As you drive out of Ooty you pass one slope after another covered with a waist-high monoculture of fresh green tea leaves. Sunith, our driver for the day, told us that his family owned five plots and they pluck leaves from it in rotation. There is constant production, when they finish the last field, they cycle back to the first. Each of the cycles takes a little less than two months. To my amateur ears this sounded like over-production. Perhaps in selecting for volume, the farmers here have selected for the less flavourful tea that is characteristic of these hills. Also, the fact that the holdings are small means that the need of a regular income forces them to overproduce. It is a vicious economic cycle that the local tea growers are caught in. So there is a growing interest in orchards of fruits and spices.
Since the hills are broken into small holdings, there are lots of small tea factories dotted about the area. We came to one and the niece wanted to take a look. She hadn’t seen the industrial process by which less flavourful tea is dried, shredded, and converted into hard pellets of instant pour-through brew, a chain called crush-tear-curl (CTC). As we waited to walk through, I noticed rusting pieces of discarded machinery waiting to be photographed. The overcast sky enhanced the clash of colours between the green leaves of tea, and the reds of dry grass and rusting metal. A perfect stop for my train of thought.
Don't hold your breath 
