Silver Fern Farms will spend $10 million over the next year introducing a Dunedin-developed X-ray grading system to its six lamb-processing plants.
The technology is seen as a key step in what its Dunedin developers say could, within five years, be a fully-automated lamb-processing system.
Scott Technology chief executive Chris Hopkins said that previously, decisions about how the lamb was to be processed were made on the chain.
But the MVTS X-ray system provided a 3D image from which those decisions could be made more accurately.
A driver for developing an automated process plant was the health and safety issues around knives and band saws.
Also, attracting staff to work in an industry often situated in small centres was a problem, he said.
The technology was developed by Robotics Technologies Ltd, a joint venture of SFF and Scott Technology.
SFF chief executive Keith Cooper said the technology was another step towards the introduction of more robots working on the lamb processing chain.
So far, there was technology to make three primal cuts to the carcass - leg, middle and shoulders - but Robotics Technologies was developing tools to further process the forequarter and middle parts of the lamb.
By better targeting the cuts to market, Mr Cooper expected lamb to be worth $2 to $5 a head more to suppliers.
At present, carcasses were streamed according to the markets being supplied at the time.
That meant valuable cuts could be sold for too little, a situation the new technology should help avoid.
SFF had launched a "plate to pasture" programme which aimed to provide customers with the product they wanted when they wanted it.
The new technology was another part of that programme.
Mr Cooper said other companies had introduced technology but the X-ray went further.
However, providing information such as the weight of each primal cut and the number of ribs in each lamb could differ from 13 to 15.
Farmers would be provided with information on their lamb from which they could make breeding and feeding decisions.
The next stage would be the addition of technology, which could predict the meat-to-fat-to-bone ratio of each lamb before it was processed, he said.
