excellent, but there was no consistency in the quality, so it was strictly pot luck.

I've dealt with tea exporters. If you're shipping out a container of tea, you've got to go through the proper channels, and often it was very difficult because, one. I'm buying tea directly from the farmer, and two, I had to pay the proper taxes. Sometimes it amounted to about 30% of the price of the tea. I don't mind paying the taxes because it supplies local governments with needed revenue. But just because I was paying all the proper taxes that in itself didn't clear the myriad of obstacles in exporting of tea. You see there is no precedence in China to purchase tea in this manner.

TT: Are these private farmers, working on their own plot of land that they own or is it a collective farm?

D: All this changes. In fact, every trip I go back it's a different situation. When I first started, they were all pretty much state farms and the only private farms were the individual family farmers who grew enough for themselves and a few friends. In the last few years, all this has changed. Now, it's permitted for the farmers to sell their tea privately, they deregulated the restrictions that the farmer had to sell to the tea cooperative, which was fine while it lasted, because it gave the farmers an opportunity to sell their teas regardless. They could harvest their tea, there was a set price, they took it down to the collection agency, and they were paid by weight. In fact this was one of my best sources for seeking out tea because I was able to taste the teas from separate farms before they got mixed into the big batch. So if you could find out where the collectives were, you were able to taste the teas when they came in. It worked out pretty well–the farmers were always happy to sell me tea directly because they would get paid more for their tea, which I'm happy to do.

The problem is that many of the state collectives are having a difficult time right now, financially. There's a serious problem in China. China has eight million tea farmers. Eight million tea farmers! The amount of tea farmers that have access to selling their tea for export probably amounts to less than five hundred, if that. The rest of the farmers have to have some way to sell their tea in China. The market is very depressed right now in China; there's actually a surplus of tea. I've seen warehouses filled floor to ceiling. A lot of it ends up being processed into green tea extract, for polyphenals, for health benefits. It's a medical product. And yet, there's such a demand in the world market for quality tea right now.

Even if the farmer has a quality product, there's no outlet for them to sell it to, there are no organized markets in China to sell tea^With the exception of one that opened last year which I attended, the inaugural opening of Ming-cha, famous tea, marketplace. It was very interesting, it was very busy, it was in Zhejiang Province up near Shaoshing in the north. I suppose it was successful from the standpoint of getting lots of publicity, but the farmers weren't represented, except from the local area where the market was held. I saw very few teas coming in from the other parts of China. And the quality of the tea coming was pretty standard, there was nothing exceptional and the prices I paid were very high compared to what's available in China. In short, it wasn't possible to conduct any business at that market although the concept itself is an excellent one, and I think if China organized tea markets, where the farmer could take his tea to market and sell directly to the public, this would provide a great benefit to the tea farmer, not to mention people looking for quality tea. As yet there are no organized markets for tea; there are markets for rice, vegetables, electronics, anything else you want, but tea is still a very strictly controlled commodity in China and it's killing the tea farmer. I saw so many farms this year where the farmer could not afford to pick tea; they're just leaving it on the bush and there are farmers going to the towns, abandoning their fields, going to the cities shining shoes on the streets, and getting paid more to shine shoes than they did to farm tea.

TT: Is that a function of the general move in China to the so-called capitalist road where the cities are a magnet for the dream of becoming rich?

D: Yes, there's tremendous wealth in China now and it's growing exponentially. It's amazing how fast the economy is booming in China but it's concentrated right in the great cities along the coast. Inland, it's much slower. I've thrown my lot in with the farmer. I've always avoided politics, my passion is tea and that's what I want to continue doing, but the reality is now I can no longer remain detached from the political arena of tea farming. The tea farmer has a very difficult time right now in China and I'm backing the farmer because in fact it's the small farmer where you can find the really exceptional teas. Not to say you can't find them elsewhere, but I haven't been able to. Every great tasting tea I've ever found has been from small farms where they still care about the product they're growing.

Forty years ago the government initiated a policy to increase tea production, to catch up with India and again become a major producer of tea in the world market. The way of doing this was through the scientific application of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbacides, which in theory I suppose sounds very good, but in practice the simple farmer knew nothing about using pesticides and fertilizers and they made a lot of mistakes. A lot of tea got sprayed with pesticides and residues remained on the plants. They're working on this problem but certainly much more needs to be done. Ultimately, nothing short of full organic conversion will resolve the problem. In the meantime, the government has been taking stronger action to prevent abuses and they certainly made a noble effort to resolve the problem with the large commercial farms that are dealing with exports, so I don't think one needs to be so concerned with pesticide residues on teas, but still it is a major problem in China. At first when they started this policy, it was great, the farmers increased their production by 20%, there was lot less labor involved with the application of fertilizer, they didn't have to carry hundreds of pounds of messy manures and animal waste up to the tea farms, and they loved it. Production went up, profits went up, everything seemed fine, and was for a few years and then things started changing.

Now major problems are confronting tea farming in China and other countries where they relied heavily on chemical fertilizers. Because what happens over time is the soil becomes depleted of nutrients which the chemical fertilizers don't replace: the trace elements and more important, the humus content, the mass in the soil that provides the structure, the bulk that retains the water, that allows aeration for the roots to grow, that allows for the microbial and natural biological life to exist in the soil. This is vital for tea production, this is vital for any plant, but if you're cooking with food you put spices and other things in it and you can mask the deadness of the food. You can't do this with tea–if tea is dead, it's dead, and so much of our commercial tea now is dead. The fact is because so much of the land has been depleted of nutrients, and because of the constant traffic of the tea pickers, the soil has become compacted, the roots don't grow, the sprays with which they apply the chemical fertilizers have a very shallow penetration in the soil because when you get a heavy rain it runs off rather than soaks in the soil and washes a lot of the chemicals into the water supply rather than going down into the roots.

