Wednesday and we are up again at 4.00am as we have a busy day ahead visiting 3 Chamong owned gardens. First is Shree Dwarika, then Soom and Phoobsering.
We arrive early at Shree Dwarika, about a half hour drive from Puttabong and are greeted by the Estate Manager, Mr. Ravi Jakmola for a morning cup of tea on the veranda of his bungalow looking over the estate. Vah Tukvar, an old and historical tea garden, fell on bad times and effectively closed down around 1995. The Chamong group acquired the abandoned Vah Tukvar, renamed it Shree Dwarika, and reopened it in 2006.
A small tea estate, with only 87.5 hectares, leaf was going from Shree Dwarika to Soom until a brand new factory was built in 2015. This is great to see as the financial challenges of Darjeeling see little new investment going into the estates at the moment.
Shree Dwarika is an organic estate as are all 14 estates in the Chamong Group. Although organic cultivation is a very positive shift for gardens in Darjeeling, it is also very challenging. A typical conventional estate in Darjeeling will be producing upwards of 700 kg per hectare and can reach as much as 1000 kg per hectare in a good season. This is still far from the 2-2500 kg/hectare of Assam and Douars. But shifting to organic production reduces output to around 400 kg per hectare.
This reduction is caused by a series of factors, mainly around nutrient density and manpower. Organic estates use a natural fertiliser which is a composted combination of caster oil cha, cow dung, and prunings and sweepings from the estate. It means that the only material transported to the estate from outside is the caster oil cha. But the quantity of material required, the cost of it, and the labour required to spread it on the plants usually means an inability to deliver the same level of nutrients to the bush on organic estates as on conventional estates.
In addition, organic planting is far more labour intensive than conventional planting, and with the acute labour shortages in Darjeeling, this leads to constraints throughout the process. As mentioned before, all labour is of Nepali origin by union law. All staff are paid the exact same wage and benefits by annual negotiation. But across the estates that we visited on this journey there have been a 50-60% shortfall in labour provision. 50-60%! The tea plantations in Darjeeling have historically provided excellent education for their workers. But this has become a double edged sword.
There is both a considerable challenge recruiting new staff into plucking, very high degree of absenteeism, and an increasing age demographic. With high educational standards, the children of pluckers are searching out opportunities elsewhere, both in the increasingly industrialised and tech centres of India and abroad. The average age of tea pluckers is now around 48 years old. But many of those registered for work, and part of the registered labour lines on the estate, are long term absent from work. Opportunities in places like Dubai and elsewhere mean that workers may be absent for long periods of time, or even permanently. Absenteeism on many estates is running at over 40%! And although they won’t be paid if they are absent, their families still have the right of abode in estate properties if they remain on the labour role. 20-30 years ago, a single family house might have provided over 3 working age pluckers. This is now down under 2, even without taking absenteeism into account.
The labour requirement on organic estates is also much higher than with conventional planting for a number of reasons. Rather than spraying weeds every 2 months, a relatively quick process, weeds are manually pulled every 20-25 days. Estates are moving to the use of strimmers where possible, but they have to be used with great caution as a careless manoeuvre can kill a 100 year old bush. So the majority of weeding is still done by hand. On the Soom estate, there is a permanent team of 15 just to week the estate.
So although there was a really positive shift towards organic farming across Darjeeling from around 2005, some estates are shifting back in order to be financially viable. This is not always a bad move though. The estates have learnt a lot about positive horticultural practices over the past 20 years. And they are being very careful to ensure that there is very careful application of chemicals where required. But mainly, it is critically important that the tea estates survive in order to provide sustainable employment to those that live and work in the region. And that produce such incredible, crafted teas.
We arrive in the factory when they are still processing from the day before. Withering is almost complete, so we head down directly to the rolling room.
A particular character of some Chamong gardens is the care and attention they afford to their first flush teas. At Shree Dwarika, as at Soom and Phoobsering, they use very small batch rolling machines from Taiwan in order to really carefully control the rolling process. A batch of just 6kg goes into each roll. The rolling takes around 30 minutes, and the operator is carefully observing to ensure that the roll is exactly as required for the batch.
From here it continues through the process as for most other gardens, but in really small batches so that the quality can be observed at every stage.
A little anecdote: Why is the grade between broken leaf and dust called Fannings?
This little machine, although rarely used now, is a fan assisted means of grading. Tea is poured in the hopper, and depending upon the grade or weight of the particle, it will either roll over the vane or get sucked through.
Those pieces that are sucked through by the fan are called Fannings. Neat!
Another amazing machine (below) is the colour sorter. Leaves are dropped in from above, and depending upon the colour of the leaf picked up by an optical sensor, the leaf is pulsed with a little jet of air to separate it. This can be used to create particularly golden blends of second flush, or particularly tippy blends. Or to remove the stalks from premium teas as they have a slightly different colour to the leaf.
Very ingenious.
I am also very inspired by what a number of Chamong gardens are now doing for heating: wood gasification.
