Surveys of harvest technology of winter bamboo shoots

Winter bamboo shoots are widely used in Asian cuisine. We surveyed growth depth (tail depth and root depth), harvest speed, and harvest processes to provide information for developing new harvest technology. The tail depth of most winter bamboo shoots was 100–350 mm below the soil surface, and the root depth was 200–500 mm below the soil surface. Most winter bamboo shoots were difficult to locate with only the naked eye. The digging depth was 200–500 mm to cut winter bamboo shoots from the root. The highest harvest rate was 7.75 times faster than the slowest one and the average harvest speed ratio of men: women was about 1.71:1. The harvest process of winter bamboo shoots was divisible into three steps: searching, digging a hole (around the shoot) and cutting the root. The ratio of searching time to the sum of digging and cutting time was about 8:1, showing that searching required more time than digging and cutting together.