Tea came to be a principal crop in Sri Lanka in the early 1870s. Prior to 1860s Sri Lanka’s main crop was coffee and no planter showed much interest in tea. A young Scottish man by the name of James Taylor who arrived in Ceylon in 1852 to work for one of the large coffee growers was mainly responsible for transformation of Ceylon’s plantation map from coffee to tea.

Taylor was a scientific planter who was entirely devoted to his work .He was involved with Royal Botanical Gardens of Peradeniya of Sri Lanka and it was there that he got his first tea seeds for experimental planting.

The 19-acre Loolecondera Estate where Taylor did the first commercial planting of tea became the model for future development of the tea industry in Sri Lanka. Taylor began to experiment with different methods of processing tealeaves. His bungalow became the factory.

Leaf was rolled on tables and firing was done in clay stoves over charcoal fires.

In 1869 a leaf disease destroyed the island’s coffee plantation and Estate owners looked for alternative crops. Following Taylor’s lead they opted for tea. The transformation from coffee to tea was fairly easy since island had experienced planters and well working agricultural system. Ceylon’s tea industry witnessed a rapid expansion in 1870s and 1880s, which brought a good deal of interest from large British companies, which took over many estates. From 400 hectares in 1875, the island’s tea area grew to 120,000 hectares by 1900.Today it covers about 220,000 hectares in the highland and southern low land areas of the country.

Taylor made his home in Loolekondera and died 40 years later. James Taylor’s legacy is best summed up in the words of John Field, a former High Commissioner of Great Britain in Sri Lanka. He wrote: “It can be said of very few individuals that their labour have helped to shape the landscape of a country. The beauty of the hill country as it now appears owes much to inspiration of James Taylor, the man who introduced tea cultivation to Sri Lanka.

  • Ceylon Tea & Environment

 

 

Sustainable cultivation methods

Ceylon Tea and the Environment

Sustainability is not just a fashionable catch-phrase among members of Sri Lanka’s tea industry. In recent years, the drive towards sustainable practice in all aspects of the cultivation, manufacture, storage, transportation and distribution of Ceylon Tea has gathered momentum, with new legislation and industry rules being put in place. Alliances have been forged with international conservation bodies and hundreds of individual initiatives are being practised on estates and smallholder farms throughout Sri Lanka’s tea-growing districts. Concern for sustainability is not new to the Ceylon tea industry.

 

An early industry initiative was to prohibit the use of DDT, while the use of wooden tea-chests was abandoned over twenty years ago. Sri Lanka now produces the world’s only ozone-friendly tea, certified under the Montreal Protocol on greenhouse gases. This was achieved through an industry-wide effort backed by the Tea Board. Read more about this important advance.

Sustainability is not just a fashionable catch-phrase among members of Sri Lanka’s tea industry. In recent years, the drive towards sustainable practice in all aspects of the cultivation, manufacture, storage, transportation and distribution of Ceylon Tea has gathered momentum, with new legislation and industry rules being put in place. Alliances have been forged with international conservation bodies and hundreds of individual initiatives are being practised on estates and smallholder farms throughout Sri Lanka’s tea-growing districts. Concern for sustainability is not new to the Ceylon tea industry. An early industry initiative was to prohibit the use of DDT, while the use of wooden tea-chests was abandoned over twenty years ago. Sri Lanka now produces the world’s only ozone-friendly tea, certified under the Montreal Protocol on greenhouse gases. This was achieved through an industry-wide effort backed by the Tea Board. Read more about this important advance.

 

A tradition of sustainable forestry

Although the central mountains of Sri Lanka were thinly inhabited in ancient times, historical authorities hold that a kind of forest conservation was practice under the Sinhalese kings who ruled the island in those days. Its purpose was to preserve local ecosystems which ensured that the monsoon winds would shed most of their moisture in these mountains as rain, and that this rainfall should run freely down natural watercourses in the mountains to reach reservoirs built among the foothills.

hence, the water would be channeled through a network of canals and naturally-occurring streams to fill the vast artificial reservoirs or tanks that irrigated the rice-fields of the central and southern plains of ancient Lanka. The remains of ancient hydraulic works are still found at various locations in the hill country.