Heavily used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, particularly on vehicles replacing coal and steam, gasification all but died out with the arrival of readily available oil and gas. Gasification is the conversion of hydrocarbon feedstocks, such as wood chip, to nitrogen, carbon monoxide, hydrogen and traces of methane. This is achieved by the combustion of wood chip or other biomass under very low oxygen and high pressure. When the gas is cooled through water, it produces a gas that burns very cleanly, with the only byproduct being charcoal that can be added to compost and put back into the soil.
The estates are producing all of the timber for gasification themselves. A lot of biomass is produced through the pruning of the tea plants themselves. But the estates also have large areas of unplanted land that is being forested with fast growing timber that can be cut, dried and chipped into fuel.
The only wastage is caused by disruption of the production process. The gases can’t be stored so if the process stops, they have to flared to atmosphere. But so long as the process is running smoothly and consistently, it is a very efficient process. And the total cost of producing heat from wood gasification is ⅕ the price of bottled propane in Darjeeling, so the payback on a £40k gasification plant is only 1-2 years.
I think we will see a lot more small scale gasifiers in the future, particularly when land is available for biomass production. One that I will be looking into upon return to the Fermentery.
We were then back to the bungalow for breakfast. It seems like factory and estate visits are just interludes between one great meal and the next. And over breakfast, lunch and dinner, great conversations about the life of the plantation, technical questions as well as sport, politics and religion.
Ravi Jakmola, the Estate Manager, like many of his compatriots, is a fascinating man. Hailing from Uttarakhand, the mountainous region the other side of Nepal from where we are in Darjeeling, Ravi was heading for a career as a professional footballer. Playing at national level in his teens, he just missed playing for the national junior side.
Like many that follow friends and family into the tea trade, Ravi did the same. And after 10 years became the youngest Estate Manager in the group.
There appears a great camaraderie, underlaid by a healthy competitive spirit, between the estate managers. Many of them have worked together on other tea plantations when they were younger and it is a small community.
Breakfast is the usual incredible spread of curried rice, masala sandwiches, a range of delectable pastries sweetened with condensed milk and honey and local fruits. This the first of 3 enormous meals of the day so I am definitely on a diet upon my return.
We are then off to the sister tea estate at Soom, again through beautiful views across tea gardens and valleys, here with the Soom factory building in the mist below.
It is really hard in photographs to fully represent the enormity of the landscape here. Standing on any hillside you are likely to be 1000m or more straight down to the valley floor below. It is then straight up the other side to the next tea plantation on the other side of the valley. And we are yet to catch a glimpse of the true Himalaya that sits hidden in the mists behind.
On the wall at Soom is a great outline of the tea process in all its steps. I won’t go through this again as you can see most of these in the notes above, but it neatly pulls this together.
And we are onto more tastings at Soom. Soom tea garden is run by another charming man Mr Arun Kejriwal. At 237 hectares it is much larger than Shree Dwarika and one of the most productive in the group. It spans from 1700m down to 800m. It was planted by a Captain J. Jerdin in 1860.
Soom has a quality traditional darjeeling character with good astringency in the first flushes, and a deep muscatel character in the second.
At the bungalow for lunch we are greeted by a wonderful display of orchids in the traditional pots that surround every veranda in Darjeeling. I wasn’t previously aware, but India is home to around 1300 native species of orchids. The prime locations are Uttarakhand, Sikkim and West Bengal, primarily Darjeeling. Without the time to go orchid hunting in the forests around us, the amazing displays in the bungalows are a pretty good second best.
And then again onto the obligatory, and wonderful lunch. I have to say that Mrs. Kejriwal and her team definitely created the highlight of the Darjeeling culinary tour. The spread was enormous: a dahl makhani, chicken, vegetables, a paneer dish, potatoes, rotis, nan and rice. There was also an amazing dahi vada, a dish of balls of deep fried lentils with chilli and coriander seed in a curd sauce.
And to finish, another first for me, but apparently a very common Indian dessert was an amazing Gajar Ka Halwa, a dessert of grated carrot cooked with milk, butter, sugar, cardamom and dried fruits and nuts. This is going to become a staple in our house when I am back. Much more interesting, and better for you than a rice pudding.
I will add a few recipes of things I have picked up on the trip later.
And from there onto Phoobsering. Another large tea garden of 240 hectares on the opposite side of the valley from where we are staying at Puttabong. We navigate the top of the ridge around the valley and then drop down into the estate. The name comes from the name of a field supervisor, Phubu Tshering, who was employed by an early estate manager Fred Marshall. Phubu Tshering was so instrumental in the success of the estate that it was named after him.
The bungalow is an ancient and beautiful house. The verandas were glazed in early in the 1900s with Crittall windows that give it a strange blend of Indian and English architecture.
And onto tasting again.
I love the simple, ingenious, but functional technology that is used across the tea plantations. Everything does its job well, but there is little move to modern technology. I am sure that very little will have changed in the methods of planting, plucking, processing or tasting in the last 100 years.
It had been raining heavily much of the afternoon, much to the joy of the planters we were with. But as we left Phoobsering, the rain stopped and the clouds cleared…
And we had the most incredible view of Kanchenjunga as we drove back. The Himalayas had been shrouded in mist for over 3 months, and just on our last evening we were given the most magnificent display. Quite breathtaking.