Darjeeling
Page 25
Steiner wasn’t only an ideas guy, a theoretician recycling Vedic agricultural wisdom from a time when farming was closely linked with the heavens. He also laid the framework for a series of practical applications centered around nine “preparations.” This part of biodynamics, more than its underlying philosophy, makes it an easy target to mock and to dismiss as “voodoo farming” or “muck and magic.”
Numbered today (somewhat arbitrarily) 500 through 508, these preparations enliven the soil and surrounding environment. In Preparation 500 cow horns are packed with fresh cow dung (ideally from lactating cows), buried underground in autumn with the tips pointing upward, and then dug up six months later in spring. “This is the period when the earth is breathing in and cosmic earth forces are most active (winter),” the Bio-Dynamic Association of India (BDAI) informs farmers on its Web site. A pea-size pinch of this rich humus is added to a bucket of lukewarm rainwater, then stirred for one hour before being sprayed so that it falls in a gentle mist over the tea plants. “Apply when the dew is falling (the earth breathes in) i.e. late afternoon or evening—descending Moon.”9 According to Demeter, the German-based company that is the main certifying body of biodynamics as well as a trademark and label for products that carry its certification, “The horn manure preparation (500) works on plant root development, plant form and its vitality, promotes plant growth, the soil micro-life which is active in the humus fraction and the Ego component of our cultivated plants.”10
Preparation 501 includes crushed silica quartz crystal (silicon dioxide). Steiner recommends first grinding it down in a mortar with an iron pestle and then on a glass surface until very fine. This hazardous powder (inhaling it can cause silicosis, a lung disease) is moistened with springwater or rainwater into a paste, packed into the horns, and buried—again tips pointing up—from the spring equinox until the autumn one. As the BDAI instructs, “This is the period when the earth is breathing out and the cosmic light energy is most active (summer).” A small amount—“enough to cover the small fingernail”—scraped from inside gets stirred into warm water and sprayed onto the fields. “Apply when the dew is rising (the earth breathes out).”11 The quantity of quartz is minute, even homeopathic, and acts as an energizer, drawing in warmth and cosmic properties.
The remaining preparations consist of involved formulas using yarrow, chamomile, dandelion, and other natural ingredients to enhance composting. Stuffing yarrow blossoms into a stag’s bladder, hanging it in the sun for the summer, and then burying it for the winter before unearthing is the gist of Preparation 502. Preparation 505 calls for putting oak bark into the brain cavity of a cow, sheep, or goat skull, interring it in a swampy expanse in autumn, and lifting it in springtime. It is then dried until the potent odor has dissipated. A small ball of these preparations is placed within composting heaps. They marshal the cosmos’s forces to encourage rich soil life in the clay-humus.12
Key to preparations 500 and 501 is the stirring of the mixtures into water before applying. Ideally using a whisk or clutching a handful of straw, stirring begins clockwise to create a vortex in the slurry, reverses directions until another vortex reaches the bottom of the pail, and so on. Stirring takes about an hour and activates and energizes the solution.
When a farmer at Steiner’s lecture asked about using a mechanical stirrer, the philosopher argued that it needed to be done by hand. “When you stir manually, all the delicate movements of your hand will come into the stirring. Even the feelings you have may then come into it.”13 Steiner offered an analogy of being treated by a machine versus by a doctor, who transmits enthusiasm through human touch. “Light has a strong effect on the remedies; why not enthusiasm? Enthusiasm mediates; it can have a great effect. Enthusiastic doctors of to-day can achieve great results.”14
At the heart of Steiner’s point is that it needs to be done consciously. For Steiner, this was also a way of developing a personal relationship between the farmer and the land.
• • •
In 1993, Makaibari became the first tea estate in the world to be certified biodynamic. The certificate only lasts six months. Demeter has renewed it biannually since.
Makaibari’s holistic approach to farming seeks a harmony between those living on the estate and the soil, microorganisms, plants, and animals, with tea playing a nurturing role in a tightly linked ecological web.
