Application Experience of Tea Machinery and Its Role in Tea Production

1. Machinery application extends from tea processing to tea pruning, bulk tea picking and weeding in tea plantations. In the era of planned economy, the rural labor force is abundant. In the tea production process, besides the use of machinery for the primary production of tea, most tea processing still relies on manual stir-frying. Since entering the market economy, a large number of rural laborers have gone out to work, which has a great impact on the labor-intensive tea industry, which provides opportunities for the mechanized production of tea processing. Generally, a trimmer can trim 5 mu tea garden every day, which not only reduces labor intensity, but also improves work efficiency, and the cut is smoother, and the split pile is obviously less than manual trimming, which is conducive to early germination and multiple occurrence of tea buds. Because the machine-cut tea canopy surface is smoother than the manual pruning, it also lays the foundation for the implementation of mechanized tea picking. In the process of tea picking, it is estimated that the cost of mechanical picking can be saved by 0.3 yuan per kilogram of fresh leaves. Ergonomics is more than 10 times that of manual work.

2. Tea processing has developed from the application of primary machinery to the introduction of tea fine and deep processing machinery. At the beginning of the development of tea industry, it mainly produced large quantities of tea. The mechanical processing of tea was relatively rough, and the mechanical processing of tea was in the initial stage. Since the end of the 1990s, the demand for large and fine famous tea in the domestic market has been increasing, which has prompted some professional tea processing households to buy some refining machinery. Large quantities of tea are basically sold to northern markets such as Gansu and Ningxia, while fine famous tea is mostly sold in the province and the south, thus realizing the primary and refinement of tea processing.

3. From focusing on the application of processing machinery, to the simultaneous application of storage and packaging machinery. Tea production is a systematic project, which consumes a lot of labor from cultivation to harvest, processing to storage, packaging and so on. Under the circumstances of rising labor costs, how to apply more machinery and reduce the labor consumption as much as possible is an important way to reduce costs and improve benefits. According to the determination, manual processing can only process 15 kg of tea per day, while mechanical processing can process 150 kg of tea per day, greatly improving production efficiency, alleviating the phenomenon that fresh leaves can not be processed in time and reducing the quality of tea. While paying attention to the application of processing machinery, it also began to pay attention to the introduction and application of storage and packaging machinery. If 30,000 yuan is invested in refrigeration equipment, refrigeration storage of tea has been established, which prolongs the fresh-keeping period of tea, especially for high-grade famous tea, ensures that the quality of famous tea is basically new in one year's commodity cycle, and increases the added value of tea by more than 15%.

4. Famous and excellent tea is an effective way to promote tea industrialization. Mechanized production of famous and excellent tea is the need to improve the price of tea. The price of famous and excellent tea is really different from that of ordinary bulk tea.

Deficiencies of Tea Machinery at Present

Due to the relative backwardness of domestic tea machinery manufacturing industry and the influence of the quality of operators, the quality of tea products has not been optimized and the benefits of tea production have not been maximized. Throughout the application practice of tea machinery in recent years, the main shortcomings of tea machinery in tea production and processing are as follows:

1. The management of tea plantation is extensive, the area is large and the output is low. The counties with large area of dense and efficient tea plantations are suitable for serious shortage of cultivation management and harvesting machinery, and there is no ideal cultivation machinery. In addition, the serious lack of labor force has resulted in the phenomenon of "spring tea is fragrant, summer tea is astringent, autumn tea is delicious and nobody picks it", which also causes a great waste of resources. According to statistics, the waste rate of tea resources is about 60%. At present, the expenditure of cultivation and management in tea production is very large, accounting for almost 40% of the total cost of tea production. The supply of tea suitable for general group consumption is insufficient.

2. Tea processing and production is not high grade, the proportion of famous and excellent tea is small, and the processing level is backward. The uneven processing technology and various product shapes have become the "bottleneck" restricting the improvement of tea quality and industrial efficiency. Tea industry leader must also start from small famous and high-quality processing enterprises. However, the existing processing enterprises are small in scale, narrow in coverage and weak in their own ability, which have very limited driving role for farmers and market development ability.

3. The processing capacity of some counties and districts is seriously insufficient, and the delivery of fresh leaves by tea farmers is limited. At present, the mechanism rate of tea in the whole city is only about 30%, and the proportion of famous and excellent tea is lower. According to our investigation in Hongchun Tea Farm in Ziyang County, due to the limited number of processing professional household machinery, the processing capacity is certain every day. In the peak period of tea picking, it is common that fresh leaves picked by tea farmers are sold nowhere, which will inevitably cause tea farmers to fry by hand and reduce the quality and value of tea.

4. Machinery output in processing process is not matched. For example, the introduction of a set of four processing machinery, in production and operation found that the shaping process and the killing process are seriously incompatible, often the killing process work for one hour, the shaping process needs to work for two hours, in order to achieve matching production. Because of the incompatibility of the process, the total operation time is prolonged, which reduces the utilization rate of the mechanical group in the total process, and also causes the unreasonable distribution of the re-products, which affects the improvement of tea quality.

5. The intellectualization of tea machinery is low. Most of the processing equipment in our tea garden was purchased in the 1980s, mainly in the form of family workshop. The quality of tea remanufactured products can only be controlled by the feeling and experience of the operators. It is very random and difficult to achieve the same quality of tea.