Author(s): Tesfaye Benti, Adugna Debela, Yetenayet Bekele & Sultan Suleman
The introduction, adaptation, and domestication process of the tea plant taken long years. Commercial tea cultivation started after thirty years in 1957 near Gore town. Now, the tea plantations passed their maximum productive age after being planted on a commercial scale. But there is no clear information about long-term production, distribution of clones, actual cultivated land size, industry cost of production, and the present production status of Ethiopian tea farms. Therefore, it is imperative to have a baseline survey on a change of cultivated tea land, type of clone, and a long-term production trend of tea farms from 1997-2018. The result indicated that Ethiopia's tea industries hold a total of 13503.42ha lands. From these, Godere, Wushwush, Gumaro, Chewaka, and Small hold tea farms shared 36, 31, 20, 10, and 3 % of the total land, respectively. Over 97% of a green leaf mainly came from the larger tea farms, while a small hold sector contributed 3% only. The actual cultivated tea land reached 3611.37ha, with an annual expansion rate of 42.8ha per annum. Ethiopia tea farms commercially cultivated 14 type clones, and Clone11/56 widely cultivated clones from the rest, but around1018.35ha of Ethiopia tea farm covered with a mixed clone. Wushwush is the largest tea farm, found in the maximum productive stage, the mean made tea production reached 3818.8 tonnes y-1 (3042.3kgha-1), and the highest 4430 tonnes (3400.1kgha-1) made tea was produced in 2018. Gumaro is the second large tea farm found at the edge of the maximum productive stage and means made tea production reached 2546.2tonnes y-1(2926.3kgha-1). The highest 2946.9tonnes (3388.7kgha-1) made tea was produced during 2013. Chewaka is the third large tea farm tea bushes found in the early mature growth stages and produced the highest 1945.1 tonnes y-1 (3426.8kgha-1) tonne made tea in 2016, and the mean made tea production reached 1402.6tonnes y-1(2581.1kgha-1). In general, the national average made tea per hectare was increased by 53.5% from 1896.7 into 2910.8kgha-1 as nitrogen rate increased between 2008- 2018, and the national annual mean made tea production was reached 7767.6tonne y-1, from this, more than 86 % made tea consumed locally. Ethiopia tea consumption as a percent of production was rising by187.2tonne y-1 (r2 = 0.68) and negatively increased by -1.55tonne per annum (r2=0.71). Hence, the local consumption as a percent of production not fits with the number of consumers; it remains insignificant with the growing number of populations.