A southern dairy sector investor once confided that the problem with the meat industry was the size of the car parks outside a meat processing works.
He was making a less than subtle observation about the large number of people required to turn a live lamb, cattle beast or deer into cuts of meat and by-products.
Meat processing has traditionally been the domain of hard men with sharp knives, each contributing to the gradual breaking down of a carcass.
But a change is in the wind.
Dunedin company Scott Technology believes it can fully automate the lamb cutting room within five years, adapting its appliance production line knowledge and expertise to cutting up prime animals.
Scott managing director Chris Hopkins said the technology was not trying to replace meat workers with robots, but about improving and integrating the whole production line process.
"It's not about task replacement. It's about automating the process," he said.
Some jobs involving band saws were dangerous, while with others, new technology and equipment helped improve the quality, accuracy of cuts and quantity of meat recovered.
Scott Technology specialised in manufacturing appliance assembly lines but, in 2001, Mr Hopkins said they realised they needed to broaden the business.
The diversification strategy reduced reliance on the North American appliance market. After meeting PPCS former chief executive Stewart Barnett, Mr Hopkins came to the realisation the meat industry was a good candidate for automated production lines.
The result was the creation of Robotic Technologies Ltd (RTL), a 50:50 joint venture between the two Dunedin companies.
Mr Hopkins said Scott's expertise was automated production lines, so it did not want to replace individual work stations on a meat chain with machines.
Because the company approached the meat industry without preconceived ideas or baggage, Mr Hopkins said it had a fresh perspective on the task.
"We came in basically with a blank sheet."
PPCS, now Silver Fern Farms (SFF), saw the possibility of introducing an automated process that would recover more saleable meat while also resolving an industry problem of finding enough staff to work in plants, especially in rural areas.
Mr Hopkins gave the example of using a bandsaw to cut a carcass into three primal cuts.
In a plant processing one million lambs, the two 1mm-wide band saw cuts needed to make the cuts equated to 2km of meat wasted each season.
Because Scott developed robots which used knives, there was less waste and less meat pulp from the bandsaw blotting the appearance of the remaining carcass.
One of Scott's first developments was an automated process to bone out the aitchbone in a lamb's hindquarters, a process that has allowed the recovery of 130g of meat per carcass that previously ended up as lower-value product.
This week, Scott released its MVTS X-ray grading system, which produced a 3D image of a carcass, similar to a CT scan, which identified the ideal place for the automated primal cutting of each individual carcass.
The MVTS also predicted the weight of each of those three primal cuts - leg, middle and shoulder - and counted the number of ribs in each lamb.
The X-ray machine can take 40 carcass images a minute and compiles 3-D models from which the ideal cutting programme for each carcass can be determined, according to the market requirements.
Mr Hopkins said no two lamb carcasses were the same, and the X-ray information allowed the automated system to accommodate that variability, such as that found with ribs.
Ribs were traditionally cut into groups of four and sold as French racks, but Scott found 18% of lambs had either more or fewer than the acknowledged count of 13 ribs.
This created processing difficulties, resulting in waste. The MVTS scan identified lambs with odd numbers and altered its process to minimise waste.
Some markets wanted the white vertebrate cartilage showing on lamb chops. To do that manually was slow, laborious and labour intensive, but Mr Hopkins said using MVTS technology, the cartilage could be exposed automatically.
"It's that sort of accuracy that we can get."
Mr Hopkins said the key in automating meat production lines was having an image of the whole carcass.
Initially, they looked at cameras which gave an external view and ultrasound, but after talking to people in the medical industry, surgeons and the University of Otago, realised X-ray was the most suitable technology.
Scotts bought X-ray components from suppliers around the world and built the units and employed three in-house computer programmers to write the software.
Mr Hopkins said the next step was to automate with rotary knives the boning of the middle section of the carcass - the cross-cut, flap removal and split the vertebrate, and with the forequarter, the removal of the knuckle-tip, neck chops, shank and brisket.
While prototypes might work in an engineering workshop, Mr Hopkins said it had to be robust enough to deal with 10 lambs a minute and also handle a perishable product.
"There is enormous production pressure," he said.
Some new machines would be trialled at the SFF plant Finegand in South Otago next season while the MVTS units would be installed at SFF plants at Finegand, Pareora (near Timaru) and Takapau, in Hawkes Bay, this winter.
Technology also had to provide a return for the investment, and Mr Hopkins said new technology to date was returning at least $2 a carcass through higher yields.
Meat company management calculated those returns could be closer to $5 a lamb.
