BURLINGTON, Wash. (AP) -- Just behind the Sakuma Brothers Farms Market Stand, in a 5-acre field bordered by a strawberry patch, a decade-long project to bring locally grown tea to market has finally come to fruition.Earlier this summer, workers walked through the tightly packed rows of nondescript evergreen plants, named Camellia sinensis, and one-by-one they pinched off the plants leaves near the stem.Later, the leaves were heated, rolled and dried in the sun, with the resulting brittle flakes ready to be steeped in water and served as tea.Last month, after the Sakumas first sale of loose-leaf green and white teas, the family-owned farm became just the second commercial tea plantation in the continental United States, and the first on the West Coast.

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India's tea sector seeks law change to diversify

COONOOR, India (Reuters) - India's struggling tea sector is seeking changes in the law to allow for diversification into other crops to fight rising production costs and increase returns, officials said on Monday.

At present laws such as the Plantation Labour Act, land reform acts of various states and Minimum Wages Act inhibit diversification and need drastic overhaul, said J.K. Thomas, president of the United Planters' Association of Southern India.

"Even while a plantation commodity is economically unviable, we cannot change over to alternate crop because of the restrictive and archaic laws which have outlived their purpose," he said.

It is high time that necessary legal amendments were brought about for allowing tea estates to diversify into other crops like bamboo, jatropha and palm, Thomas told a planters meet in Coonoor.