by Jeff Koehler
Because, if there is no financial compensation, what’s the point? he asked. “It’s a huge expense. There needs to be a benefit.” For Singbulli, the change immediately brought up the price of its lower-end teas.
Not all gardens in Darjeeling have had successful conversions. Namring Tea Estate is an example of what Sarda cautions against. This lovely garden runs down from the eastern slopes of Tiger Hill to the Teesta River. Teas, labeled Upper Namring, from its highest section are considered some of the finest in the district. In 1997, Namring turned organic. Yields fell 35 percent. “We couldn’t get a market,” said H. R. Chaudhary, running his hand over his close-cropped, silver hair. “Marketing is a big thing.” The losses were untenable, and in 2004 the garden returned to conventional production.
For some, it isn’t only about price. The drop is offset by other gains. “If you want to make your farm sustainable, you must sacrifice something,” Tukvar’s young manager, Rajesh Pareek, observed. Solidly built and broad shouldered, he would not look out of place in a Venice Beach gym. Tukvar, among the first Darjeeling gardens planted out—and the first to top Rs 10,000 at auction (Rs 10,001, at J. Thomas & Co. in Kolkata in 1992), briefly holding the world record—saw a 20 to 25 percent drop from its recent organic conversion. Still, they are producing up to 300,000 kilograms, or 660,000 pounds, of tea a year, making it one of the largest estates in Darjeeling. While the garden, which sells under the name Puttabong, sacrificed yield, they are conserving the farm’s soil and protecting the environment and wildlife, Pareek said.
One of the Chamong properties that suffered steep declines was Ging Tea Estate, down the Lebong Road on the backside of Darjeeling. In autumn, trees with pink blossoms lined the switchbacks down to the factory. Across the Rangili Valley, the tea-covered slopes of Glenburn and Tukdah estates radiated green in the morning sun. Relaxing on the shady verandah of the manager’s bungalow with a cup of tea, Mukul Chowdhury, the senior assistant manager, said Ging’s output tumbled from 180,000 kilograms (400,000 pounds) to 96,000 kilograms (about 212,000 pounds) with 2006 certification, although it has now stabilized at around 120,000 kilograms (about 265,000 pounds), a loss of one third. Chowdhury, a tall, middle-age Bengali from a landowning family, came to these Himalayan foothills two decades ago. The flower gardens around the solid, gray-stone bungalow buzzed with honeybees. Butterflies and small sunbirds skimmed around in the morning autumn sun that lit up in butterscotch yellows the marigolds studding the hedges along the fields of tea. Look around, he seemed to say with a wave of his hand at the surroundings, this is the trade-off.
That night, on Makaibari, Rajah Banerjee said, “Healthy soil is healthy mankind.”
Not all are convinced that going organic is the best move for their garden. Castleton, Margaret’s Hope, Gopaldhara, and Namring are four marquee estates that produce some of the most sought-after and expensive Darjeeling teas, and they remain conventional. So does Glenburn.
Why to turn organic was answered in a single word. Why not took Sanjay Sharma an afternoon.
“It’s pure soil science,” Sanjay began, dropping down one of Glenburn’s steep garden roads from the manager’s bungalow in his ranger-green Maruti Gypsy. It was July. Rain had been falling in starts and stops all day, and a late break finally allowed him to take the sturdy but roofless jeep down to look over a lower field. A Scottish tea company had started the estate in 1859 and named it Glenburn, “a river valley” in Scottish. With 40 percent of the estate bordered by rivers, the name is particularly fitting. The Rangeet River marks the northeastern boundary of the garden and separates it from Sikkim.
The monsoon rains had washed out chunks of the precarious track, and stones, some the size of dinner plates, had been set in the deep ruts and along the crumbling edges. Sanjay brought the jeep to a stop and then inched it around a tight hairpin switchback before easing out the clutch. The road passed a mobile weighment station where pluckers were hanging their conical wicker baskets on a scale before dumping the tea leaves out on a tarp. A large, blue plastic sheet covered in leaves stretched across the wet ground behind the open bed of a pickup with bald tires and metal grates over the taillights. A couple of men were packing the leaves into large mesh bags and heaving them into the pickup’s bed. Sanjay got out for a moment and spoke to the group in Nepali.
