Why do tea farmers’ skills erode after the arrival of industry giants?
I was born in a small tea-growing village in Hunan. Growing up amidst the tea gardens and mountain forests gave me a particular interest in the tea industry.
When I was a child, tea production in the village lacked a formal system; every household ran it as a side hustle, picking and roasting leaves during the season to earn a bit of extra money for the family. Later, outside investors arrived and established large-scale tea factories, and tea gradually became the village’s primary industry.
As I grew older and my knowledge and experience expanded, I came to realise that this was what is known as “capital moving to the countryside” or “industrialisation of the countryside”, a process driven primarily by the government and leading enterprises.
However, the increase in income was not proportional to the heavy labour involved. Long hours of hand-picking or machine-harvesting under the scorching sun meant that farmers sometimes had to rely on Huoxiang Zhengqi Water to prevent heatstroke.
The profits for the leading enterprises were far more substantial. For example, fresh tea buds purchased from farmers at 80–95 yuan per jin are processed—on average, four and a half jin of fresh tea produce one jin of dry tea—and once packaged, can be sold on the market for thousands of yuan.
Why is there such a vast profit gap between the tea farmers and the leading enterprises? Beyond the repetition of labour exploitation, is there a better way for farmers to increase their profits? I turned my attention to the issue of the restructuring of tea-making skills in the village.
I. “All-rounder” Tea Production
In the thirteenth year of the Guangxu Emperor’s reign (1887 AD), a Guangdong merchant happened to taste the Bai Maojian tea from the Hunan-Hubei border, which had a beautiful colour and superior taste. He decided to stay and open a tea factory, specifically inviting tea masters from Qimen, Anhui, to refine the local white tea into a black tea. He named it “Yihong” and established the Taihehe Tea House based on this.
During the heyday of Taihehe, Yihong tea was highly praised alongside the black tea from Qimen, Anhui, earning the reputation of “Qihong in the North, Yihong in the South”. The techniques for producing black tea were passed down locally and eventually spread to our village.
As for green tea production, our village benefited from the state’s “agricultural technology extension”. In the early 1990s, technicians from the county agricultural station came to guide farmers in producing premium green teas, and many learned the techniques for varieties such as “Yinzhen” and “Yinfeng”.
Consequently, before the leading enterprises arrived, most people in the village, regardless of age or gender, possessed some knowledge of the tea-roasting process.
During every tea season, people would pick fresh leaves by day and roast them on their own stoves at night. Once finished, they would sell them to traders who came to the village, or take a risk by taking the bus to the county town to sell them. Prices were higher in the county, but one had to be extremely careful; if caught by tax inspectors, you could lose everything.
Beyond the ordinary tea farmers, there were a few small-scale family workshops in the village equipped with mechanised production equipment and more mature processing techniques. In addition to picking and roasting their own tea, these workshops would occasionally hire a small amount of labour or purchase fresh leaves from households to process, selling them to regular customers through their own networks.
In those days, tea production in the village was unsystematic, and selling tea was merely a way to earn some cash to supplement the household income. Yet, at the same time, the tea farmers were “all-rounder” producers, mastering every skill from cultivation and picking to processing and sales.
This observation aligns with what I witnessed in the village. Following the entry of leading enterprises, the “all-rounder tea production” model began to change.
II. Skill Upgrading and Acquisition Bundling
With the support of government policy and the technical guidance provided by the leading enterprise, tea farmers achieved a skill upgrade in the cultivation and picking stages.
In terms of layout, villagers shifted from intercropping tea with other crops to a professional, dense planting layout, increasing the tea-growing area and the yield of fresh leaves. Regarding varieties, high-yield superior breeds such as Bixiangzao, Baihaozao, and Chuyeqi were introduced. For pest and disease control, organic fertilisers and biological control methods replaced chemical pesticides and fertilisers to create an organic tea quality. For picking techniques, there was a broad promotion of hand-picking tea buds and “one bud, one leaf” for premium teas.
This skill upgrade improved the income and stability of the villagers’ earnings. To use a metaphor favoured by the locals—”selling tea to buy rice”—they would say, “Now, the money from one day’s picking can buy enough rice to eat for a month; before, we’d spend the whole year worrying about droughts or floods and barely get a few hundred jin of grain. Life is much better now.” Survey data from 2021 shows that tea farmers cooperating with leading enterprises earned an average of around 2,000 yuan per mu, with some exceeding 4,000 yuan.
Farmers who sell their fresh leaves to the company have indeed gained security in terms of acquisition channels and price stability, but due to the market monopoly of the leading enterprises, they have lost their broader bargaining power.
