Jingmai from space

Google Earth is a great tool, I often find myself travelling through it. I love to see how the places I've been to look like from space. Jingmai mountain was very well shot, with a clear sky and good light.

Here is the picture I want to share with you:

On this picture, you can clearly see the difference of landscapes between conventional plantations (on the left side), ancient tea gardens (at the top) and secondary rain forest (at the bottom). The village you can see is Jingmai Da Zhai (''Jingmai big village''). The road goes on the left side to Mangjing: the Bulang area of Jingmai.

The white little dots in the plantation fields are actually small huts where the tea pickers can have a rest and gather the leaves.

These photos were shot in 2010, at this time, the tea trees density was high but since then, the field has been converted into natural tea gardens, with a density such as you can see in the foreground of the second picture, I will cover this subject in a future article.

Along the main road

Inside the ancient tea forest

The ancient tea trees are rarely located in a dense forest, the trees need light and room to grow and it must be easy to move around and harvest the trees. Ancient tea gardens are also managed to a certain extent, they form a different landscape from primary forest. 

I have seen very few tea trees growing in a totally untouched environment, i can remember of a few places near the village of Mengsong, in Bulang Shan, and remote parts of Yiwu mountain. 

When I started my tea journey, I thought the better the environment, the better the quality; now, I have found out reality is much more complex. Managing tea gardens can be very tricky.

This is all about learning, first, you have strong beliefs, and with better knowledge and experience, they are teared to pieces while new convictions seize your brain. I love that process.

Mixed plantations

On my trips in Xishuangbanna, I came across a large variety of crops, from family gardens to industrial bananas, there is a lot to see in Southern Yunnan. In the surroundings of Jingmai mountain, an interesting field caught my eye:

One row of rubber trees (hevea brasiliensis) inter-cropped with four rows of tea trees (Camellia Sinensis var Assamica). This kind of setting contrasts with the usual vast mono-cultures.

According to several papers (here, here and here), inter-cropping rubber with tea would be advantageous on several aspects such as:

-increased carbon sequestration, leading to a richer soil on the long term.

-reduced run-off and soil erosion, rubber trees are infamously known in Yunnan for affecting the local climate, it is indirectly related to water retention capacity. Rubber tree tends to make the soil impermeable, during heavy rain, water will tend to flow down the slope instead of binding to the soil.

-increased revenues because of a more efficient usage of the field, if you wanted to have the same amount of rubber trees and tea trees in mono-culture, you would need more ground.

-increased stability because the price of rubber and tea leaves are not related.

Are we going to see rubber trees growing around Mahei, Lao Banzhang or Banpo Laozhai? Probably not, because the studies undertaken were aiming at lowland fields. As altitude increase, the price of tea increases and the yield of rubber trees decreases, hence, it would probably not be economical for the famous tea mountains to choose rubber trees as inter-crops.

However, many tea gardens require shade trees and natural tea gardens have room for other crops to be planted, maybe in the future, we could see a more advanced management of tea gardens, using nitrogen fixing plants to increase the soil nutrients and using specific predator hosts in order to keep pest away.

There is a lot of research being done on inter-cropping and tea, rubber, cocoa, coffee, banana, palm oil and other long term crops will be the first beneficiaries of these advancements. Because of the expected population increase (10 billion people in 2050), mankind must launch a ''doubly green revolution'' which implies a production increase as well as a reduction of the environmental impact. Let us hope there will be enough tea for everybody!