Tea Garden Production Enters a New Stage of Full Mechanization

Recently, led by the Institute of Agricultural Mechanization under the Ministry of Agriculture, 8 institutions including the Tea Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences held a tea garden machinery on-site demonstration and observation meeting at the Tea Expo Garden of Jiangsu Polytechnic College of Agriculture and Forestry. The new machinery and new equipment they jointly developed cover the entire tea garden production process, saving 320 yuan per mu in labor and costs, marking that tea garden production in China has begun to move toward a new era of full mechanization.

China's tea garden area is 42 million mu, with a total output value of 150 billion yuan last year. In tea production, labor costs already account for more than 65% of total costs. Due to the lack of suitable machinery, problems such as tea garden soil compaction and fertilizer loss have become increasingly serious. Since 2013, 8 institutions including the Institute of Agricultural Mechanization under the Ministry of Agriculture have carried out research and development of mechanized tea garden operation technology and equipment. At present, the full-process mechanized technology and equipment involved in tea garden production, including deep plowing, fertilization, insect suction, pruning, and picking, have been successfully developed and are about to enter the stage of large-scale promotion and application.

According to researcher Xiao Hongru of the Institute of Agricultural Mechanization under the Ministry of Agriculture, the project leader, the project team separately developed suitable machinery. For mountainous tea gardens, the main focus is on lightweight, disassemblable machinery, so tea farmers can carry the machinery up the mountain by hand or on shoulder poles, assemble it quickly, and operate rapidly; for hilly slope land and plain tea gardens, there are multi-functional tea garden tractors and supporting machinery, and one tractor can separately drive 6 kinds of implements with different functions for operation. Taking deep plowing in tea gardens as an example, one set of deep plowing machinery can operate on 3 mu of land per hour in hilly slope land and plain tea gardens, while the cultivation amount of one laborer in one day is only about 1 mu of land. In addition, the project team also specially developed picking machinery for famous and high-quality tea, which can reduce the broken tea rate of mechanized tea picking from 40% to below 10%.

It is understood that at present, the full-process mechanization technology and equipment for tea garden production have been tested and demonstrated on more than 3 million mu in 22 major tea-producing provinces and regions across the country, with cumulative savings in labor production costs of about 900 million yuan.