In central Mississippi, outside the town of Brookhaven, a field is lined with long rows of precisely squared-off shrubs, which look more like misplaced landscaping than a crop. These are tea plants, or Camellia sinensis, a cousin of the camellias that blossoms in yards across the South.
Jason McDonald knew nothing about tea, or even much about farming, when he was casting about for a crop to plant on this land he inherited from his grandfather. After a visit to the Charleston Tea Plantation, for many years one of America’s only commercial tea farms, McDonald decided to give it a try. (In 2020, “plantation” was dropped and the name was changed to the Charleston Tea Garden.) With Timothy Gipson in 2012 he founded the Great Mississippi Tea Company.
“The first couple of years, we were the village idiots,” McDonald said. “Now that we’re making money, people are asking, ‘What’s going on here?’”
A single acre of Camellia sinensis in one year can produce a ton of finished tea. McDonald and Gipson currently farm 1.25 acres of tea plants. Another 7 acres will soon be ready to harvest. But growing Camellia sinensis…