In the past, the village’s mechanised family workshops typically had fixed, acquaintance-based purchasing circles rooted in geographical and kinship ties, linked by networks of personal reciprocity. Ordinary farmers and tea factory owners were often of the same clan or close neighbours and friends. Their strong personal relationships fostered a mutual trust—a tacit promise that “I won’t compromise on quality, and you won’t slash my price”—leading to stable, long-term transactions based on a shared understanding.
The arrival of leading enterprises dealt a heavy blow to these purchasing circles. These companies adopted a “Company + Farmer” cooperation model, signing fresh-leaf purchase contracts with village tea farmers. By using a rebate system—such as “ten jin of fertiliser for every jin of tea buds”—they effectively tethered the farmers to the enterprise.
Once a leading enterprise discovered that a farmer had violated the contract by selling spring tea leaves to a local processing workshop during the Qingming festival, they would refuse to buy any further leaves from that farmer. This left the farmer with nowhere to sell their summer and autumn harvests, allowing the leading enterprises to gradually monopolise the supply of fresh leaves.
In recent years, as the village’s family workshops declined, the leading enterprises—now devoid of competition—began to squeeze purchase prices and shorten buying windows, gradually eroding the profits of ordinary tea farmers.
“MCY (the village’s mechanised family workshop) would buy at 75 per jin, but the tea factory (the leading enterprise) only pays 70. Even when the factory buys from traders in other villages, they pay 75. We get 5 yuan less per jin, and we have to spend more time enduring the sun. But we have no choice; if I don’t sell to the factory today, they’ll find out tomorrow and won’t take my tea at all.”
“If they say they don’t want it, that’s it. You can’t just not put in the effort to pick it.”
III. The “Partial Tea Farmer” Behind the High Added Value
They also actively participate in tea trade fairs and tea-making skills competitions organised by the government and tea industry associations. Through television, newspapers, and new media, they promote their brands, transforming the village’s tea from “mass-market tea” for ordinary consumers into “premium tea” for the high-end market, thereby greatly increasing the product’s added value.
This process of skill restructuring could not have happened without the strong impetus of government subsidy policies.
For instance, leading enterprises enjoy tax incentives ranging from 6% to 17% for tea production. If they update their tea-making equipment, they can receive a 42% subsidy for technical renovation costs. Additionally, local governments provide various other forms of support, such as a subsidy of 5 yuan per mu for organic tea certification, and free tea seedlings and fertiliser provided through cooperatives. These are dividends that ordinary tea farmers and family workshops cannot access.
This reshuffling of tea-making skills occurred silently amidst the lush green mountains. While ordinary tea farmers enjoy the expectation of a stable income, they have gradually become detached from high-value-added activities such as tea processing and sales. They have become “partial tea farmers”, whose lives are defined by long hours of standing, the scorching sun, and the constant company of Huoxiang Zhengqi liquid (a traditional herbal remedy). Consequently, the profit gap between the farmers and the leading enterprises has widened.
Returning to the second question mentioned at the beginning of this article: beyond repeating the cycle of labour exploitation, is there a better way for farmers to increase their profits? Can tea farmers truly leave the leading enterprises behind, roast their own tea, and sell it themselves?
To test this, I started selling tea to my own social circle on WeChat.
My mother and I picked the leaves by day and consulted a master on how to roast them by night. I sold the tea to my friends and acquaintances at a price below the market rate, and the profit was still considerable—nearly double what we would have made selling to the leading enterprise.
However, the volume of sales was not as optimistic. Compared to the average tea farmer, the spending power of my social circle is quite high, yet I could only sell a dozen or so jin of tea per year. For an ordinary tea farmer, roasting and selling their own tea would be even more difficult.
Does this mean that discussing the skill sets of farmers is pointless?
I don’t believe so. Even if industrial development and the social division of labour are inevitable trends—tides that cannot be halted simply out of compassion—we must still maintain a baseline of fairness throughout this process. We must empower individuals with the capacity and the right to develop, ensuring they have the opportunity to achieve a better life through their own efforts, rather than tilting these rights in favour of leading enterprises that already possess a competitive advantage.
Specifically, regarding the development of farmer skills during agricultural industrialisation, we must keep pace with the times. We should not only focus on improving traditional skills such as planting, picking, and harvesting, but also strive to cultivate new skills in processing and trading for the market. Only then can farmers truly share in the benefits of industrial development and agricultural transformation.
The original paper was co-authored by Professor Wang Xing and the author of this article.
Note:
Our sincerest thanks to Professor Wang Xing.
Click “here” for the link to the original paper.
Editor: Ze’en