A Cup of Tea

Rooibos tea grows wild in the Fynbos of the Suid Bokkeveld, and small scale tea farmers harvest it for a living. Wild rooibos is more drought and heat tolerant than the kind of rooibos that commercial farmers have been cultivating for 80 years. Wild rooibos may yet be the answer to commercial farming of rooibos tea, and sustaining the associated jobs and downstream economic benefits, in a hotter, drier, climate-altered world. Nature has many such plants we depend on for medicine and agriculture.