“The tea tree is a bonsai,” he said, continuing to drive down the uneven gravel road. “You have stunted it with pruning and plucking. It’s creating new foliage to sustain itself. It’s a tree. And left alone it grows high. Naturally there would be a little new foliage in spring.” He maneuvered through a corner so sharp that it took a four-point turn to complete. “But we are plucking it thirty to forty times a year, every five to seven days. The plant is trying to survive. The most important thing for it is nitrogen.”
Nitrogen forms the triptych of primary nutrients for a tea plant, along with potassium and phosphorous. Potassium, or potash, works largely on root development, while phosphorus focuses on fruit, flower, and seed development. Nitrogen is the prime ingredient responsible for the tea plant’s growth and leaf development and is an essential part of chlorophyll, which creates the brilliant green pigments and causes photosynthesis to take place. As tea is a leaf crop, nitrogen is essential for good yields. It’s generally added by a fertilizer application or, on organic gardens, using manures, composts, and cover crops. “The old planter’s adage says that every fifty kilos of green leaf needs one kilo of available nitrogen,” Sanjay said. “How do you put it back? The best compost has half a percent available nitrogen. A good producing field might produce five thousand kilos of green leaf. That’d be twenty thousand kilos of compost. You’d have to bury the plants in it.”
At the bottom of the estate along the river, the land flattened out. Narrow drainage ditches for runoff had been dug and created a herringbone pattern across a section of tea that had been planted out in spring. The river sits at eight hundred feet above sea level, some twenty-four hundred feet lower than the bungalow, and it ran fast and milky from the monsoon rains. Golden mahseer carp migrate from the Ganges up through the river during the rainy season. In winter, when the water runs lower and clear, Sanjay fly-fishes for Himalayan trout. A pair of crested serpent eagles floated across the river to perch on a tangle of branches on a cliff above the water. He named them and then unclipped the phone on his belt, opened a birding app, and flipped through screens until he found the species with its distinctive white band across the tail to confirm his identification.
“Conventional teas are safe,” he said later in an exasperated tone, after checking the field and grinding back up the steep track in the lowest gear toward the bungalow. “They are not hazardous to health. How about Japan? China? Taiwan?” He was referring to three great tea-producing countries where customers are not insisting on organic teas. “Organic teas don’t taste different.”*
Glenburn’s use of chemical inputs is slight, and maximum residue limits (MRLs) are within what the EU, Japan, and the USA permit. “The conventional practices we follow need to be very judicious,” he said, “how we go about it. We’re not polluting the environment with huge chemical loads and deadly pesticides.” He laughed at the often unambiguous view of conventional gardens all being awash with toxins. “We take the best from conventional and the best from organic and play it by ear and see what the tree needs.”
While it will be sprayed if an infestation of red spider mites gives the bushes a telltale rusted appearance, Glenburn uses eight hundred thousand kilograms (1.7 million pounds) of organic manure a year, which he buys from farmers on a nearby organic tea estate—“My neighbor hates me,” Sanjay joked with a schoolboy grin, as Glenburn can pay more—and has an active program of vegetative composting and vermicomposting, which uses earthworms to convert the organic waste into fertilizer. Three or four times a year, men harvest Guatemala grass, a robust, broad-bladed perennial that grows on parts of Glenburn, and haul it around the garden for mulching and rehabilitating uprooted soil.
Sanjay instigated a massive planting of marigolds. They die off and self-seed, coming up the following year. “Self-generating mulch.” He introduced them for aesthetics, too. When they flower in October and November, Glenburn’s vibrant green tea fields are interwoven with rows of brilliant yellowish-orange buds.
Such a hybrid approach is not uncommon in Darjeeling. Other conventional estates have significantly cut their use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. “Conventional—but minimal,” said Namring’s Chaudhary. “Practically organic. Or near-organic.” Rohini’s B. B. Singh said, “I use only when the pests and insects come.” It is for treatment rather than prevention. “It’s like if you have fever—you take pill.”
