AMITE CITY, La. — When you think of Louisiana crops, you probably think of sugar cane, cotton and soy beans – not tea.
Well, it turns out Southeast Louisiana has a great climate to grow tea, and a retiree in Amite is taking advantage. In this week's Access Code, we explore the 70422 zip code and the Fleur De Lis Tea Company, the state’s first tea plantation!
David Barron bought 160 acres in Amite to retire on. It was originally meant to be a self-sustaining pine plantation but a new friend, horticulturist Buddy Lee, brought new opportunities.
“He said, ‘would you like some tea plants?’ And of course I'd been accepting all these exotic plants from him and I said sure,” Barron said.
Tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world, and the United States is the third largest tea importer in the world. We usually get our tea from Argentina, India and China. But now, Louisiana has a tea plantation and a local option for tea lovers: The Fleur De Lis Tea Company.
About the same time Barron was getting into the business, LSU was awarded a tea grant. They created a partnership, which has been crucial. For several years now, LSU experts have come and monitored his progress and offered their advice.
Barron showed us around the plantation. Just one field has 1,000 tea plants, many of which were planted in 2017. He also planted a new crop last October with about 1,000 more plants, and has all the room he needs to grow. There’s also an additional 1,500 plants in a greenhouse and nursery.
As soon as the leaves start to develop you can make tea, but it usually takes about 3-to-5 years for a tea plant to mature.
“We just received our processing equipment three weeks ago, so we'll be setting that up, we're moving with all haste to try to get the tea house and processing room ready,” he said.
When those buildings are ready, the goal will be agro-tourism. People will be served tea in the front and will get tea field walks, hikes on natures trails and more.
Fleur De Lis Tea Company is on a timetable to complete the tea house because Barron is a member of the "U.S. League of Tea Growers," and he's been asked to host this year's convention in October. At one of the past meetings, he brought his tea leaves for taste testing.
“I heard some of the experts saying that David's tea has a great aroma, really brisk and has a wonderful taste, and I heard the remark he really knew what he was doing when he planted the trees,” Barron said.
He was shocked some of the country's top experts, who have tested teas around the world, were so impressed, but then again his cultivar did come from China, from a time period where the punishment for smuggling tea out of China was death.
“It was smuggled out of china by the Russians. The Russians took the plants to the only place in the old Soviet Union that had a climate that was somewhat conducive, to the Republic of Georgia, near the Black Sea and the horticulturists in Russia cultivated the plants and kept picking out the ones that were more cold hearty and produced this cultivar here,” he said.
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In the first four months of these plants' lives in 2017, Amite had one of the biggest snows on record. The following January was the coldest on record, followed by the hottest February on record. Yet his plants thrived.
Barron’s son Nathan will one day inherit the tea plantation. Nathan's girlfriend Cheyenne works full time in Amite, tending to the plants. She experiments and does all of the propagating.
“I'm learning something new everyday,” she said. “We're one of the very few people in this country that grow tea so I think it's amazing to be a part of.
Their particular tea plants can produce all of the teas: Green tea, white tea, red tea, oolong tea and the black tea that we're all familiar with here in the south.
The goal is to be processing tea full-time by mid to late summer and open to the public sometime in 2021.
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“We have already been contacted by people from around the country wanting U.S. grown tea and it's very popular with people in Louisiana. We've had several vendors waiting in line to accept our tea. So you literally put them in the ground and all this stuff has just kind of happened. I would rather be lucky than smart any day,” Barron said.
About an hour north of Amite in Brookhaven, Mississippi is the Great Mississippi Tea Company. They’re a couple years ahead of Barron, with the goal of planting 30,000 tea plants. Barron is friends with the owners and says they’ve been extremely helpful.
Barron even has his own bees to pollinate the tea plants.
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