Let’s chat a bit about “tea garden anti-frost fans.” The first time I saw one as a shop owner was over ten years ago at Fushoushan Farm. At the time, I thought Fushoushan Farm was so kind to install electric fans to cool down the tea trees, but it turned out to be the exact opposite—the fans are actually used to protect against low temperatures.
Because high-mountain tea regions frequently experience frost in spring and winter, young tea shoots freeze and get completely ruined when frost hits. This is where anti-frost fans come in handy. They pull the warm air 6-10 meters above the ground down to the surface, “disrupting the radiative cooling effect” and “raising the temperature around the tea trees,” thereby lowering the chance of frost damage.
When you see anti-frost fans installed in a tea garden, it generally means a few things: first, the tea garden is definitely at a high altitude; second, the tea farmer is willing to spend big on tea garden management; and third, the tea won’t be cheap because installing these fans is very costly. Needless to say about Fushoushan Farm mentioned in the first paragraph, their tea goes for nearly NT$10,000 per 600 g. Other places where I’ve seen anti-frost fans—Cuifeng, Qilai Mountain, Xinjiyang, and LongFengXia—all belong to higher-priced tea gardens that also happen to do very well in business. From the perspective of tea merchants like us, installing anti-frost fans is a major plus when it comes to evaluating whether a tea garden is well-managed.
Speaking of tea garden frost damage, the worst in the past decade happened on April 12, 2020. The Cuiluan, DongYanShan, Datongshan, Qilai Mountain, and Cuifeng tea regions all suffered from frost. Among them, the damage in the Cuifeng tea region was “super severe,” with many windward tea gardens losing half of their tea leaves, and one major tea factory directly losing NT$30 million in revenue. That day was filled with grief and despair across the Cuifeng tea region. That frost event likely left a psychological mark on the tea farmers, as more and more anti-frost fans have been installed in Cuifeng ever since, making it the ultimate stronghold for anti-frost fans in Taiwan.
Finally, what do you think it costs to install an anti-frost fan? Back in 2021, a single unit went for NT$300,000. Not sure if the price has gone up over the past couple of years, but looking at it this way, it’s only fair that the tea sells at a higher price.
