Hello friends!
Welcome to the first SustainabiliTEA profile of 2022, and I have another awesome farm to introduce to you today! I talked to Lochan from Jun Chiyabari, a family-run tea farm in East Nepal about how the farm is run and what their ethical and sustainable efforts are.
Introduction: Who is the family behind Jun Chiyabari?
Jun Chiyabari, which means “Moon-lit Tea Garden” in Nepali, started with memories. In early 2000, two brothers, Lochan and Bachan, were inspired by their childhood days in Mount Hermon School, Darjeeling to start a tea farm in East Nepal. Much like the team at Renegade Tea Estate, they did not have any experience in the tea industry but they had a lot of passion and drive for tea.
Located in Hile, Dhankuta, Jun Chiyabari is a 75-hectare tea garden that produces many artisanal teas. I’ve tried their Hand-Rolled Tippy Oolong, which was a sweet and fruity oolong that did very well in my tea steamer!
If you’re interested in learning more, I would highly recommend reading their story as well as their page on the terroir of the tea gardens on their website. It was really interesting to see how the geographical location and latitude of the garden combined to produce misty conditions that are conducive for growing tea.
Planet: How Jun Chiyabari is taking care of the environment
Starting Organic, moving towards Natural Farming
Jun Chiyabari has been committed to protecting the earth from its inception, and they started farming organically right from the time the tea gardens were created in 2000. In 2011, they were certified organic by the IMO (Switzerland). However, organic farming is merely the start. These days, they are moving towards natural farming as laid out by Mananobu Fukuoka. You can read more about Fukuoka’s method at his Wikipedia page, but essentially, the four principles of natural farming are:
- There is no need for humans to interfere with the soil by plowing, tilling, or using powered machines;
- There is no need to prepare compost or use prepared fertilisers.
- There is no need to manually weed or use herbicides – instead, minimal weed suppression should be practiced.
- There is no need to use pesticides
As you can imagine, this is radically different from conventional farming and Jun Chiyabari is actively learning to see how they can incorporate as much of Fukuoka’s principles in their tea garden.
About their Tea Garden (terroir) and Planning Ahead
Speaking of their tea gardens, I’ve always imagined tea gardens to be one vast plot of land. However, this is not the case for Jun Chiyabari. They have a variety of gardens, ranging from a few big plots of land to many mini and micro plots of land. There are normal farmlands, jungles, forests, bamboo groves, streams, etc between their tea gardens, which helps them avoid being one monocultural tea farm.
Another interesting thing about Jun Chiyabari’s tea garden is that they deliberately chose to be located much higher up in the mountains than is normally recommended. This is part of their future planning against global warming – they’re planning 150 to 200 years in the future and to them, a higher location might be necessary in the future.
Speaking of the changes through time, Lochan shared a very interesting post about how the tea gardens have helped impact the landscape positively – I’m embedding it below so check out the differences between the first and third picture!
Clonal vs Seed
As we’ve seen from talking with several different farmers, it’s important for tea farms to grow different cultivar of teas. Currently, Jun Chiyabari’s garden is populated with a variety of tea trees since they don’t know what cultivars will do well in the era of global warming. Hence, they are encouraging diversity in the tea trees and observing which are more suitable for their gardens. Apart from growing non-monocultural crops, Jun Chiyabari are also moving towards growing tea trees from seeds. Currently, most tea gardens, including theirs, are populated by clonal tea trees (trees grown from cuttings), especially since tea trees grown from seeds are less profitable than clonal tea plants. However, for the sake of genetic diversity and as an insurance against global warming, they are dedicating large sections of their tea gardens to tea trees grown from seeds.
I asked Lochan more about the difference between clonal teas trees and seed-grown tea trees, and he told me that clonal tea trees tend to have better harvests, more uniform taste per production batch, and it’s more economic for the tea garden to have mostly clonal plants. On the other hand, teas from seed-grown tea trees taste different because a) each tea tree grown from seed is different, and b) the root system of a seed tree goes much deeper than a clonal tea tree. So it is better able to cope with drought and also it is better able to absorb the nutrients from much deeper in the soil. He suggested comparing Darjeeling clonal tea and Darjeeling China jat (variety) from the same season and the same garden to see a difference in taste.
It’s important to stress that seed grown tea trees aren’t necessarily superior to clonal trees and each have their advantages and disadvantages. For Jun Chiyabari, they are focusing on seed-grown trees at the moment for genetic diversity in their tea gardens, as trends in other agricultural food products (coffee, bananas, grapes, etc) show that maintaining genetic diversity is important.
People: How is Jun Chiyabari working with the community?
As with their long-term planning for the tea gardens, Jun Chiyabari is thinking long term when they are working with their local community. Lochan shared that they have had many social schemes in the past and they will continue to have new programs.
For example in the past Jun Chiyabari has had programs for elderly folks in an “old age ashram”. More recently they tied up with one of their customers to in drinking water, sanitation and hygiene areas in three local school that benefitted some 3000 people. They also have an ongoing, long term, program for supporting a local school that done is in conjunction with some of our tea customers.
Where Can You Buy Jun Chiyabari Teas?
Jun Chiyabari is stocked in many stores, and two brands that I know sell their teas are What Chat (link to all Nepalese teas) and Rare Tea Company (link to their Nepalese teas). Jill, whose amazing tea blog I follow, also pointed out that TeaHaus stocks Jun Chiyabari (found their handrolled oolongs in the online store)! If you have a local indie tea brand that you regularly buy from, it’s worth contacting them to see if any of their Nepalese teas are from Jun Chiyabari.
We also sell their tea; I absolutely love it. Thanks so much for this very informative post. They deserve more attention for their fantastic tea.
Thanks Jill!! I have added a link to TeaHaus in the post too – that will be useful for people in America!
Thanks so much!
I love that they’re thinking about genetic diversity too!
Me too!! Their planning for the future is something that I really admire!