Sustainability

Big Island Tea and Agro-ecology

Big Island Tea was founded in 2001 with a goal to grow tea and sustenance vegetables in the most ecologically and sociologically sustainable way possible. We pledged to design the farm to mimic an ecosystem by reforesting the farm with canopy and understory plants that are naturally found in native cloud forests in our area. We also designed our crop to asynchronously flush so the work is more sustainable for our employees. We are also growing a sustainable oil palm for bio-diesel production for our farm.

We are beginning to use genomic and phytochemical analysis to study optimal cultivating condition to inform the creation of new agro-ecological tea (and other) farms. We are interested in examining the effects of specific environmental conditions on gene expression and leaf chemistry.