4 “Relying on Heaven”
Natural farming and “Eco-tea” in
TaiwanScott Writer
Just to look at Mr. Zhang’s tea fields is to see that they are different. Arriving at
his small farm after a bumpy half-hour ride in a flat-bed truck through the hills
above the town of Beipu, you notice first the long grass growing between the
rows of tea plants; if left unchecked, it seems the grass will soon cover them
entirely. Looking closer, you see that a host of animal species has taken up
residence among the tea. Zhang points them out as he walks among the bushes:
a spider’s web traced across the face of one plant, a dense cluster of caterpillars
hidden beneath the foliage of another. It is a far cry from the neatly manicured
rows of tea bushes commonly seen in Taiwanese tourism campaigns. Yet what
at first appear to be signs of neglect—tea plants converged upon by weeds, a
crop riddled with pests—are in fact manifestations of a particular approach
to agriculture that in Taiwan is known as “natural farming” (自然農法 ziran
nongfa), or what Zhang calls the “ecological school” (生態派 shengtai pai) of
tea cultivation.^1 For farmers of this stripe, the plant and animal life that surround
their tea plants are not pests to be eradicated but constituents in a complicated
and contingent play of agencies, a tea-field “ecosystem”, whose dynamism is
thought to determine the quality of each tea crop.
This chapter focuses on practices of “natural” tea farming and tea manufacturing
in and around Beipu, a small town in the southeast of Hsinchu County in Taiwan.
My argument is based primarily on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews
carried out there in 2011 and 2012. During this time, I was granted access to
the fields and factories of several small-scale tea producers, who instructed me
in tea-making procedures and shared with me their thoughts about growing,
manufacturing, and selling tea.^2 My primary tutors in the art of tea making were
the farmers whom I refer to here as Mr. Zhang and Mr. Lin.^3 Their centrality to my
fieldwork experience is reflected by the prominence I grant them in this chapter,
albeit deploying their views in counterpoint with those of other tea producers
whom I visited for interviews or participant observation during my research. All
of these farmers are engaged in growing, manufacturing, and selling tea directly
to customers under the “produce your own, sell your own” (自產自銷 zichan
zixiao) model of small- to medium-sized home-factories that has been prevalent
since the liberalization of Taiwan’s tea manufacturing industry several decades