The estate sits just below Kurseong, known as the Land of White Orchids, about halfway to Darjeeling from Siliguri. It’s a fifteen-minute walk down Pankhabari Road to the factory on an upper section of the garden, passing first the Castleton Tea Estate, Darjeeling Tea Research & Development Center, Cochrane Place Hotel, and the turnoff for Ambootia Tea Estate before entering Makaibari land. Black-and-orange butterflies flutter above the shrubby trees that line the narrow, windy road, brilliantly plumed birds flit about, and triangular, green-and-white Gorkhaland flags snap in the breeze. Steep pitches covered in emerald foliage fall down from the road’s shoulder; quiet contours of tea bushes are broken by pockets of scrub and overlooked by tall neems, Persian lilacs, shirish (East Indian walnut) with irregular fissures on their yellow-gray bark, and stout fig trees.
Spread along the four ridges of the estate are seven villages, tight clusters of brick houses painted in blues or greens or reds with tin roofs. “Living in these villages are 1,558 people,” Rajah said in the first days of July, adding, with a smile, “The last one was born ten days ago.” He takes pride in knowing each by name.
Over half of Makaibari’s land is under a cover of forest where wild things thrive. Above the canopy of green tea bushes rise the soft calls of birds. The trees and skies bustle with a plethora of large and small birds, colorful and drab. Most impressive are the great pied hornbills, black-and-white, vulture-size birds with five-foot wingspans and heavy, yellow-orange, concave-topped casques. They eat small rodents and reptiles but prefer feeding on fruit trees. Wild figs are a favorite; they can devour 150 in a single meal. Their loud barking call, at times more of a retch, reverberates across Makaibari.
Inside the estate’s forests are troops of rhesus and Assamese macaque monkeys, cobras, boar, barking deer, wild goats, and large cats. “There is just one tiger—but plenty of leopards,” said a resident in the village closest to the factory. The animals, with their distinctive black spots and black-tipped ears, hunt around the tea estate villages on occasion, he said, skulking at night after a pye-dog, goat, or even cow.
But no creature on Makaibari makes a bigger stir than a bug that sits easily in the palm of a hand. In 1991, a strange green insect that looked exactly like a tea leaf appeared on Makaibari. Rajah Banerjee christened it Tea Deva—“God of Tea”—after the class of deities from the Vedas. Entomologists identified it as a member of the Phillidae family, an insect highly adept at mimicry. Sometimes called a walking leaf, it can impersonate leaves, sticks, and branches.
The insect is rare enough that an extremely generous bounty of Rs 5,000 ($90) goes to anyone who finds one. For a plucker, that’s equivalent to fifty-five days of wages. “The one who has luck will get that bug,” a field supervisor said during a sunny first flush day, as she watched over a dozen pluckers working a section below Lower Makaibari. As the women moved through the bushes, rapidly gathering shoots and tossing them into their baskets, they kept an eye out for a moving leaf. Each year, pluckers find a couple of Tea Devas.
Why Banerjee is so keen on finding them, and willing to pay so much, is a matter for debate. “To show to foreigners,” answered one of the pluckers in the group. She was in her fifties, with red rubber boots, a golden stud in her nose, and a folded towel on her head where the thick strap of her basket rested.
It’s part of the legend of the farm. Or, as some cynics say, one of its gimmicks. The manager of another Darjeeling estate, when asked if he had seen any Tea Devas on his farm, wryly remarked, “I thought Rajah Banerjee had a monopoly on those.”
“If the farm is purely organic, then the tea bug will come,” said the pluc
king supervisor. “It proves the organicness of the leaf.”
Rajah Banerjee goes further. In his book he wrote, “As Rudolf Steiner—the father of biodynamic agriculture—has stated, if all agriculture practices are truly holistic, then the principal crop will be reflected in mimicry.”15
The notion is perfect for the legend and near-mythical status of Makaibari. Perhaps too perfect. Malcolm Gardner, biodynamic research expert at the Rudolf Steiner Library of the Anthroposophical Society in America and editor and cotranslator of Steiner’s agriculture lectures, exclaimed when asked, “In my thirty years of studying everything related to Steiner’s agriculture, I have never come across this quote or anything close to it.”
