At the Qianmu Mechanized Tea Plantation in Samaba, Gengma County, intelligent tea-picking equipment and drones are now working in tandem across the mountainous terrain.
During the autumn tea harvest season, a range of new tea garden machinery has debuted at the Samaba Qianmu Mechanized Tea Plantation in Mengsa Town, Gengma Dai and Wa Autonomous County. Weeding machines maneuver nimbly across the sloping fields, crop protection drones evenly spray treatments from above, intelligent tea pickers precisely harvest fresh leaves, and robotic dogs handle inspection and transport duties.
This scene epitomizes Yunnan's tea industry transition from experience-based practices to data-driven operations, and from manual labor to machine automation. Facing the dual pressures of rural labor shortages and escalating labor costs, the province is leveraging full-process mechanization across cultivation, planting, management, harvesting, and transportation to accelerate the industry's high-quality development.
The "Sweat Agriculture" Dilemma: Who Will Pick the Tea?
According to a provincial agricultural and rural affairs department official, over 90% of Yunnan's tea gardens are located in hilly and mountainous regions where fragmented plots, steep slopes, and narrow paths make tea cultivation, management, picking, and transport heavily reliant on manual labor. The industry universally struggles with an aging workforce, significant labor gaps, rising costs, substandard operational consistency, and low utilization rates for summer and autumn tea harvests. The shortage of suitable mountain-adapted machinery and the weak commercialization of research outcomes have become major bottlenecks to improving tea quality and scaling production.
Lincang, a core tea-producing region in Yunnan renowned as the "Tea Capital of the World" and "Capital of Black Tea," relies on the tea industry as a pillar for consolidating poverty alleviation achievements and advancing rural revitalization. However, more than 80% of its tea gardens sit on mountainous slopes with fragmented plots and poor road access, making the problems of "no machinery available, no good machinery available, and machinery difficult to use" especially acute.
Under traditional labor models, tea pruning, pest control, and picking depend heavily on manual effort. This clashes with the growing market demand for high-quality, standardized tea products, while skilled tea garden managers become increasingly hard to find. A single worker can only harvest about one mu of tea per day, yielding roughly 50 kilograms of fresh leaves—labor-intensive and inefficient. Pruning is particularly taxing: one person can complete at most one mu daily, which is not only time-consuming but also lacks uniformity, directly impacting the quality and yield of the following spring tea.
Given the intensifying labor shortage and soaring costs, the mechanized transformation of Yunnan's tea industry has become an urgent necessity. In recent years, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, along with domestic universities, research institutes, and agricultural machinery enterprises, have persistently developed tea garden equipment. From soil preparation, pest control, and pruning to mechanized picking and drone-based fresh leaf transport, a suite of lightweight, intelligent machinery tailored to Yunnan's mountainous conditions has been introduced, providing technical support to resolve labor challenges and fill mechanization gaps.
Taking Machinery to the Hills: Deep Integration of Machinery and Agronomy
Solving the mechanization puzzle in mountainous regions hinges on the dual alignment of "machinery suited to the land" and "land suited to machinery." A recent demonstration event for the research, promotion, and application of tea cultivation, planting, management, and harvesting machinery was held in Lincang, unveiling a comprehensive mechanized solution spanning the entire chain from cultivation to delivery.
For land preparation, compact tea garden tractors and handheld hole diggers navigate gentle slopes with ease, addressing the challenge of establishing new tea gardens. During management, electric pruners and inter-row weeding machines deliver several times the efficiency of manual labor, while crop protection drones and agricultural unmanned vehicles make pest and disease control precise and efficient.
At the harvesting stage, alongside conventional electric tea pickers, the intelligent tea combine harvester developed by Kunming University of Science and Technology in collaboration with Zhejiang University became the centerpiece. Using intelligent recognition technology, it accurately identifies tender buds for standardized, precise harvesting. The Zhejiang University project leader noted that this mountain-adapted intelligent harvesting equipment integrates canopy profiling detection, slope-adaptive travel, and integrated picking and sorting functions. It performs real-time bud screening and grading during operations, effectively tackling industry pain points such as labor shortages, high work intensity, rising costs, and inconsistent manual grading. The equipment has entered field trials in Lincang tea gardens and holds strong potential for industrial promotion.
The efficiency and economic gains from mechanization are striking. In Mengman Town, Menghai County, a tea picker covers three mu daily, collecting 400 kilograms of fresh leaves—eight times the output of manual picking. Mechanized tea gardens yield up to two tons of fresh leaves per mu annually, far exceeding the 800 kilograms from manual management, and daily tea farmer income can jump from 150 yuan to 800 yuan. In Wenquan Town, Changning County, mechanized autumn pruning boosts efficiency fivefold while saving roughly 800 yuan per mu.
Timely Policy Support: Innovative Subsidies Break Down Barriers
The adoption of new technology depends on supportive policies. To address the "no machinery available, no good machinery available" challenge in Yunnan's plateau mountain regions, the provincial agricultural and rural affairs department, together with financial and scientific departments, issued the "Several Measures to Support Agricultural Machinery Research, Promotion, and Application" and the "Pilot Subsidy Plan" in 2026 to boost tea machinery adoption.
These policies explicitly include tea-specific machinery in key subsidy categories. Notably, new products that are highly innovative and applicable but not yet covered by central fiscal subsidies receive fixed subsidies from provincial funds, with subsidy rates up to 30% of average sales prices. This measure significantly lowers the barrier to machinery ownership for tea farmers and business entities.
Additionally, the policies encourage research institutes and agricultural machinery enterprises to form joint research teams, focusing on breakthroughs in lightweight, efficient machinery for hilly and mountainous areas, aiming to resolve the industry's urgent equipment supply from the source.
Mechanization is transforming more than just efficiency—it is reshaping the industry's development model. Simao District has pioneered a four-party collaboration model involving enterprises, foundations, government, and cooperatives. Beyond establishing standardized mechanized picking tea gardens, it focuses on training female machinery operators, ensuring certified, skilled workers so that the benefits of mechanization reach broader groups.
From the "cattle plowing teams" in Gengma County, Lincang, that modify rotary tiller blades to adapt to complex terrain, to the "Party building + enterprise + farmer" interest-sharing mechanism in Mengman Town, Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan's tea industry is achieving significant transformation through mechanization's small breakthroughs.
When intelligent recognition technology meets thousand-year-old ancient tea mountains, when new tea garden machinery works the undulating slopes, and when drones hover over lush, verdant ecological tea gardens, this traditional specialty industry is radiating new vitality and momentum amid the wave of agricultural and rural modernization.