Trailblazer Finds Tobacco No Longer His Cup Of Tea

The Age

Saturday December 20, 2008

Darren Gray

George Barel has switched from a crop that causes cancer to one said to fight it, reports Darren Gray.

EVERY morning Kiewa Valley farmer George Barel rolls out of bed as the sun kisses the picturesque valley outside, heads to the kitchen and starts the day with a healthy breakfast. He downs a freshly brewed cup of green tea - which has been grown in the paddock outside the kitchen - and enjoys a serve of Weet-Bix and milk.

Well-tanned Australian farmers, cups of green tea and healthy diets aren't a particularly well-known combination, but Mr Barel is something of a trailblazer. He is one of about 10 farmers in Victoria growing green tea, a drink believed to fight cancer.

But there's something else about the unassuming 45-year-old that makes him even more unusual: he's the only one of the 10 who used to grow tobacco, a product known for a different kind of association with cancer.

While a small amount of the green tea grown by Mr Barel and his wife, Antoinette, goes into his teapot (not hers - she prefers coffee), the rest ends up thousands of kilometres away, on the retail shelves of Japan, a nation of fanatical green tea drinkers. Mr Barel supplies his tea to the large Japanese company Ito En.

Mr Barel loves his morning green tea brew. But his connection with green tea is not life long: when he planted his first six hectares in 2002 he had never drunk a drop of it.

Back then Mr Barel was a tobacco grower, like his father before him, and had been for about 20 years. And for the next three years, he grew green tea and tobacco, the crops separated by cow paddocks and the winding Kiewa River.

Perhaps you could call it yin and yang. On the gentle southern slopes of the Kiewa Valley, in north-eastern Victoria, Mr Barel could stand among his 320 rows of green tea, and look across the Kiewa River to his second farm a few hundred metres away, and assess his tobacco rows.

Those years of growing both crops were hectic, he says. After tending the tobacco, he would drive home and tackle the weeds threatening his young green tea crop, and organise irrigation and other necessary tasks.

Drinking freshly brewed green tea in his kitchen, the easygoing farmer acknowledges the paradoxical nature of his farming career. "I've done about 22 years of tobacco basically, and then I have to do 22 years of tea for the penance, I suppose. One causes it and one, so-called, prevents it. It is ironic isn't it, a tobacco grower growing green tea," he says.

"But it will end up, hopefully, with green tea being an alternative crop for some of the ex-tobacco growers."

While they are vastly different crops - green tea bushes last for 30 to 40 years, for example, while tobacco must be planted each year - the tobacco operation helped the green tea one. Mr Barel's 168,000 green tree bushes were planted with a converted tobacco planter in soil that for 27 years, until 1994, grew tobacco.

Although a non-smoker, Mr Barel says he didn't have a problem with growing tobacco. "The Government didn't say it was illegal, so I had no problems with that."

Green tea is well suited to the alpine country of the Kiewa Valley, he says, with its sandy fertile soil, high rainfall and availability of water, cold winters and cool summer nights. "You can't really grow it outside of the alpine areas. You can't really grow it in Albury or Wodonga, or Wangaratta or Griffith or Mildura ... it's sort of a niche thing for upper valleys."

And while tobacco was also well suited to the alpine region, Mr Barel's green tea crop seems a little more versatile. The young leaves in each season's first harvest taste as sweet as snow peas, he says, and can be added to a salad. A summer green tea leaf salad? Sounds more appetising than a tossed tobacco salad.

GREEN TEA - THE FACTS

The first green tea harvest of the season, conducted in late October and early November, is the most important.

Kiewa Valley tea farmer George Barel harvests his crop three times a year.

The botanical name of Mr Barel's green tea plant is Camelia sinesis.

A green tea plantation will produce for 30 to 40 years.

About 10 Victorian farmers grow about 70 hectares of green tea.

SOURCE: GEORGE BAREL

© 2008 The Age

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