Safe tea production in Phuc Thuan

Sitting in the house built spaciously, beside the teapot pervading softly, Mr. Pham Van Tuyen – Bai Hu hamlet leader – said: I do not know when the tea plant was planted here. I just know that when I grew up, I saw my parents look after and process tea. After one day of gathering, in the evening, every household lighted the kitchen stove to process batches of tea to serve tomorrow market-day. Up to now we always have a close-knit relation with this plant and replace old tea grounds having poor productivity with the highly qualitative stem tea varieties. In this hamlet, there are more than 100 households producing tea out of 180 households. Total of tea area is about more than 20 ha. Because the local people are trained in training courses about technology-science transfer and new variety embedding, our tea productivity and quality are improved ceaselessly. In 2011, kinds stem tea such as: LDP1, Phuc Van Tien, etc. made up more than 70% of tea area of hamlet. We are striving for replacing the rest of area of the central area tea. Nowadays, Bai Hu supplies the market about 130 tons of the dried tea shoot every year, making up 40 tons in comparison to 2003.

 Ms. Pham Thi The, a person on that hamlet, said: I owned 3 rods of midland tea and 1 rod of stem tea newly planted. Because of good care, my family gathered 80 kilos of the dried tea shoot each time, the average price is VND 80,000 per kilo in each sale time. There are 7 gathering times and my family gets about VND 50 million of tea sale. With the last 2 gathered-tea times, more than 1 tea rod were put down by Azotobacterin microbial fertilizer which was organized by Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. Through observation and comparison, we realized that putting down microbial fertilizer made tea plant more green, leave were thicker and more brightly polished, tea shoots were longer and more steady in comparison with tea which was put down by NPK chemical fertilizer. With the result of gathering on 1 rod, tea beds put down by microbial fertilizer have higher productivity than tea beds put down by the normal chemical fertilizer: 36 kilos of fresh shoot. In addition, we were recommended that this kind of fertilizer has effect on stimulation of plant development, increase in resistance of tea plant to pestilent insects, soil improvement, increase in the ability to keep humidity, etc.

To tend to the long-term production, we are implementing to improve cultivated land and produce safe tea products to serve International Tea Festival, in the coming time we are going to embed this kind of fertilizer in use. Along with the structure change of variety, step by step on the way to produce safe tea, Bai Hu people also have a sense of keep an environmental sanitation. In the beginning of 2011, as financed by World Council of Churches, a construction of collecting and treating packing of pesticide was built. Mr. Yen said: Formerly, there were many pesticide packing over the tea land, especially on the stream, river, lake. Since that construction was built, the local people had a sense of collecting to burn the pesticide packing and not throwing rashly.

We visited Mr. Dinh Van Manh’s house, one of the famous family of making tea in hamlet. He shared: To make the high quality tea, it is necessary to pat attention to steps such as taking care, putting down fertilizer correctly, preventing from pestilent insects timely and desiccating seasonably in order to keep aromatic flavor of tea, not to break tea left. Especially, to pestilent insects such as: Chlorita flavescens Fabricius, Baliothips bijomio (Thrips palmi), Oligonychus coffeae N., etc… it is necessary to spray specific chemicals timely in order not to impact the quality of tea. To protect customers’ health as well as our health, we produced towards the safe tea product such as: do not use toxic chemicals prohibited in use by State, spray pesticide timely and gather tea and process after the regulated time, etc. Today, the cast-iron frying-pans, manually crumpling machines were replaced with the electric motor rotating machines. All processing steps are mechanized to increase the product value. Life of Bai Hu people was improved significantly. All households can purchase the utility furniture such as television, fridge, motorbike, etc. In hamlet, there are only 17 poor households, which decreased by 40 households in comparison with the poor household in 2003. 9km of the hamlet road was concreted to serve traffic and goods trade of local people conveniently. 

However, people in Bai Hu hamlet still hope that an electrical station will be built in order to serve their production. Because in the evening, when every household prepares the stove to process tea, electricity is always feeble. System of rotating machine and crumpling machine cannot operate, this thing makes people do manually and wastes labor. As hoped, their expectation in Bai Hu hamlet will be considered soon by all levels of concerned local government.