For Glenburn, instead of organic, Sanjay Sharma opted for what he calls “an integrated approach” that looks at the larger picture. “The whole thing: land, people, plants, tea,” he explained in the jeep on the way back up to the bungalow. He does what is best for all, not just one. “The teas, the environment, people in every aspect, we need to do good by them. People have different needs. The future must be secure. Sustainable. Security will only come if production is up and the teas are selling. The trade-off with organic is losing production.”
Three Indian peafowl—better known as peacocks—crossed the road in front of the Gypsy. A lesser yellow-neck woodpecker (as Sanjay’s app confirmed) urgently knocked on a tall shade tree with leaves dulled like antique coins. Wild boar and Indian muntjac—generally called barking deer, a small, tawny-colored animal with short antlers partially covered in fur and a doglike “bark” that sounds more like a husky cough—roamed the underbrush, unseen in the swiftly failing light.
“It’s not about organic, but sustainability. I have five thousand mouths to feed,” Sharma said, referring to the large community living on Glenburn. The manager has an enormous responsibility not just to the estate’s owners in Kolkata, but to the nearly nine hundred full- time employees working on the garden and their dependents, who risk rolling into a downward spiral of poverty. His decisions affect everyone.
Sharma had little desire to put into jeopardy his relatively small yield—125,000 kilograms (275,000 pounds) a year or so to support thousands of people—and thin profit margin that is continually being teased by the vagaries of weather and politics. Glenburn’s teas are well respected, sell in shops from the luxury home-furnishing chain Good Earth in India’s most exclusive retail enclaves to two hundred small tea shops in the United States; at auction, they are popular not only with exporters but also blenders, who particularly like their high-quality monsoon flush. It’s doubtful that Glenburn could get enough of a price push to compensate for production declines if it went organic.
But something else was also behind his reluctance to turn organic: Sanjay remains skeptical about the motivations of those who insist on organic teas when their lifestyles don’t necessarily follow suit. “I don’t want to go organic just to make someone feel good by drinking my tea. Why? So some guy can feel better—and I can starve my own people?
“We don’t make organic teas,” he said emphatically. “But we sure as hell make responsible teas.”
At least for now, one of Darjeeling’s premier gardens has decided to undertake both conventional and organic production. On steep slopes near Mirik, west of Darjeeling along the Nepal border, and watered by the Mechi and Rangbang Rivers, Thurbo, part of the Goodricke Group, produces 240,000 kilograms (530,000 pounds) of tea a year, with roughly 70 percent conventional and 30 percent organic.
One of its autumn teas, an FTGFOP1 Moonlight, in Sale No. 51, the penultimate sale of the calendar year, achieved the highest price for 2013 at J. Thomas & Co.’s wholesale auction, selling for Rs 5,700 per kilogram (not far under $100).
It was a conventional—rather than organic—batch.
But even with that, the future resides in that smaller, lower- producing organic portion of Thurbo that experienced a sharp drop upon conversion and has stabilized around 20–25 percent below previous yields, according to Suman Das, Thurbo’s assistant manager.
“It will all go organic,” Das said in the garden’s wood-paneled tasting room. “That is the future.”
Most people working with Darjeeling tea agree. Even with production loss, the organic trend shows little sign of abating. While organic teas do not fetch more from buyers for the local Indian market than conventional ones, nonorganic ones are becoming more difficult to export to Europe, Darjeeling tea’s most important market. The trend in Europe for organic teas is growing stronger. “In the next seven to ten years,” said the DTA’s Sandeep Mukherjee at the end of the 2013 season, “I think Darjeeling will be one hundred percent organic.”
* * *
* A number of gardens became “organic by default.” Having been unsustainable during the tough years of the 1980s and 1990s, they were closed and fell into disuse. When snapped up by buyers after 2000, they had been years without chemical inputs, and the new owners did not need to go through the three-year process to make them organic.
* Or necessarily better. For instance Steven Smith buys mostly—but not exclusively—organic for his bespoke line of fine teas, one of finest and most respected in the United States. “It’s about quality first, and that’s what we buy.”
