About Tropical Agricultural Machinery Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences

Tropical Agricultural Machinery Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences

The Tropical Agricultural Machinery Research Institute, known by the abbreviation TAMRI, is a research institute of the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences (CATAS) based in Zhanjiang, Guangdong Province. Founded in 1959, it is the academy's comprehensive research institute for tropical agricultural engineering: the organisation that designs, tests and standardises the machines used to grow, harvest and first-process tropical crops in China's south. Its official profile describes it as specialised in the technology development and experiment and demonstration of tropical agricultural equipment, in the standardisation of tropical agricultural machinery, and in quality control and inspection. Tropical farming poses machinery problems that temperate-zone equipment does not solve — clearing land planted with rubber trees, harvesting sugarcane, cassava and sisal, extracting fibre from pineapple leaves, processing coffee and coconut — and TAMRI is the national institute assigned to solve them. It has six research sections and four innovation platforms, offers two master's programmes in cooperation with universities, and records 120 main research achievements, including two National Science and Technology Progress Awards.

Foundation in 1959 and place within CATAS

TAMRI was founded in 1959 in Zhanjiang, five years after the creation in 1954 of the South China Special Forestry Research Institute from which the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences descends. The academy — China's only national institution for tropical agricultural research, administered and financed by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, and renamed CATAS in 1994 — works from three campus centres at Haikou, Danzhou and Zhanjiang; TAMRI is part of the Zhanjiang centre, at No. 3 Huxiu Road, Zhanjiang, Guangdong 524091. Its founding at the end of the 1950s coincided with the state-farm development of China's tropical south, when large areas of Hainan and southern Guangdong and Yunnan were being planted with rubber and other strategic tropical crops and the new farms needed land-clearing and cultivation machinery suited to tropical conditions. The institute's earliest recorded products belong to that era: its faculty developed tractor-mounted tree rooters, land clearing machines and hole borers, and some of its machinery was exported to aid African countries, with many products winning awards from the Ministry of State Farms and Land Reclamation, the ministry then responsible for the state farm system.

Structure: six research sections and four innovation platforms

The institute is organised into six research sections, supported by four innovation platforms named in its official profile. Among the platforms are the Sub-center of the State Engineering and Technology Research Center for Key Tropical Crops, the Quality Supervision and Testing Center for Tropical Crops Machinery of the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Pilot Plant of Pineapple Leaf Fiber Processing under the Ministry of Agriculture. The combination is characteristic of the institute's function: a research core, a state engineering sub-centre that turns research into deployable technology, a ministry testing centre that supervises the quality of tropical crop machinery in service, and a pilot plant where a specific technology — extracting textile fibre from pineapple leaves, a residue otherwise burned or left to rot — is proven at production scale. Its two disciplinary focus areas, as stated in its profile, are Agricultural Mechanization Engineering and the Recycling of Solid Wastes from the tropical agriculture production process, pairing the machinery of production with the machinery of waste recovery.

Research areas and priorities

TAMRI's stated aim is to build a comprehensive agricultural machinery research institute focused on modern tropical agricultural equipment. Its research covers the mechanisation of tropical agriculture, the preliminary processing of tropical agricultural products, the comprehensive utilisation of tropical agricultural wastes, and the standardisation, quality control and inspection of tropical agricultural machinery. It undertakes basic research, applied basic research and applied technology research, and also carries responsibility for personnel training, technical training and science and technology extension in tropical agricultural machinery, providing technical support for the mechanisation of tropical agriculture across the country. Within that remit, its published research priorities are sugarcane production mechanisation; tropical agricultural field machinery; tropical agricultural product processing equipment; rural energy equipment for tropical areas; tropical fibres and fibre products; marine fisheries and animal husbandry machinery; and standardisation, quality control and inspection for tropical crops machinery. Sugarcane stands first in that list because it is one of the largest and most labour-intensive of China's tropical crops, concentrated in Guangxi and Guangdong, and historically harvested almost entirely by hand.

