Farmers uproot tea crop to allow for new varieties

The push to double tea bush productivity per unit area and get healthy disease and drought tolerance tea has forced multinational companies to uproot old clones of tea and replace them with new varieties.

At Unilever Tea Kenya (UTK), more than 2000 ha of land has since been replanted with new clones. The bushes being uprooted were planted in the early 1920’s through to early 1950s.

The bushes were from seed obtained mainly from India by the early planters. Joseph Sunday, the Unilever East Africa Corporate Affairs and Sustainability director, said since the old bushes were grown from seed, individual bushes varied genetically.

“Given the company’s refined agronomy original seedling fields yielded an average three tons of made tea per hectare of land. This contrasts with figures of two tones in some smallholder farmers and some plantations in India,” he said.

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Sunday said the UTK tea improvement programme has been running since 1885. The actual tea designer breeding started with the development of tea germplasm garden in 1991 with the first hybridisation work started in 1984.

“We aim to get high yielding tea varieties which double bush productivity per unit area. With increased demand for population growth and finite land to expand tea plantations, sustainable technologies should be harnessed to deliver more tea per unit land area,” he said.