Report Feasibility study organic bitter tea Cao Bang - Helvetas

Feasibility Study Organic Bitter Tea in Cao Bang: 2007
Visit of processing unit in Cao Bang (3km) on 16.5.07
BT Company employs 10 staff in Cao Bang
• Processing consists in: washing, pre-heating, drying, curling, drying, packaging
• Production is around 300 grams/day/person
• Unit produces 3kg/day in a 6 day week
Visit of processing unit in Dong Khe town. Thach Anh district on 16.5.07
• Has the equipment to produce tea bags and instant tea but stopped production of both
• Reasons: instant tea is too expensive to produce and for tea bags there is no market
• Bud production is very same as in Cao Bang (12 people working)
• Normally needs 5,3kg of fresh leaves to get 1 kg of processed buds
• Price composition:
10,000 of 12grams buds (packaged)
830,000 /kg
100,000 /packaging and handling
100,000 /raw material (12% should be higher)
100’,000 /labour
100,000 /processing material and equipment
430,000 /selling margins (50%)
• The processing is simple and easy and could be decentralised. The BT company
already started to decentralise (but which step exactly?)
• Processing at HH level is possible but HH need to be trained and monitored
• The BT Company has a list of the producers and registers all the purchases made by the
processing unit (which information is registered?)
• Normally farmers bring the buds to the processing station. Sometimes the collection is
made at the district market and then the bulked production of different farmers is
brought to the processing unit
• Farmers normally are paid cash
• BT Company has all 1300 farmers registered (data?): area, number of trees, villages,
production, monitoring
• The BT company has 7 technical staff
• Visits to the farmers: 2 visits/year
• Are there registration of farming techniques
• Normally farmers are not using pesticides with the exception of some big farmers (7?);
what is big? Farmer who has 7-10,000 trees
• All the farmers are using NPK, but only because this chemical fertilizer is subsidized
by the BT Company in the first year
• After the first year only the big farmer keep buying NPK, not the smaller ones. Bt there
is no experiences what happen to the trees with no NPK fertilizer application
• There is no experienced farmers in organic techniques
Visit of a second farmer in Dong Khe town, Thach An district on 16.5.07
• Plantation on a smoothly slope land; 2-3000 trees but the trees are definitely too high
for any bud collection (farmer needs now a ladder)
• Plantation supposed to produce leaves, but now leaves aren’t anymore needed by the
market
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