Equipment failure on the farm.

Every two years, we have to prune the tea plants. This is no easy task for our small team here at The Great Mississippi Tea Company, with 7 acres to prune and roughly around 35,000 tea bushes.

Fortunately, we are fans of technology and innovation so we have a two person pruner that allows us to manage the task much faster. This is if your technology doesn't break.

Which is exactly what happened while pruning the fields this week. The trolly that carries the pruner broke and put our work on hold.

This is where the multiple hats come into play. There isn't a lot of time when juggling farming schedules and weather to get key tasks like this done. So the team here has to put on their engineering hats and find a fix, fast.

After a rush trip to Home Depot and some farmer engineering, we were able to work on the pruning rack. This is a reality when working with equipment, sometimes it fails and never at the best time.Good news, we fixed it. We are back on our way to finishing the pruning process.

The leaves will be mulched under the tea plants to provide organic matter back to the soil. The whole process will help us keep the tea plants in the best shape for the spring harvesting machinery, while also encouraging healthy plants.

Here is a short video of the pruning technology in action on YouTube. This is a summer pruning of young plants. Make sure to hit that Subscribe button.