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Sophisticated software systems are automating product grades, logistics and traceability.
VIDEO IMAGE ANALYSIS SYSTEMS, robots and live animal tracking tags are coming to a plant near you, if they haven't already.
Software systems are enabling meat- and poultry-processing operations to largely automate their inventory management, logistics and product traceability today. Although some technologies may not be new - they are simply improvements upon existing software - today's software systems are certainly streamlining paperwork and reducing physical labor at protein-processing plants.
"A lot of companies are trying to extract more value out of everything that goes through their plants, whether it's individual worker yields or tracking carcasses," says Marcine Moldenhauer, president and owner, Meat-Link Management LLC, based in Wichita, Kan. "They need to understand what's going on at the plant at every step of the way."
Perhaps the biggest hot-button technology today is the use of video image analysis systems to grade carcasses by applying the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) traditional standards.
"Sophisticated software allows companies to use images to assess the visible lean from fat meat, and determine the product's marbling score and yield characteristics, therefore predicting the approximate yield value of the carcass," says Dale Woerner, Ph.D., assistant professor, Department of Animal Sciences, Colorado State University, based in Fort Collins, Colo.
By taking the images and data and putting them into a mathematical or statistical model, this software develops an algorithm that will predict yield and cut-ability, making predictions on the types of cuts best-suited to each unique carcass, says Woerner.
He notes that the pork industry has been more innovative than the beef industry with...