Frost destroys half of farm’s tea crop

A TABLELANDS tea farmer is bracing for more cold weather after a recent cold snap wiped out half of his plantation.

The Nerada Plantation at Malanda has more than 400ha of planted tea on the Atherton Tablelands and produces about 1.5 million kilograms of black tea a year — about 750 million cups of tea.

But, with the mercury recently dropping to single figures on the Tablelands, a large portion of the tea crop experienced frost damage.

Plantation director Tony Poyner said cold weather and winter frosts often had devastating effects on the tea crop.

He said he recently lost about 50 tonnes of tea as a result of the first cold snap of the season.

“It’s always the fresh, new shoots that are affected by the frost and they freeze, rupture and then they start to decay,” he said.

“All those areas where the frost has affected any of those new shoots has to be discarded, so we would have lost probably half of the estate.

“There’s not a huge amount of tea on it this time of year so we think we’ve lost about 50 tonne.”

Mr Poyner said it would take about six to eight weeks for the frost-affected area to be back in full rotation for harvest.

“There are chemicals you can spray on them that will help prevent frost damage, but we certainly prefer not to use any chemicals — we won’t use any pesticides or fungicides,” he said. “We just hope for the best at this time of the year.

“It’s a very resilient crop, but depending on the severity of the winter period depends on how much crop we lose.

“It can be a good year … we prefer a drizzly winter, for the tea it’s much better because the threat of frost is not there.”

Mr Poyner said he would go in and “cut and dump” the damaged tea this week.

“Any areas that are prone that weren’t affected in the last round, we’re out there harvesting now in case we do get more frost in this coming week,” he said.