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Abstract. In the process of sugarcane harvesting, tops are cut off by the topper and directly thrown into the field. A small percentage of sugarcane tops are picked and collected to feed livestock. Therefore, it is meaningful to develop an effective sugarcane top chopper which is used to harvest tops before sugarcane stalk harvesting. In this study, a sugarcane top chopping platform was fabricated to investigate critical parameters, such as cutting speed (CS), top feeding speed (FS), and cutting drum gap (DG) on the machine performance. In the chopping test, three single factor experiments and one orthogonal experiment were carried out. The single factor test was analyzed to examine the influence trend of CS, FS and DG on the chopping performance. Through the variance analysis of the orthogonal test, the influence significance of each factor on the evaluation index was obtained, and the optimal parameter combination was determined to improve the chopping performance and economic benefits. The relationships between chopping performance and three critical factors were examined and analyzed to provide a theoretical basis for sugarcane top chopper design and development.