Then and Now: Oregon Tea, 10 Years After the Bet on American-Grown Tea

In January 2017 I shared a Modern Farmer story on X: “Oregon Farmers Bet That Great Tea Can Be Grown in the US”. It was about Minto Island, a small farm near Salem that had been growing tea in Oregon since the late 1980s and wanted to turn it into a real crop. Nearly ten years later, I went back to see how that bet turned out. This is part of Then and Now, where I revisit old tea stories and see what became of them.

The short answer: Farmers in Oregon still grow, pick and sell tea, and you can buy the 2026 harvest today. But the big expansion never happened, the price per ounce has roughly doubled, and tea grown in the US is still a tiny niche next to the billions of pounds the country imports.

What the 2016 story promised

In December 2016, the Modern Farmer piece described Minto Island as Oregon’s first organic commercial tea farm. It started in the 1980s almost as a lark, with an experimental plot of Camellia sinensis. By 2016 the family behind it was making green, black and oolong teas. The plan was to grow to 15 to 20 acres. The tea sold for nearly $20 an ounce.

The big open question was the weather. The tea plant likes water and hates real winters, and nobody knew how it would cope with a cold year in the Willamette Valley.

What happened to the Oregon tea farm next

The winter answered quickly. In 2016 the farm had planted 10 more acres of tea on leased land, and a colder-than-normal winter killed most of those plants. In a 2018 Tea Journey profile, Elizabeth Miller called it “an unusual winter” and listed what went wrong: young plants, planting conditions, cold and weeds.

By 2018 the tea was back to its original half acre. It holds more than 200 cultivars from around the world and makes about 100 pounds of tea a year. Miller described it as “a research plot, a genetic bank” rather than a commercial plantation. The new goal was more modest too: 5 to 10 acres of chosen cultivars.

Oregon tea in 2026: Minto Island today

The farm is still going. Its online shop lists three teas from the 2026 harvest: a spring green tea, a spring white tea and a summer black tea, at $32 to $34. The green comes in a 24-gram packet, which works out to about $38 an ounce, roughly double the 2016 price. The farm describes it as its first tea of the year, pan-fired and rolled on the farm, with notes of artichoke heart, pine sap and citrus zest.

The farm stand also sells the tea from July to October. The visit page lists $35 group tours and tastings that walk through the “35-year-old Mother Tea Plot”, and private tours for groups. The free summer open house is not scheduled for 2026.

I couldn’t find any public figure for how many acres are in tea today. From what the farm shows, it is still a small, careful operation, closer to a winery’s estate block than a plantation.

Is tea grown anywhere else in the US?

Yes, but it is still small. A few places worth knowing:

• South Carolina is the largest tea-producing state. The Charleston Tea Garden on Wadmalaw Island, owned by Bigelow since 2003, is still the only large-scale tea farm in the country, at about 127 acres.
• Mississippi: the Great Mississippi Tea Company near Brookhaven grows on about seven acres, and its teas have been stocked by Zingerman’s.
• Hawaii, Alabama and Washington have small growers too. A Washington farm in Burlington stopped making tea in 2016.

Growers organized in 2013 as the US League of Tea Growers. By 2019 it had 85 members, from hobbyists to commercial farms, and held its annual meeting in Oregon, with a visit to Minto Island’s nursery. Its president, Angela McDonald, put the challenge plainly: “Once that novelty wears off, you can’t sell bad tea.”

What the 2025 tea tariffs showed

Last year gave American tea its biggest test. According to Fortune, the average tariff on imported tea rose from under 0.1% to over 12% by July 2025, and importers paid about $19.6 million in tea tariffs in the first seven months of the year, nearly seven times as much as in the same months of 2024. The government later lifted the tea tariffs. Still, if there was ever a moment for home-grown tea, that was it.

It wasn’t. US farms can’t supply American demand for more than a few hours a year, and McDonald told Fortune: “We don’t have an industry and we can’t produce one overnight.”

So did the bet pay off?

Not the way the 2016 headline imagined. Oregon did not become a tea region, and the 15 to 20 acres never appeared. But the farm is still there, still picking, and still selling a fresh harvest every year. Oregon tea was never going to replace Darjeeling or Uji. What it offers is something imported tea rarely can: leaves picked this season, a few miles from where they were processed, by people you can visit.

That is a small win, and an expensive one at $38 an ounce. Still, in a year when matcha is in short supply and import prices are unpredictable, I find it reassuring that someone in Oregon kept going after that first hard winter.

Where to buy American-grown tea

• Minto Island Tea, Salem, Oregon: small seasonal harvests online, and the farm stand from July to October
• Charleston Tea Garden, Wadmalaw Island, South Carolina: the largest US tea farm, with tours
• The Great Mississippi Tea Company, Brookhaven, Mississippi

Oregon tea: frequently asked questions

Read next

• What became of the Coffee and Tea Festival NYC: another look back, at the tea booths I photographed in 2019
• NYC bubble tea 15 years later
• An introduction to white tea

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