Cargill depends on its people and their skills to keep automation maintained and in top working order.
Set to stun
CO2 stunning seems to be the wave of the future for many processors of poultry and pork. Some consumer and animal advocate groups have already influenced some companies’ policies to only procure meat from CO2 stunned birds.
“Electric stunning gets a bad rap it seems, but when done properly, you can get very similar results to CO2,” Acosta says. “There’s no doubt about it that a CO2 stunned animal, from a bleed out perspective and potential blood spots in the meat, does a better job than electric, but you can do a really good job with electric stunning if you control your parameters. You can get a really good quality.”
The biggest benefit to CO2 stunning comes in the form of animal handling. “You don’t have a 45-lb. live animal being hung in a shackle manually,” Acosta says. From an ergonomic aspect there are definite benefits, he adds.
Acosta explains the merging of machines and manual tasks involved in turkey processing.
Although the investment to change from electric to CO2 stunning at the facility prices out at over $10 million with infrastructural changes to the building, the Springdale plant has a plan ready to go.
“While both stunning technologies – electrical and controlled atmosphere – are approved for humane stunning of poultry, the recent trend favors the latter for new facilities and when replacing, or upgrading, existing systems at plants,” Acosta says. “Cargill pioneered CAS at its Dayton, Virginia, turkey processing facility and more recently installed a CAS system at its London, Ontario, Canada, broiler chicken harvesting plant. Our goal is to eventually install CAS at our other three US turkey processing facilities as the replacement for electric systems warrants. CAS is a significant investment at each plant, with a minimal return, so the economics must be taken into consideration when making these decisions.”