 

Preserving the forests

Above the estates of the Sabaragamuwa tea-growing district lies the Sinharaja, a tract of virgin high-altitude rainforest that is home to hundreds of species of plant and animal found nowhere else in the world. Apart from its natural treasures, the Sinharaja forest also has important climatic effects on the surrounding countryside. Other high-altitude ecosystems, such as the Hakgala forest reserve in Uda Pusselawa district, Horton Plains and the Peak Wilderness around Adam’s Peak, are also essential elements in the web of climatic and ecological interactions that give Ceylon Tea its unique character.


Tea planters have long understood the importance of preserving the forests that lie above the tea, and a considerable part of the labour of running a tea-estate is dedicated to this task. To an experienced planter, the condition of the surrounding forests is one of the marks by which a well-run tea plantation is judged.

Today, when climate change is a reality experienced daily and deforestation is a worldwide issue, the emphasis on forest conservation in the Ceylon Tea industry is stronger than ever. It is, in fact, part of a wider concern for environmental issues relating to tea cultivation, such as competition for water resources and pollution from fertilizers, on which the industry is now acting. Many Sri Lankan estates and smallholder cooperatives have entered into partnership with the Rainforest Alliance, an international non-profit organization that sets standards for sustainable practice by land users of all kinds, including tea cultivators. The Alliance offers valuable certification to cultivators who conform to these standards, and works with some of the world’s leading tea producers to promote them.

 

Standards and best practices

Sri Lankan tea growers now follow the standards the Sustainable Agriculture Network, an international body that sets standards and recommends best practices for sustainability. Inspection and certification is undertaken through the Rainforest Alliance. The first estates to achieve this were in Uva, among the Passara and Namunukula mountain ranges; other regions soon followed, with estates in Dimbula, Kandy and Uda Pussellawa being among the early adopters. The process still continues indeed, at the time of writing, Alliance representatives are visiting several estates in the Nuwara Eliya district, as well as for the first time smallholder farms in the low-grown regions of Ruhuna.

 

 

Ozone friendly’ story

Protecting the Ozone Layer

Ozone is a gas, a special type of oxygen molecule made up of three atoms instead of two. The ozone layer, high up in Earth’s atmosphere, contains large amounts of this gas, which acts as a barrier to ultraviolet (UV) light and other forms of high-energy radiation reaching Earth’s surface from the Sun and elsewhere. These types of radiation tend to be harmful to life, affecting fertility and reproduction as well as giving rise to birth defects, cancers and other diseases. Humans and other land animals, crops and marine life are all vulnerable to these effects. In addition, the presence of the ozone layer high in the atmosphere has important regulating effects on weather and climate.

The Threat to the Ozone Layer

During the 1970s, scientists studying Earth’s atmosphere found that ozone was vanishing from its upper levels. By 1985, a very large area above Antarctica was almost entirely free of the gas. The cause of this depletion was quickly identified as chlorofluorocarbon compounds, or CFCs for short – a family of chemicals then commonly used in refrigerators, freezers and air conditioners. CFCs rise into the upper atmosphere, react with the ozone there, and destroy it. But besides CFCs, there was another offender: methyl bromide, a pesticide used to fumigate soil and many agricultural products. At the time this was discovered, methyl bromide pesticides were widely used in the Sri Lankan tea industry, on estates as well as in warehouses, aboard ships in and other places where tea was stored or transported. No-one suspected the environmental damage these pesticides were causing, 10-15km up in the sky! But given the size and geographical spread of the Sri Lankan tea industry, its use of methyl bromide posed a real threat to the ozone layer.

The Montreal Protocol and After

Alarmed by warnings from the scientists, the world’s nations met in Montreal, Canada in 1987 to decide upon action to protect the ozone layer. Out of this meeting came the Montreal Protocol, signed by 191 countries including Sri Lanka. Under the protocol, methyl bromide use by the Sri Lankan tea industry was progressively reduced, then done away with altogether. As a result of such prompt and effective action by the tea industry and others, Sri Lanka was acclaimed a ‘leader in ozone-layer protection’, receiving the Montreal Protocol Implementers Award in 2007.


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