Many in the West remain dubious about biodynamic farming despite its recent popularity. (It is practiced across the world in various sectors, perhaps most famously in the United States in viticulture.) Evidence for the results for biodynamic farming tends to be more anecdotal than scientific. As anecdotes go, Makaibari is biodynamic farming’s greatest success story. Even if the Tea Deva doesn’t convince Rajah Banerjee’s skeptics, the price tag on his world-record-setting Silver Tips Imperial and the discerning clients it attracts should.
Silver Tips Imperial sits at the top of Makaibari’s selection of vintages. The delicate tea has a satiny floralness that’s soothingly subtle. “This is the dynamic one,” Rajah said one spring morning, sipping a cup of it in the Makaibari tasting room. By that he meant the energized one, the one produced by forces of nature not completely understood by science.
Made with silvery, unfurled buds, it has—unlike Glenburn’s Silver Needle—a degree of fermentation and a extremely light roll. It is not a white tea, Rajah insists, even if some retailers market it as such. “It is exceptional handiwork,” he said. Beyond that, he is recalcitrant. He has spent thirty years perfecting it and remains evasive on manufacturing specifics. “Don’t ask any questions about Silver Tips Imperial and you won’t get any lies,” he said. “Isn’t that right?” he called out to his wife across the sitting room of the bungalow one evening, then turned with a wide, tight-lipped grin that bunched up his cheeks around his eyes and brought to a halt any further discussion on producing the illustrious tea.
Another difference from Glenburn’s Silver Needle is that the leaves of Makaibari’s Silver Tips Imperial are energized by cosmic forces and plucked around the full moon. According to Demeter, “The moon and planets influence the growth of roots, leaves, flowers and fruit, just like moon phases have an influence on sea tides.”16 The highest tides of the month are when the moon is the fullest. A tea plant is made up largely of water—the green leaves contain around 78 percent moisture—so it’s hardly unthinkable that the moon could have an influence.
During this period, the elements of the earth are drawn upward by cosmic forces, explained Makaibari’s production manager, Sanjoy Mukherjee, a young man with a wispy mustache and a broad smile. “The taste and aroma levels are very high.” Holding a Nike baseball hat in his hand and waiting to begin the morning batch tasting, he added, “This is the magic of the universe.” (The opposite happens with the new moon, when the water is falling to the roots. Then, he advised, harvest potatoes and carrots.)
Production of Silver Tips Imperial is limited: only 120 kilograms (265 pounds) in 2013, according to Mukherjee. The first of five pluckings took place at the end of March, just as the first flush had got under way. It had a special resonance, as it was Holi, the Hindu spring festival of colors.
“It is a fusion of external forces … spirit-soul … which can never die,” Rajah said in the tasting room, trying to explain its uniqueness. “It is a reflection of past, present, and future in one teacup.”
But it costs dearly to sample a tea that at bedtime can, according to Rajah, “cull one to celestial slumber.” While Makaibari significantly bettered its 2003 auction benchmark, selling Silver Tips Imperial a few years later in a tea expo in Beijing for Rs 54,000 a kilo17 (then about $1,315), even such princely sums pale next to what Banerjee gets for his best vintages through private sales. The highly respected English-language Indian newsmagazine Outlook reported in 2005 that the British royal family was paying Rs 200,000 (about $4,500) per kilo for Silver Tips Imperial, and the sultan of Brunei even more, some Rs 250,000 (about $5,700) for that same amount.18
Commoners can get the celestial leaves, too. Craft House shops in Delhi sell twenty-five-gram (about three-quarter-ounce) packets for Rs 2,600 (about $50). That amount weighs less than thirteen playing cards—a single suit in a deck—and will brew just ten cups of tea. But at Rs 104,000 ($1,900) per kilo, it’s significantly less than the queen and sultan pay.
Makaibari is not the only biodynamic estate in Darjeeling.
Originally planted out in 1861, the year of Rudolf Steiner’s birth, Ambootia stretches from twelve hundred to forty-two hundred feet, and occupies some 966 hectares (2,400 acres) with just 350 hectares of those under tea. The garden is divided into sixty sections, with about two dozen reserved for the German organic-tea company Lebensbaum. The high, northeast corner of Ambootia abuts Kurseong (and neighbors Makaibari and Castleton estates), and to reach the factory requires thirty minutes of aggressive driving down the curvy, bumpy drive lined by a hedge of Lantana camara, with small clusters of yellow and pink florets.
