Mechenical Harvesting of Tea

Mechanical harvesting (MH):

Introduction:
Manual plucking is highly labour intensive: consumes almost 70% of the workers and accounts for approximately 30% of cost of production. Labour shortage is becoming a bigger and bigger issue every year. Like it has been happening in South India, now workers families have started heading back to their home states where there are lots of jobs on offer at higher wages. Bihar of late is a major destination. This is only going to get worse in the near future.
With labour shortages estates not only go out of round at crucial periods of the year, but they have to compromise on other cultural practices because they do not have enough available mandays. Brokers are talking about the dipping of quality in many companies for extended periods, caused mainly by poor quality of leaf. When rounds become extended there is initially an increase in crop & a dip in quality. But as the rounds get extended even more, there is not only a further dip in quality, but also there is a drop in crop. In case these sections are, at the end of the season, due to be lightly skiffed or left Unpruned, the crop loss will extend into the next year.
How do we evaluate the problem of labour shortage? It is not just shortage of pluckers, but also mandays that are required for other cultural practices, which are put on hold because mandays are diverted for plucking. So, based on the extent of this problem, decide on how much area to put under harvesting. Part of this area could be started on harvesting from 1st flush & slowly increased to cover the whole planned area by the end of June. Thereafter this area stays on harvesting for the rest of the season. So, this area’s harvesting stays on target, the rest of the estate stays on round (no labour shortage) & the other cultural operations are on schedule. Now tell me, do you still doubt that this will improve quality? And look at what it does to your cost !!

Mechanical Harvesting
Mechanical Harvesting has really not been given a try. In the few places it was introduced, it got rejected before they could understand what mechanical harvesting was. Forget trials, there has actually been no real debate on whether to use or not to use Mechanical Harvesters, specially in North India. The conclusion, that they are detrimental to quality, was drawn long before they were really understood & put into use, by citing a few isolated examples of the usage of either ‘Shears’ or harvesters by people who did not understand harvesting nor had any training. These conclusions were passed onto the Tea Board to convince them not to give subsidies for harvesters, to protect quality. This ‘wisdom’ has kept gardens from deploying harvesters, even when long leaf is waving in their faces and causing loss in quality & crop. In 2007 on a trip around all the tea districts in South India I came upon many fields/sections with grossly overgrown leaf. The managers expressed their helplessness as there were huge shortages of workers. In some estates as much as 40% houses were lying vacant as families had moved to the plains for road work, etc. which was giving them better income. Now tell me, if they were using harvesters for parts of their estates, would they have poorer quality & lesser crops ?!! This trip to South India helped me (with help from the Captains of the Industry & UPASI) convince the Tea Board Chairman that MH would actually improve overall quality and so subsidy was approved. However, to undo this in North India needs much more doing.

Often new machines introduced into the industry were not better than those that existed at that time. Take the introduction of the Withering troughs in about 1970: within 6 months of evaluating quality, the conclusion was that the then ‘Chung-withering’ produced better quality. But were the troughs discarded? NO!! The think tank then thought ahead – a) wages would keep rising, b) Capital investment in constructing ‘Chung Houses’ would be prohibitive c) labour availability could become an issue, … So they worked at altering the withering troughs to suit the needs of the Industry. And today everyone withers on troughs. Alas, if we had evaluated the Mechanical Harvesters (more than a decade later) in the same manner; we would have had harvesters (suited to our requirements) harvesting many areas. So sometimes our pundits in their wisdom actually do more harm. And in a conservative industry like tea, it takes a lot to undo. Even when some new things are demonstrated there are remarks like “ …ahead of his /it’s time, …I don’t want to be the first,…”

Fortunately there is a slow but perceptible change taking place. There are some willing to break away from the pack and see for themselves. This is great news for the Industry. Part of this must be attributed to last year’s wide spread damage caused by Helopeltis. They realized that the same old Plant Protection Measures, that did not work last year, are still being recommended with just cosmetic changes. Is that all the wisdom we have got from our experience? And is this all there is to pest management?! Are we ahead of our time?!!!

Can we really blame Research? More than two decades ago TRA got a harvesting machine with a Rotary cutting blade. It apparently failed - It would keep missing out ready leaf every little while. Many years later, on having a look at it, I found that the machine used to be pushed manually by workers operating it, with the rotor blade worked by an engine. Now this has a rotary-blade cutter & the ground speed has to be linked to the rotor speed. The workers pushing it will never have a constant speed & so this has to keep happening. The machine was rejected by Research, but if the industry really had interest in it, Research would have easily worked out the solution. Till the industry realizes the necessity of harvesting and starts demanding R & D to start work on this, we will have to depend on work of some individuals & progressive companies and learn from them. Good thing is that there has been a fair amount of independent work done on harvesting.

