Abstract
Due to the unpredictable natural droughts that occur, causing tea farmers significant losses in tea estates, a two-day method for distinguishing between drought tolerant (DT) and drought susceptible (DS) Camellia sinensis cultivars was developed. This work was based on known cultivars developed at the Tea Research Institute in Kenya and the Tea Research Foundation for Central Africa in Malawi. This paper contains an in-depth description of the application of the SWAPDT method on four 60-year old, C. sinensis seedling fields in Kenya. The in-filling history of the four fields due to drought-related deaths was obtained from historical records. The SWAPDT method scores correlated very well with the historical records. It has been indicated, from the results obtained in this study, that a sample size of 20 tea trees is sufficient to accurately determine the drought susceptibility of a large tea field of approximately 5-20 hectares, containing 50 000-200 000 tea trees, were the difference between their mean values, as measured by the SWAPDT method, is approximately 10%.
Highlights
Tea made from the leaves of Camellia sinensis, as green or black tea, has been drunk as a mild stimulant due to the caffeine content, since time immemorial (Ellis & Nyirenda, 1995)
The results presented in the ANOVA showed that the SWAPDT method distinguishes good fields from poor fields
These findings correspond with the historical records of in-filling that were available for these fields
Summary
Tea made from the leaves of Camellia sinensis, as green or black tea, has been drunk as a mild stimulant due to the caffeine content, since time immemorial (Ellis & Nyirenda, 1995). Global world trade is approximately 78% by value in the form of black, 20% as green and 2% as oolong tea (Nyarukowa, Koech, Loots, & Apostolides, 2016) It is an important cash crop for countries such as India and China; in Africa alone, several countries produce tea, namely in Kenya, which is currently ranked third behind Sri Lanka and India with regards to annual production and export of black tea (FAO, 2015), Malawi, Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, South Africa, Burundi and Mauritius. Most estates keep good records of the in-filling, and good and poor fields are identified Sometimes these records are missing, and a new method is required to determine the drought tolerance of a tea field that might be 20-90 years old (Willson & Clifford, 2012)
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