Cultivating Tea: Natural-Shitate

This article is written by Hiroki A.

“Natural-shitate” is, as the name suggests, a cultivation method that uses the tea plant’s natural form without any artificial pruning. In the early days of the tea industry—before mechanization—tea bushes were grown without pruning, allowing their branches to grow freely. The lateral branches that extended from these main branches were hand-picked for the first flush harvest.
Today, with mechanization common across many tea-producing regions, the proportion of tea grown using the natural-shitate method has become quite low.

The biggest advantage of machine-shitate—which contrasts with natural-shitate—is the ability to improve work efficiency per unit area and increase total production as the size of the farm increases. In reality, with machine harvesting, two people can pick several hundred kilograms of fresh leaves in an hour, whereas hand-picking is limited to just a few kilograms.
Because timing is crucial in tea harvesting, the area that can be harvested within a limited period determines the scale of production. For natural-shitate, which relies on hand-picking, it is difficult to secure enough pickers, making large-scale expansion impractical. As a result, production has become limited to only certain regions.

However, natural-shitate cultivation is still practiced in specific areas. Representative regions include Uji in Kyoto, Nishio in Aichi, and Yame in Fukuoka. Tea grown using natural-shitate in these areas is traded at high prices, allowing producers to maintain their businesses despite the labor-intensive nature and lower yields. In the tea industry, where quality and price are positively correlated, this fact supports the idea that the natural-shitate cultivation method produces higher-quality tea.

In practice, natural-shitate cultivation is superior in quality compared to machine-harvested methods. Tea bushes under natural-shitate grow in a more three-dimensional shape, enabling efficient photosynthesis and allowing them to secure a wider root zone. This lets the plant fully express its natural potential.
Natural-shitate trees have strong vigor, and the large branches produce powerful first flush growth. These new shoots have more leaf layers than what is typically possible in machine-harvested fields. Because these shoots harden later, they can withstand long shading periods, making natural-shitate the most suitable cultivation method for producing shaded teas such as gyokuro and tencha, which require extended shading.