What You Are Supporting When You Support My Local, Woman-Owned Tea Business

As someone who has spent years in both the business world and the tea world, and who has immersed herself in tea sourcing, regenerative agriculture, small family farms, and beyond, one of the deepest lessons I have learned is that our choices as consumers and community members often run much deeper than we realize.

I have personally benefited from these choices, and I have also been burned by them. What has come through for me, loud and clear, is that when we choose to support a small, local business, we are rarely just purchasing a product. We are participating in a web of relationships.

All of life is relationships, including the economy. And our purchasing power helps determine what kinds of relationships thrive: relationships rooted in reciprocity and community, or relationships shaped primarily by extraction and competition.

I recognize that every business and individual has the right to determine what values they prioritize. But I also believe that our purchasing decisions are never entirely neutral. They help shape what kinds of businesses survive, what kinds of agricultural systems flourish, and ultimately what kind of economy and world we collectively create.

There is value in considering what happens when even a portion of our purchasing remains rooted in local relationships, local economies, and life-sustaining systems.

My business is centered around those relationships. Here is what that means to me.

Supporting the Local Economy

As we all know, when businesses choose to source from local independent suppliers, or when consumers purchase from local businesses, money has the opportunity to circulate through local families, businesses, artists, service providers, schools, youth programs, restaurants, and other community institutions. The impact can extend far beyond a single transaction.

As a local business owner and mother, the support I receive does not disappear into a distant corporate structure. It supports my family, is reinvested into my business and local economy, and allows me to share my offerings of nature-connection with my community at low or no cost. I am deeply invested in the health and vitality of the place where I live.

No single purchasing decision carries the responsibility for an entire community, of course. But collectively, these choices contribute to the economic resilience of a place.

I know these values are talked about a lot here in San Luis Obispo County. I will also say that I have noticed a tendency to talk about supporting local more readily than we actually practice it. I am just as guilty of this as anyone else, and it is something I continually strive to do better.

Because ultimately, supporting local is not just a slogan. It is a practice.

Supporting Ethical Suppliers and the People Behind Them

The same principle applies at the source. The teas I have chosen to carry come from small farming families whose livelihoods depend on people valuing quality, stewardship, and relationship over scale and convenience. These are growers caring for the health of their land and preserving agricultural traditions deeply rooted in relationship with seasons, ecosystems, plants, and communities.

They recognize tea as part of a living system rather than simply a commodity to be extracted, packaged, and sold. But unfortunately these kinds of farming relationships are increasingly vulnerable. As agricultural systems become more industrialized and concentrated, small producers practicing slower, more place-based forms of agriculture can struggle to compete with larger commercial operations.

And this is where greenwashing can become particularly confusing. Large companies can use language around sustainability, organic practices, ethical sourcing, and environmental responsibility but the reality is that to be operating at mass, global scale the vast majority of their teas are commercially grown with little care for the land, the plant, and the workers.

This is not unique to tea. We see versions of this tension throughout our food and agricultural systems and beyond.

When I source tea, I am dedicated to looking for relationships I can stand behind with utmost integrity.

Supporting Sustainability Even When It Isn't Convenient

I imagine that businesses and individuals often choose larger suppliers because scale offers real and understandable benefits: lower costs, consistency, accessibility, and the perception of greater control.

But I have come to question how much control scale actually provides. Supply chains across nearly every industry can be disrupted by weather, transportation, geopolitical events, tariffs, labor shortages, crop failures, or changing availability. And climate change is likely to make many of these disruptions more frequent and unpredictable.

Unfortunately because tea does come from Asia, my business will always be vulnerable to supply chain instability. Also, tea as an agricultural product is subject to many other variable conditions - weather, harvest conditions, discontinuations, and shifting availability. But the fact is that no tea supplier, large or small, is immune to these realities.

When buying tea from a small local supplier like me, you may not always get perfect consistency. You may have to wait for a harvest or a shipment. You may fall in love with a tea that eventually becomes unavailable. But these realities can exist within larger supply chains as well. What differs is what we choose to prioritize while navigating that uncertainty.

Behind every tea I offer is a relationship with farmers and suppliers, countless hours spent navigating sourcing and logistics, a deep belief that the products we choose to sell matter, and a commitment to agricultural practices that honor the land and the Earth, and therefore the future.

The farmers I work with are not simply trying to maximize yield in the shortest possible timeframe. Many are working within agricultural traditions that emphasize taking only what is needed while allowing the plants, soil, ecosystems, and communities to remain healthy for generations to come. This is a way of thinking about harvest that is sometimes described as honorable harvest: receiving from the land without destroying the conditions that make future abundance possible. That feels increasingly rare and meaningful in a world so often organized around extraction.

And there is an irony here that I cannot ignore: the agricultural and economic systems that prioritize maximum production, maximum efficiency, and maximum profit can also contribute to the very ecological instability that threatens the future of the products they produce. The future availability of tea is not separate from the health of the ecosystems that grow it.

Supporting Life-Sustaining Systems

This is why I believe every product carries a story. It carries the values, priorities, relationships, and systems behind the people who grow it, source it, produce it, and bring it to you. It is important to ask where a product is from but we are also invited to ask an even deeper question: what kind of world does this product participate in creating?

Do we want a world where the things we love, like tea, are produced through relationships of stewardship, reciprocity, and care for the Earth?

Or do we continue moving toward systems that prioritize scale, efficiency, and convenience while disconnecting us from the people and landscapes that make these things possible?

And perhaps most importantly: what happens when those systems ultimately undermine the ecological conditions required for the products we love to exist?

This is not a conversation about one business or one purchasing decision. It is an invitation to become more conscious of the larger web we participate in every time we spend money. Our dollars, our attention, and our support are forms of participation. Every choice helps shape the future we move toward.

The future of tea is not separate from the future of our planet. The farmers who grow it, the lands that sustain it, the communities that depend upon it, and the ecosystems that make it possible are all connected. When we support something, we are supporting much more than what is immediately visible.

A Deeper Thank You

If you have spent any of your dollars purchasing tea from me this year, I am sending you so much gratitude. Not simply because you have supported me. The truth is that my tea sales do not sustain my family. Most of what comes through Sacred Mountain Teas is reinvested back into the business and helps support me in sharing my broader offerings.

So my gratitude actually runs much deeper. I am grateful because you have invested your time, energy, and dollars into something that I believe is much bigger than all of us.

You have chosen to participate in a different kind of economy. One that asks us to slow down, that values relationship over convenience, that keeps resources circulating through local communities while also connecting us to the farmers and landscapes where products originate. An economy that recognizes that the health of a farm, a family, a community, a watershed, and a planet are not separate things.

This is countercultural. And I don't think that is something to minimize. I think it is something to celebrate. Because sometimes choosing differently means choosing the slightly harder, slightly more expensive, or slightly less convenient route.

And sometimes that choice is a vote.

A vote for local resilience.

A vote for regenerative agriculture.

A vote for small farming families.

A vote for relationship.

A vote for the future of tea.

And ultimately, a vote for life-sustaining systems.

Raising a cup to you!

P.S. There is another reason I am especially grateful for your support: women-owned businesses often have significant ripple effects within families and communities because women entrepreneurs tend to reinvest a substantial portion of their income back into their households and communities. Typically around 90% of their income vs 30-40% seen in businesses owned by men. Research has explored this connection between investing in women entrepreneurs and broader social impact. You can read more from Harvard Kennedy School here and here.