Machinery for tropical crops: rubber, sisal, sugarcane and cassava

The institute's 120 main achievements map onto the crop list of China's tropical agriculture. They cover the research, development and demonstration of machinery for land reclamation in tropical areas; natural rubber machinery; sisal machinery; sugarcane machinery; cassava machinery; processing machinery for coffee, coconut and pepper; and machinery for the recycling and comprehensive utilisation of the field trash of sugarcane, pineapple and banana. Each crop imposes its own engineering problem. Rubber production requires tapping and latex-handling equipment suited to smallholder and plantation conditions. Sisal, a hard-fibre crop, requires decortication machinery to strip fibre from leaf. Cassava roots must be dug without excessive damage or soil contamination. Sugarcane requires planters, harvesters and trash-handling machines that can work in the small, sloping fields typical of southern China rather than the vast flat plantations for which Australian or Brazilian harvesters are designed. The named products in the institute's record illustrate the range: the WSL-900 root-digging and subsoiling machine and the W80C hole borer belong to land preparation, while the sugarcane trash shattering machine belongs to the residue-management line of its work.

Processing equipment and waste utilisation

A second strand of the institute's work is the equipment of first processing and waste recovery. Its faculty has developed series of technologies and equipment for the wet processing of coffee — the pulping, fermenting and washing steps that determine coffee quality; for the comprehensive utilisation of pineapple leaves; for sugarcane trash shattering; for cassava harvesting; for the dry anaerobic fermentation of solid wastes, a biogas technology suited to farm residues; for palm oil extraction and processing; for macadamia nut processing; and for the comprehensive utilisation of banana leaf stalks. The pineapple work is the most distinctive: the institute operates the ministry's pilot plant for pineapple leaf fibre processing and has developed a series of pineapple leaf fibre textiles, converting a bulky field residue into a textile raw material. This strand embodies the institute's second disciplinary focus, the recycling of solid wastes from tropical agricultural production, and connects its machinery research to the circular-economy goals that CATAS pursues across its institutes.

Recent development work: the manure and biogas slurry applicator

The institute's recent public record shows the same pattern applied to new problems. In July 2022 CATAS reported that a small-scale manure and biogas slurry deep application and returning machine, jointly developed by TAMRI's sugarcane mechanisation team and the dry farming new material team of the academy's South Asia institute, had been successfully tested in Zhanjiang and delivered to the Zhanjiang Zhengda Group for use. The machine addresses a disposal problem of intensive livestock farming: manure and biogas slurry discharged directly onto farmland pollutes it, while returning the material deep into the soil fertilises it. After more than a year of collaborative research, the team designed key components including a deep plough, a quick hitch device, a liquid extraction system, a liquid drainage device and a suspension transmission system, producing a machine suited to the small plots of southern China. Combined with an agricultural machinery information monitoring system, it can remotely monitor, in real time, the depth of soil loosening and the area returned, making the fertilisation operation itself a monitored, data-recorded process. The project is a compact example of the institute's method: a defined production problem, a purpose-built machine, field testing in Zhanjiang, and delivery to an operating farm enterprise.

Standards, testing and training

TAMRI's third function, after research and development, is the governance of machinery quality. Through the Ministry of Agriculture's Quality Supervision and Testing Center for Tropical Crops Machinery, it performs quality supervision and testing of tropical crop machinery, and its achievement record includes the formulation of more than thirty industrial standards for the sector. Standards and testing are the mechanisms by which one institute's research becomes an industry's practice: a manufacturer anywhere in China building a cassava harvester or a sisal decorticator works to standards the institute has drafted and can be tested at the institute's centre. The institute also trains people. It offers two master's programmes — Mechanical Manufacturing and Automation, and Agricultural Mechanization Engineering — through cooperation with universities, and its mandate includes technical training and extension work that carries mechanisation knowledge to farms and machinery stations in the tropical region. Patents form part of the same record: its profile records more than fifty patents in one summary and more than sixty granted patents in its achievements section, alongside more than thirty provincial and ministerial science and technology progress awards in addition to its two national awards.

Record of achievement and significance

The institute summarises its record as 120 main achievements, two National Science and Technology Progress Awards, more than thirty provincial and ministerial science and technology progress awards, more than sixty granted patents and more than thirty industrial standards formulated. Those numbers describe an applied engineering institute rather than a publication-led one: its products are machines, standards and test results. Its significance lies in the sector it serves. China's tropical agriculture — rubber, sugarcane, cassava, sisal, tropical fruit and spice and beverage crops — is grown in some of the country's poorest rural regions, where rising labour costs have made mechanisation the condition of survival for industries such as sugar and natural rubber, yet where terrain and farm size rule out simply importing machinery designed for other continents. TAMRI, from its base on Huxiu Road in Zhanjiang, is the institution charged with closing that gap: designing the machines, writing their standards, testing them for the ministry, and training the engineers who will design the next generation.