In early October 1968, unusually heavy rains fell across Darjeeling and Sikkim, causing hundreds of landslides. Ambootia received thirty-five inches of rain in just fifty to sixty hours. The saturated soil in the southern section of the estate fell away in what is said to be the largest landslide in South Asia. It carried off 150 hectares (370 acres) of Ambootia, taking two villages and some three hundred homes with it. For the next decade or so, the slide continued to expand.19 Today, it’s carpeted over in green, but standing on its abrupt edge feels like being on the rim of a sweeping waterfall chasm void of water.
This catastrophe remained deeply imprinted on the mind of Sanjay Bansal when he took over the garden from his father in 1992. “For the new owner this was one of the pinching proofs that the increasing use of chemicals (pesticides and fertilizers) in tea gardens had a huge negative effect on the soil structure,” wrote the newsletter by Soil & More, a Dutch soil and sustainable-farming consulting company. “Chemicals, especially the salt in fertilizers, destroy the microbial life which normally holds together the soil particles. This leads to a loss of soil structure causing either leakage of water or floods due to water logging.”20 Alongside the aggressive reforesting program, Bansal transitioned the garden to organic farming in 1993, and the following year introduced biodynamic practices.
The move from conventional farming meant the garden lost about a quarter of its yield, but it helped stabilize the land while being able to produce teas for the most exclusive names in Europe: Harrods, Fortnum & Mason, Simon Lévelt, Alnatura, Lebensbaum, and Schwarzsee. Mariage Frères in Paris stocks more than fifty Darjeeling teas from thirty-plus gardens. A hundred-gram (3.5-ounce) packet of Ambootia’s second flush Brumes d’Himalaya—“Himalayan Mists”—made especially for the French boutique, sells for 120 euros ($170), the most expensive tea in the shop.
Bansal actively champions the organic and biodynamic movements, but on the ground, the garden’s manager, Jay Neogi, is more prosaic about its esoteric theories. Driving around Ambootia, he said, “I don’t see any pests.” Why not? “It’s ecologically balanced.” At being pushed for a fuller reason, he simply shrugged and smiled. “Seeing the effects but not necessarily seeing the cause.”
The fields were vibrant green, the bushes healthy looking. There was no barren earth. Herbs and mulching covered the ground between tea bushes. Spiderwebs stretched across bushes, dragonflies buzzed about, and even ladybugs, as featured in the Ambootia logo, crawled on tea leaves—all signs of a naturally healthy garden.
And a healthy place to work. “I feel different when I enter the garden,” said one of Ambootia’s field managers, a young Bihari who has worked on the estate for four years
. In charge of one of the four divisions, he has a dozen field supervisors and 220 pluckers under him. “I don’t have words to describe it. But I feel totally different. The air, the water.”
“Why do we believe?” Neogi asked. “Because the product is good. The outcome.” He considered this idea thoughtfully. “As long as the outcome is good, then we are satisfied.”
That satisfaction has influenced the entire Ambootia group, which has converted all of its gardens to biodynamic farming. Along with Ambootia, the group’s other ten Darjeeling gardens—Chongtong, Happy Valley, Monteviot, Moondakotee, Mullootar, Nagri, Nurbong, Sepoydhoorah (Chamling), Sivitar, and Aloobari—have also become certified biodynamic. According to the group’s precise general manager, Krishnendu Chatterjee, their eleven properties, spread over a total of 4,302.57 hectares (10,631.87 acres) containing 2,284.56 hectares (5,645.27 acres) of tea, are producing more than 12 percent of Darjeeling’s total output under Demeter’s strict biodynamic guidelines.*
To this list of biodynamic gardens is added another, Selimbong Tea Estate in the Mirik Valley near Gopaldhara and Chamong. The smallish garden, just 307 hectares (759 acres) and half that under tea, produces around 50,000 kilograms (110,000 pounds) of tea. It has held Demeter certification since 1997.
Biodynamically speaking, probably no other place in the world nor any other single product can match what is being produced by Darjeeling’s tea gardens. Around two-thirds of Darjeeling’s tea is organic. That is comprehensible. But that about 15 percent of its total tea can be called voodoo vintages is highly surprising, especially as the area does not market itself as such.