Home

About the Farmer

About the Farm

Farming approach

Featured product

Nutrition Facts

A little side note...

Order information

Listen to Jingle

Mr. Suzuki's Farming Approach


Tea plants (camellia sinensis), especially those varieties that produce high-grade delicate tea, are extremely susceptible to certain pests and diseases, and therefore most farmers still believe it basically impossible to completely eliminate pesticides from the growing process.

Commercial green tea production also relies heavily on nitrogen-rich chemical fertilizers that are believed to be essential for increasing certain amino acids that produce "umami" or the distinct savory taste found in premium-quality green tea, even though chemical fertilizers could deplete the soil and pollute the environment in the long run. It is said that if a tea farmer wants to convert his farmland into an organic one, he should expect no income at least for the first five years. It takes three years or so for the tea plants to become strong enough not to be completely chewed up by pests, plus additional two years or longer for the soil to build up naturally occurring nutrients to produce good-tasting tea.

Mr. Suzuki stopped using chemicals for growing tea plants in 1984, when the term "organic farming" was unheard of by the rest of his rural community. He began studying zealously different natural farming approaches, including the BMW (Bacteria, Minerals, and Water) Technology that was developed by emulating the natural cleansing/rejuvenating cycle of a healthy ecosystem. The BMW method aims to restore and generate "good water" and "good soil" by fostering indigenous aerobic/anaerobic microbes in the soil in an optimum balance.


Weeding
"Feeding" the soil with
organic fertilizer
Laying rice straws

Autumn - winter is the most critical season to building soil that will directly affect the quality of the tea leaves to be harvested in the following spring. At Suzuki's farm, organic fertilizes are prepared by fermenting a mixture of sake lees, fish mill, rice bran, kelp, soy pulp, waste vegetables, etc. added with certain strains of yeast, lactobacillus, and "indigenous" microbes collected from his land.

"The nearby bamboo bush is the best place to collect the most powerful combination of bacteria for my land. I have experimented with different ready-made microbial blends, but the fermentation process seems to be most effectively facilitated by the indigenous ones," said Mr. Suzuki.

"What we have been doing for generations is to put cooked rice in a wooden box and tightly cover it with a piece of rice paper so that insects and other crawling bugs would not get in. Then we place the box in the bamboo bush and cover it with grass. In a few days, you'll see a white fuzzy growth on the surface of the rice... that's 'indigenous microbial species' you cannot find elsewhere. I take them home and breed them, as they seem to know how best to enhance my land."

Copyright 2006-2009 sasara.com, all rights reserved.