CHAPTER 17
Celestial Influences
As an engineering student in London, Rajah Banerjee attended lectures outside his own degree course and, in an Imperial College hall, first encountered the ideas of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), whose writings on education and child pedagogy (the Waldorf Schools), medicine, arts, and sciences remain influential. Steiner developed a philosophy called anthroposophy that he defined as “a path of knowledge whose objective is to guide the spiritual in man to the spiritual in the universe.”1
Not long before Steiner’s death, a group of farmers from Silesia (a region today largely in Poland with pieces in the Czech Republic and Germany) approached the eminent philosopher. Their seed strains were deteriorating, they told him, their plants losing vitality. Animals were becoming barren. Pests and diseases were taking larger and larger tolls on their crops. Their fields, filled with chemicals from the First World War, were infertile. Deeply concerned with the degeneration of their soil, they wanted a way forward to heal the land.
In response, Steiner gave a series of eight lectures in June 1924 at the country estate of Count Carl von Keyserlingk at Koberwitz (then in Germany; now Kobierzyce, in western Poland). Together called Agriculture Course, they offered a doctrine that elevated planting and harvesting beyond a strictly material level and endowed it with a mystical dimension. Essentially, Steiner took farming from the dirt and embraced a wider view that incorporated an archetypal rhythm following the celestial cycles. The lectures formed the basis of biodynamic farming (from bios, “life” in Greek, and dynamis, “energy”).
Years after his first brush with Steiner in London, Rajah, living on Makaibari and immersed in organic agriculture, came back to the philosopher’s oeuvre. Steiner’s holistic vision of farming deeply interested him. “And since it concerns not only the earth but the denizens beyond it and the sun, moons, and stars of the universe as a whole, it was literally my cup of tea,” he said in the Makaibari documentary. “I personally felt that it was the highest form of organics.”2
“Insects and diseases are combated by the use of nature’s own remedies (ladybugs, trichogramma, wasps, lace wings, preying mantises, garlic and pepper sprays, etc.),” wrote Wolf Storl of the organic method. “Biodynamics is also ecologically orientated, but takes a much wider scope into account, including the sun, the moon, planets and subterranean features, in its effort to understand the totality of all factors.”3
Another way to sum up the difference is, in Storl’s words, “putting one’s energies into supporting the good, rather than into fighting the bad.”4 That means, according to journalist Katherine Cole, biodynamic agriculture is about bolstering the health of the farm rather than treating its sickness. In her
book on biodynamic wine growers in Oregon, she lays out the tenets of the approach in a series of ageless maxims: “Time farming decisions according to the movements of the moon and stars in the sky. Use the raw materials on your property to nourish your crops. Protect nature, which in return will protect your harvest. And, in doing all these things, harness the spiritual forces of the heavens.”5
Across India, Steiner’s biodynamic method has found fertile ground, with more than five hundred farms implementing its procedures—dairy farms, farms that grow cotton, grapes, mangoes, vanilla, cardamom and peppers and various vegetables, a handful of coffee plantations in the south, and tea estates in Darjeeling, Assam, and Kerala.6 This is in part because its theories lie close to many of the agricultural practices described in the ancient Hindu scriptures, namely the collection of four books known as the Vedas. Passed down orally for millennia, they offer a comprehensive body of knowledge on the natural world, from the mundane and practical to the spiritual. Steiner’s profound engagement with these scriptures generated two lecture series that formed a book called The Bhagavad Gita and the West and later deeply informed his agricultural treatise.
Biodynamic farming in India is, in many respects, more than three thousand years old.
“Many of the essential principles of bio-dynamic agriculture mesh seamlessly with Vedic agricultural practices,” wrote a journalist in the Hindu, one of India’s most widely read English-language newspapers. “Our farmers respond instinctively to the concept of the ‘planting calendar’; following the almanac, and knowledge of planetary and cosmic rhythms and their influence on plants is used to plan agricultural activities.”7
A key to the Vedic teachings is the harmony of the five elements (pancha bhuta) which make up everything in the universe. The first four—vayu (wind or air), apa (water), agi (fire), and prithvi (earth)—are empirical. But these are infused with a fifth, akasha (sometimes translated as “ether”), the opposite of matter. It’s what fills the gaps between the elements, keeps the cosmos in order, and the celestial bodies moving in a disciplined manner. This is the unexplainable element. “The living being must always be permeated by an ethereal—for the ethereal is the true bearer of life,” Steiner said in his third lecture in Agriculture Course.8
