It poured in northern Taiwan on Monday, and the weather forecast predicted a chance of rain in Lishan over the next couple of days. Eager to share in the joy of the upcoming rain with local tea farmers, our store manager headed up the mountain excitedly on March 13th. To everyone’s disappointment, only a light drizzle fell by dawn on the 14th—so little that it didn’t even wet the roads completely, doing virtually nothing to relieve the drought.
You can imagine the farmers’ disappointment. To make matters worse, Taichung and Nantou are forecasted to stay sunny for the next few days, meaning the water shortage is far from over. Many farmers who previously relied on automated sprinklers have switched to manual watering over the past few days because sprinklers consume too much water. They are now running hoses to water the base of the tea bushes directly in a desperate bid to conserve water and save their yield. Besides cutting back on usage, everyone is trying to find ways to boost their water supply. One tea farmer even drove his pickup truck down to the stream to haul water back, though it barely helped—his tea plantation is so massive that the tiny amount carried by the pickup truck felt like trying to put out a forest fire with a cup of water. XD
These past couple of days, the tea farmers have been buzzing about things like, ‘Once this drought is over, we definitely need to upgrade our water sources,’ ‘We need to apply for irrigation subsidies,’ and ‘We’re going to swap out our water storage tanks for 40-ton ones’… I heard all these same conversations during the 2021 drought. It seems procrastinating and taking things as they come really is a flaw most of us share. Then again, who could have predicted another drought would hit just a year later?
Since I made the trip to Lishan, I decided to check out a few more tea gardens. The high-altitude tea gardens haven’t even started budding yet, and because of the lack of rain, a lot of the fertilizer hasn’t dissolved (Figure 2 shows undissolved fertilizer, while Figure 3 shows it slightly dissolved). Tea gardens facing water shortages are all dealing with this situation. It looks like the deciding factor for this year’s spring tea quality will come down to whether they have enough water.
