Agricultural Machinery is Expected to Promote the Natural Rubber Industry’s Sustainable Development

Natural rubber is a global bulk industrial raw material with dual attributes of industrial products and agricultural products. It is listed as the four major industrial raw materials alongside petroleum, steel and coal. It is an indispensable strategic material for national defense and economic construction. For a long time, the global natural rubber tapping production has completely relied on manual labor. However, due to the environmental temperature, air humidity and other factors of the rubber forest, the increase of rubber output is seriously restricted. According to statistics, in my country, more than 50% of the rubber trees have been abandoned and cut to a certain extent due to the reduction of rubber tapping workers. In addition, irregular rubber tapping such as barbaric operations can easily lead to a large number of bark necrosis, which seriously affects the sustainable development of the natural rubber industry.

Therefore, there is an urgent need for mechanization of natural rubber production to solve the shortage of rubber workers faced by the natural rubber industry, low production efficiency and high cost of winter pipe manual operations.

In March last year, the National Natural Rubber Industry Technology System Production Mechanization Post and Zhanjiang Comprehensive Test Station jointly carried out on-site training on the mechanized fertilization technology for hilly rubber gardens - 2FH-L small crawler remote control rubber garden ditching and fertilizing machine. and experimental demonstrations. The test results show that the 2FH-L small crawler-type remote control rubber garden ditching and fertilizer applicator has a pure working hour productivity of 5.09 mu/hour, a shift hourly productivity of 2.93 mu/hour, and a fuel consumption of 3.05 yuan/mu. The efficiency is increased by about 2 times, and the operating cost is reduced by about 20%. The small crawler-type remote-controlled rubber garden ditching and fertilizing machine can complete the ditching, fertilizing, and soil covering operations at one time, and can remotely monitor the operation in real time. The operation effect has been unanimously recognized by the rubber workers and farm managers.