So how do we go about harvesting?
1. First let us look at what apprehensions some people have about harvesting?
a. Yields start dropping after a few years:
i. If the systems are altered to suit the MH, this will not happen. One of the biggest problem was the catch word “tactical shearing/harvesting”. People started putting areas on & off harvesting according to how the rounds were going. Tactic is to evaluate what is the extent of the problem & at which period of the season & then decide to put that much area onto harvesting & keep it there for the season.
ii. In some cases the crop has actually increased.
iii. The harvesting is complete & to level as a result there is no dipping & so the number of plucking points increase.
iv. No Helopeltis affected shoots are left on the table & so it can help in mitigating the Helopeltis problem.
v. Harvesting Interval (HI) is as per plan and specific types of harvesting for different clones/prunes etc.

b. Quality deteriorates:
There should be very little drop in quality & only in the beginning. As the machines & systems are altered to suit own conditions there should be no drop in quality. As rounds across the estate will be maintain the overall quality will actually improve.
c. Productivity: you can gain as much as 74% in productivity
d. Bush Health: Maintenance Foliage (MF) requirement and it’s addition changes, as harvesting is non selective and so no additional leaf is left on the table by default. Do not let Maintenance Foliage become inadequate. In case it looks inadequate because of whatever reason (drought / pest / disease / stress) make it up by giving the additional layer of foliage.
2. We need to understand what types of Harvesters there are which can be sourced?
Then decide which types suit your requirements the best.
Here are some harvesters being used across the world:
A Mechanical Harvesters –
i. Single man operated (Reciprocating blade)
ii. 2 man held (Reciprocating blade )
iii. Wheel mounted (Rotary cutter) (synchrony between rotor r.p.m. and surface speed.
iv. Track mounted (Williams) T-3000
v. Rail track mounted, as in Japan. Fully automated.
vi. Magic carpet (Williams) T-1500
vii. Some small hand-held battery operated machines
B SMH (Semi mechanical harvesters or Shears)
i) Flat shears
ii) Step-shears
These different harvesters also have different blade sizes to suit your different needs & plant spacing, etc.
3. Which types are suitable for which terrain / conditions? What has a bearing on this is the slope of the land, plant spacing, firmness of the plucking table, height of the bushes, type of clone/seed, soil type, availability of workers, etc. The importance of the correct selection of harvesters can not be overstressed. It could make or break your harvesting. There are also some poor quality harvesters that have come in and attracted the ones who want to try harvesting. First we need harvesters that give you good clean cuts, good productivity and are reliable. The price comes in much later as without these, your harvesting will anyway fail. Unfortunately these cheap models – i) give a poor cut & so will give poorer quality & lesser crop, ii) consume higher fuel, iii) have a shorter working life. First time users often use these machines without any training and the results put them off harvesting & with their experience and little knowledge they pass this opinion onto others.
4. How do we use them in different conditions and for different needs? And how do we adapt them to suit our specific requirements. Which prunes/unpruneds to take up, which clones/seeds are best suited, should sections have shade trees, are drains a problem, does nutrition need to change, when should harvesting start for which prunes,…
5. Wage structure:– we have worked out an incentive system that ensures that there is :
a. share in gains by the machine operators & company (the workers should have the potential to earn at least 30% higher than hand pluckers)
b. recovery of cost of investment
c. recovery of the cost of fuel
It is crucial that it must be a win-win for the workers & company.

Methodology: How do we plan on harvesting.
1. First evaluate the extent of labour shortage you have for the estate’s smooth functioning & how it changes over the season.
2. Decide on the type & numbers of harvesters you require. Remember you need to keep 10 to 15% stand-bys.
3. Select the sections you want to put under harvesting: take into consideration the prune, clone, plant spacing, plucking table compactness & height,… Ensure that the Maintenance Foliage is healthy & adequate.
4. Train your teams for Maintenance (also preventive) and for Operating the harvesters. There must be enough people trained, so that even when some are sick/absent, you have harvesters running on schedule by trained workers. In most cases where these harvesters were put into use because of poor/no training
a. the machines repeatedly broke down
b. there was not sufficient incentive for the operators to run the machines efficiently
c. the training on maintenance was so inadequate that the repeated break-downs made companies scrap the machines and condemn MH as a failure.

5. Select a team/estate that really wants to do harvesting. Give them good machines and good training. Plan on ‘Target shoot’ (TS) and then let them work out the Harvest Interval (HI) for their estate, in their conditions. TS tells you when to harvest and this would change the HI as growth rate changes with the season progressing. Then decide on Intensity of Harvesting (IoH) – this shows you what level to harvest at.

6. Glossary of terms: As more and more estates get onto harvesting we need to sort out the terminology so that we know exactly what the others are talking about and that we are comparing apples with apples. Some of the terms used in point 5 above are an indication of what we use.

There are some exciting innovations which I have worked out that are giving tremendous results. Here are a few examples to give you a taste of them:
1. Uni-directional plucking (UdP) – every row is plucked in the same direction every time. This is helping in the MF flattening out & so reducing the cut leaf and improving quality.
2. Increase in Productivity: The 2-man operated harvesters leave out the shade line completely. Thus their movement is fast and area coverage is more. The shade lines are harvested by Single-man operated harvesters.
3. The new wage structure: it is simple, effective, economical and acceptable to both the Company and the worker. In many cases the wrong introduction has put paid to harvesting.

It is time for the industry to recognize the extent of this problem, the loss it is causing to crop & quality and address it by looking at the current best option- ‘Mechanical Harvesting’. We need to recognize that things around us have changed.
Change is a door that can only be opened from the inside – Terry Neill (Anderson consultants)