A STUDY ON THE AGRO-TECHNICAL ENGINEERING IN MACHINE TEA-PLUCKING GARDEN

Tea plucking should be carried out in time and needed a large amount of labour. These are the limiting factors in developing the tea production in China at present. Thus, the necessity of using machine plucking for tea production becomes very urgently. The study showed that machine tea-plucking can increase the efficiency, decrease the cost of production, reach to optimum plucking, ensure tea yield and quality and release much work force to do other jobs. In this way, evident economical and social benefits can be achieved. But it is necessary to have some basic conditions and relative cultural techniques in machine tea-plucking garden. This paper discusses systematically the basic engineering techniques about tea garden design, tea variety selection and tea tree shape in machine tea-plucking garden. According to the growing characteristics required for the machine tea-plucking plant, authors introduce some key cultural techniques about prunning cycle, optimum plucking time, maintaining autumn shoot, fertilizer applied and so on. The experiment proved that the complete set of techniques as stated above are indispensable and effective. Based on the testing operations of plucking and prunning machines used in the tea garden of China, authors suggested the principle for type-selection and the programme for forming a complete rationl set of plucking and prunning machines. These techniques will be helpful to the teaplucking machinery manufacturers and extension persons too. The investment result will be good.