Welcome to The Yaupon Brothers forest farm where they harvest yaupon holly! Yaupon holly is North America's only native caffeinated plant. It has the potential to replace coffee, tea and yerba mate in the USA and Canada. Most coffee and tea is shipped long distance, guzzling fossil fuels, but yaupon holly is a native, local source of the much loved caffeine buzz. This can be a truly sustainable tea for millions of North Americans. As a native, wild plant it does not need any watering, fertilizer or pesticides and needs not be shipped across the oceans.
The Yaupon Brothers, Bryon and Kyle White, are working to bring this ancient Native American tea back into the lives of modern Americans, and to promote healthy living, an active lifestyle, harmony with nature, and accountability in enterprise. Ethical sustainability and accountability all around.
Note: At :42 I misspoke when I said it is "North America's only caffeinated plant." I meant to say that it is "North America's only native caffeinated plant." The North American continent includes Canada, USA and Central America. Yaupon is most applicable in the Southern USA and would have the shortest shipping to most of the USA and Canada for a caffeinated beverage. Coffee and cacao do grow in Central America. I apologize for misspeaking.
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— Rob Greenfield is an activist and humanitarian dedicated to leading the way to a more sustainable and just world. He embarks on extreme projects to bring attention to important global issues and inspire positive change. 100% of his media income is donated to grassroots nonprofits. His YouTube channel is a source to educate, inspire and help others to live more sustainable, equal and just lives. Videos frequently cover sustainable living, simple living, growing your own food, gardening, self-sufficiency, minimalism, off the grid living, zero waste, living in a tiny house and permaculture.
Hey everyone, Rob Greenfield here, and I'm with Brian and Kyle White, the Yapon Brothers.
And right here, it might look like we're standing in a forest, which we are, but this is also their farm.
Right here is the Yapon Polly tree, and this is why we're here.
I'm really excited to share their story with you because this plant right here could replace coffee and tea.
This is North America's only caffeinated plant, and it is a local, sustainable, and native source for that caffeine that people love so much.
So Brian, tell us, why are we here in the forest that you call your farm?
Years ago, I was looking at our Yapon Polly in our garden, and I was reading about it, and I realized that it's North America's only native caffeinated plant.
It's been consumed by Native Americans for thousands of years.
I started asking, like, why isn't anyone drinking this stuff?
Why aren't we making any products from this sustainable, native plant species that does everything for us that tea can do?
I said, well, it must not taste very good.
And we started sourcing it on our friends and relatives, and we found out that it's actually a great product.
And it was just time for Yapon to be reintroduced to the marketplace.
And that's what started us creating Yapon Brothers and creating the products we have today.
So most people's question, well, is, what is Yapon?
But we kind of went through that.
So what is so great about Yapon Polly?
Our Yapon is wild-crafted, which means it grows here, totally natural.
We don't add any pesticides, fertilizers, irrigation.
It's watered with Florida rain from showers.
That's it.
So we work totally in harmony with nature to produce our Yapon tea here in Florida.
No watering, no pesticides, no herbicides, any of those things.
And a big part of that right now is that Florida, you have these toxic algae blooms.
So this would not contribute to that at all, right?
People buying Yapon over tea, over coffee, they're making a choice that helps to eliminate that source of pollution entirely.
So it's grown right here.
And then after harvesting, what's next?
We go to our factory, our tea shop, which is right down the road.
And we process Yapon into the products that you'd find in a grocery store.
All right, so let's head on over there.
So we're here at the Yapon factory, and this is where the leaves that are harvested in the forest farm
are now turned into something that we can actually drink as a tea.
So where is most of our tea and coffee, where people are getting their caffeine, coming from right now?
Most coffee and tea in the U.S. actually comes from overseas.
It has to cross the ocean to get here.
So most of your coffee comes from South America.
Most of your tea comes from Asia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia.
This is really the only option for caffeinated tea that grows in the continental United States.
So we'd like to present a better option here for tea in the U.S. for people to drink.
So changing that industry would be a massive shift in the United States and around the world.
It would take a lot of weight off the environment as well, yes.
All right, so how can people drink Yapon Holly if they want to?
Well, the really great thing about being in the South is that you can process and produce Yapon Holly
from trees in your own yard.
You can find it growing in the wild.
You can buy it from yaponbrothers.com online, and we sell the trees as well.
Cool. So you can literally go out and forage it.
You can buy the tea from them at a lot of shops or online.
Or you can actually buy a tree and grow it in your own yard.
That's right.
So if you are in North America and you're drinking tea, coffee, or yerba mate,
and you want to do it in a more sustainable way that's not shipping stuff around the world,
then Yapon Holly is the tea for you.
