Farmers "break the blindness" of spring tea

Ms. Nguyen Thi Minh's family in Team 1, Khe Da, Ngoc Lam Tea Enterprise, Thanh Chuong District harvests tea by machine. Photo: Dinh Ha

In recent days, Ms. Nguyen Thi Minh's family in Team 1 - Khe Da, Ngoc Lam Tea Enterprise, Thanh Chuong District has been very busy. They have been taking care of taking tourists to visit the tea island, and also focusing on harvesting the first spring tea crop of the new year, the crop that tea growers call "breaking the fog" - a very important step in the process of intensive tea cultivation and care.

Ms. Minh happily said: In the life cycle of the tea tree, around the middle of the 11th lunar month, the tea tree is cut off almost all the top, called tea pruning. After about a month, the tea will sprout, but because the weather is still cold and there is little sunlight, these first branches will grow slowly, not growing up in a dense manner, but only have 2-4 leaves and quickly expand to photosynthesize, covering the entire base below to protect the tea from the cold. This is the "blind" tea batch that must be urgently harvested and cared for to welcome the warm spring sunshine, the tea will grow faster and stronger. The batches after this "blind batch" are the main harvests.

Workers at Hanh Lam Tea Enterprise mix tea before bringing it into the factory. Photo: Dinh Ha

Ms. Nguyen Thi Minh is one of more than 10,000 tea-growing households in Thanh Chuong district who are eagerly "breaking the fog" for spring tea. Currently, in tea factories and tea-growing communes, it is easy to see people picking tea everywhere. In addition to the main labor source in tea-growing households, the busy season has also attracted a large number of workers from non-tea-growing communes to work for hire.

According to Mr. Nguyen Danh Duyen - Secretary of the Thanh An Commune Party Committee - a locality with nearly 450 hectares of tea: This "blind" spring tea crop has low productivity and value. Each hectare only yields about 2.5 tons on average, the average price is only 3,500 VND/kg, but due to the large volume, people have earned billions of dong from the first tea crop of the year.

Tea processing factories are operating at full capacity. Photo: Dinh Ha

The biggest beneficiaries of this “blind-breaking” tea crop are tea processing factories. Mr. Nguyen Van Ky, Deputy Director of Hanh Lam Tea Enterprise, said: The “blind-breaking” tea crop does not have “shrimp” shoots, the leaves are few and old, so it is not used to process tea but mainly used to process CTC tea, which is powdered tea, the main product of the factories. This is also the batch of tea that does not require the use of pesticides, so it is favored by customers. These days, the factory’s processing plants are running at full capacity.

As an area with nearly 5,000 hectares of tea, of which over 4,000 hectares of commercial tea have been harvested, in this "blind breaking" tea crop, Thanh Chuong tea growers harvested over 10,000 tons of tea, earning 30 billion VND - a significant amount of money to improve living standards and reproduction, laying the foundation for the next bumper tea crops in the year.