Tea Farming Upcountry

As my first taxi driver informed me upon arriving in Kenya, most people in Nairobi don’t consider the city home. They have immigrated to the city for work and when they say home they mean the land their family owns outside of the city where they go for holidays, and where they plan to retire. This weekend, one of my colleagues was kind enough to take me upcountry to her home, an hour and a half northeast of Nairobi on the way to Mount Kenya, in a Kikuyu region near Murang’a, high in the mountains and incredibly beautiful.

The contrast to Nairobi was stark. I’ve grown accustomed to seeing 10-12 matatus a minute whiz by belching out black exhaust along side the buses and cars doing the same. Of course, the cars and buses are there for all the people, 1.5 - 3 million depending on where you define the city boundary, hawking fruit and jewelry or walking to or from work or the market.

But outside of Nairobi the road emptied, with no traffic to speak of and people concentrated in small clustered communities along the way up the hillside. As we put more and more distance between ourselves and the cars around us, the air became cleaner and clearer and urban development (from multiple story buildings or branded commercial activity to the small one-man kiosks that sell fruit, baked goods, and mobile phone credit) gave way to fewer, simpler structures (single story stores with a more permanent feel than the kiosks) and varied, lush green vegetation clinging to hillsides accented with brightly colored flowers against the backdrop of deep, red earth.

The further we drove the more beautiful the land became, but still I wasn’t prepared for the farm. Pictures don’t do it justice, but even in the cold, damp mountain mist the sight of acres and acres of tea rolling down the sides of a canyon took my breath away.

Mama David, so called because her eldest son is David, runs this farm more or less on her own in a region where it is still unusual to see a woman driving a car. She is a remarkable woman in her early 70s but looking and acting like a woman 20 years younger. (She inherited good genes from her mother, born circa 1896 who still lives on the farm with Mama David.) She built her house, a sprawling single story construction, in typical Kenyan fashion starting with a very basic set of rooms in the 1970s, and slowly, decade by decade adding more “when there is some extra money or some stone available.”

After snacks and warm drinks, Mama David took us out on the land. Farming in Kenya is labor intensive as basic technological aides are either not available or too expensive to be practical. All the labor on the land is done by hand, save a drip irrigation system. We passed a group of workers preparing some land to be planted and stopped to talk with three tea pickers.

Tea picking is especially labor intensive. Tea grows on waist-high plants that almost look like bushes, but the pickers seemed to move through them quite easily. The part to be harvested is at the very top of the plant – two leaves and shoot – and should be picked while the leaves are still light green and tender.

With hands moving like propellers, tea pickers quickly and precisely grab the tops of the tea plants and throw handfuls of tea backwards into large baskets strapped to their backs every ten seconds or so. When full, the baskets weigh about 30 kilograms, and a good picker can fill about three in a days work.

Full baskets are brought to the tea house where they are emptied onto long, flat stone benches for inspection and weighing. The tea is then bundled and shipped off to an auction, where tea manufacturers buy in bulk from any number of regional farms.

The tea pickers come to Mama David looking for work, and in exchange for their labor they get paid per volume of tea (Ksh 5 per kilogram) and are housed on the farm tea shacks, a single room per family. Mama David’s farm appeared to have about a dozen basic but well constructed units for the workers and their families.

Many children have school on Saturdays, but today a group of about a dozen children ages two to twelve were watching the mzungus with curiousity. Play stopped immediately once we were spotted and the children began cautiously following us. Some shy smiles emerged, but the group was very quiet. Mama David explained that some of the children were quite clever, telling them in Swahili, “There’s a doctor among you, you know … who will it be?”

The children don’t learn English until fifth standard, and the oldest among them was just in fifth standard now. So communication without Mama David was nearly impossible. But the children stood obediently for a picture, and melted into laughter and delight when they saw their faces on the screen display, poking and pointing and each other and the camera.

Our colleague explained on the way home the importance of encouraging the children to believe in the possibilities of their lives, because their circumstances are quite difficult. Besides the visible impacts of poverty - the tall, barefoot boy who seemed to be growing too fast for his clothes to keep up, living in a tea shack and sharing access to the water pump and common latrine - there may come pressure to leave school and help the family by illegally picking tea. There are strict laws against child labor, but children will sneak into the fields and help their families if necessary.

According to the World Bank, more than 40% of Africans live on less than $1/day.* A good tea picker is able to earn Ksh500 (or approximately $8) per day, which would put him solidly in the Kenyan middle class, except that his earnings must also support his family. Depending on the tea picking or other economic contributions of his wife and the size of their family, the tea picker navigates a thin line between poverty and extreme poverty, much of which is dependent on forces outside of their control, like weather and crop yield. It's therefore not surprising that children become a source of income security or insurance.

And it's not surprising the general disdain for the middleman** I encountered. The tea farmer's life is more secure than that of the pickers, but not easy or flush, with thinning margins in a cost and labor intensive business that some think is not sustainable in the long-term. It's hard to imagine a solution that would allow both farmers to maintain a viable business without also disrupting the source of income on which the tea pickers rely. So, for now, it all continues, with thin margins all around, and an uncertain future for all.

* World Bank, "Annual Report - Population Living Below $1 and $2 a Day," World Bank website, accessed July, 2008.
** I realize the figures in this article contradict that data we collected on the farm, but I do not know which is more accurate, and therefore am leaving them unreconciled.