Tea garden production has stepped into full mechanization.

Recently, led by the Agricultural Mechanization Research Institute of the Ministry of Agriculture, eight units, including the Tea Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, held an on-site demonstration of tea garden machinery at the Tea Expo Garden of Jiangsu Vocational and Technical College of Agriculture and Forestry. The new machinery and equipment jointly developed cover the whole process of tea garden production, saving 320 yuan per mu, indicating that China's tea garden production has begun to enter a new era of mechanization.

China's tea garden covers an area of 42 million mu, with a total output value of 150 billion yuan last year. Labor cost has accounted for more than 65% of the total cost in tea production. Due to the lack of suitable machinery, the problems of soil consolidation and fertilizer loss in tea garden are becoming more and more serious. Since 2013, eight units, including the Agricultural Mechanization Research Institute of the Ministry of Agriculture, have carried out research and development of tea garden mechanization technology and equipment. At present, tea garden production involves deep ploughing, fertilization, trematodes, pruning, picking and other mechanized technology and equipment has been successfully developed and is about to enter the stage of large-scale promotion and application.

According to the person in charge of the project team and Xiao Hongru, a researcher at the Agricultural Mechanization Research Institute of the Ministry of Agriculture, the project team has respectively developed suitable machinery. Mountain tea gardens are mainly lightweight and detachable machines, and tea farmers can carry the machines up the hill with shoulder-to-shoulder machines to assemble and work quickly; on the hilly slopes and plain tea gardens, there is a multi-functional tea garden tractor and supporting machinery, and one tractor can drive six kinds of machines with different functions. Take the deep ploughing of tea garden as an example, a group of deep ploughing machines can work 3 mu of land per hour on hilly slopes and plain tea gardens, while the tillage amount of a labor force is only about 1 mu a day. In addition, the project team has also specially developed a famous tea picking machine, which can reduce the broken tea rate of mechanized tea picking from 40% to less than 10%.

It is understood that at present, the mechanized technology and equipment for the whole process of tea garden production have been tested and demonstrated in 22 major tea producing provinces and regions across the country, saving a total of about 900 million yuan in labor production costs.