I remember that I forgot to post a story about the Nerada tea plantation on the Atherton Tableland. I wondered how the tea was harvested. The only image in my mind of tea harvesting was of women on the slopes of India hand picking the crop. The neat hedge-like clip of these fields assured me this was not the case here.
The photo below of the video display shows how it's done.
The informational display says the best tea comes from the top shoots. Hand pluckers can pick 40 or 50 kilos a day. With shears a plucker can do about 150 kilos a day. A Japanese developed hand shearer can do about 300 kilos a day per person but it is hard to control the depth of the cut. The machine above is Australian developed and can do 45 tonnes in a single shift, of tea as good as hand plucking.
That is interesting. I had never contemplated how tea is harvested here.
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