TT: What's the solution?

D: The solution is to start feeding the soil, it's very simple. It's something they did for thousands of years. You can apply modern techniques to the old way of doing things, and this is the main work I'm doing in China. What I'm doing^now is basically working with farmers to establish organic farming techniques which is so important to the sustanance of tea farming in China, because if nothing is done right now, not only are the eight million tea farmers going to suffer, but so are the passionate tea drinkers around the world who want a quality product but won't be able to find it. You cannot get great tea from dead soil, there's no way around that. So much of the tea coming out of China now that is judged to be high quality tea is based totally on the appearance of the tea leaf. I see this all the time. They're more concerned with the appearance of the leaf–it looks good, it's whole, got good color, it's picked at the right time, it's a famous tea–these are the factors that establish the price of tea in China.

The farmer can't afford to collect the manure and the leaves and the rapeseed extract. Even though they know it makes better tea. Everyone knows it makes better tea if you use natural fertilizer. When they scent, they grow these flowers in these pots in Fujian used for scenting tea. They're beautiful flowers, and they grow them in these big pots. And in the springtime they pull them outside, in the wintertime they bring them inside. They must weigh 200 Ibs. a tree, they're big trees. Anyway, they will not use chemicals, they will only use organic [materials]. Because they know, if you want a good-scented flower, you've got to feed the soil. And the farmers know this with tea. The problem is, if you're going to grow commercially, there's no way to collect all the food you need for the soil.

I've got the support of the Tea Research Institute, the Department of Agriculture. They all know they have major problems, they're documented, and they know the problems, and even the erosion problem, has to do with feeding the soil. If you can build up the soil, if you can aerate the soil, the water flows into the soil and absorbs it; the soil, it's like a sponge, it retains water. If you don't have humus in the soil it leaches out.

What we're doing is creating a system. This has been my work for 20 years: how to turn garbage into fertilizer. Earthworms will do it 24 hours a day without asking for anything in return except being fed. Worm casts happen to be nature's finest fertilizer ever, because they're totally water soluble. And it's got so much good stuff in there. Well, it turns out that these worms we're raising here in California are acid-tolerant. And the tea plants need an acid condition. So the worms provide aeration for the soil, they provide fertilizer.

You take the waste, any kind of organic waste–worms will eat anything. All you have to do is compost it, break down the cell structure. And the worms and microorganisms will take care of the rest. The worms will do it most efficiently. If you don't have a resource of organic material, then you simply compost elsewhere and bring in the concentrated fertilizer. In other words, just the worm casts. Best is when you create a situation where you're composting directly on the soil. All you do is feed the soil. Just as nature has done for years. The leaves fall off the trees, fall on the ground, and create an environment, a microcosm of life and digestion. It's biodigestion. That's what composting is. Each element in the chain feeding off one another. You have thermaphilic decomposition in a heaped compost pile, but that's a different process. You use a different set of bacteria to break [it] down. What I'm promoting is use of biodigestion with worms and other organisms.

T: Now when you bring this program to a farmer, are you also saying, "If you do this I will buy your tea?"

D: Oh yes. "At twice the price that you can sell it for regularly." You have to provide an incentive for the farmer. And I tell them, "I'll take a percentage of the tea that I've got from you now, I'll take a percentage of that money, and give it back to you to invest in the soil."

T: You're actually subsidizing, you're advancing him cash, so he can afford to do this?

D: Yes. I want to provide an incentive. We have to–not just me–everyone has to support the farmer.

TT: Who initiated the project you're doing with the Tea Research Institute?

D: I did. At that point there were no organic teas coming out of China. I visited several farms where they claimed it was organic, they had the certificates, I visited the farms and saw evidence to the contrary. My biggest concern now with the future of China tea is with the misrepresentation of the word organic. It has great marketing potential and that's what they're picking up on, the marketing potential, not the actual sustainable practice of organic farming, which is so much more important than just being able to sell a product. I'm working on this project to be able to qualify tea that is certified organic. What does this mean? It's simply a piece of paper that says this tea is organic. It doesn't mean anything unless you can qualify the statement. In other words, show how the farmer is feeding the soil, show what they're doing for insect control, etc. There's a half dozen international certification organizations, but this in itself isn't sufficient. What they use in China, teas are given the "Green Award," and that's as close as they get to in China. I've tried to track down trails of teas which they're calling organic now and you run into big obstacles. One, the suppliers don't want to disclose their sources which is a big problem in itself–how do you know when a tea's organic, how do you know when it's grown without pesticides and herbacides? The only way you can really know is have someone go back to that farm and monitor their farming techniques, then you know. Unfortunately, organics has become a marketing concept rather than an actual practice of farming. And that's what we've got to get back to. We've got to get back to the farmer, back to the land, back to the soil. ^

TT: Have you seen any indications of other importing countries, such as Taiwan, Japan, Germany, coming to China and trying to gain access to garden growing in China?

D: Oh, very much so. Everyone is going over there because I think they see the potential in the cheap labor. Certainly China has thousands of years of tea growing history and they're great masters at it. There's no way to get around that, they are the leading world masters of tea farming. I know of at least eight Japanese farms in China, and there are quite a few Taiwanese investing in China now. There's a lot more interest in China from foreign countries.

TT: With this new prosperity in China, is that leading Chinese consumption to increase?

D: There is a new class of people in China that has a lot of money now, and they want to buy the good things they haven't had before, and that includes good tea of course. They're paying lots of money for tea and two things are happening: they're buying a lot of mediocre tea in great packaging, and two, they're also buying good tea and consuming it domestically so it decreases the amount of tea of that quality for export.

Continue >>