Bright Coop started providing live poultry handling equipment in 1951. Over the years, Bright has continued to innovate in providing effective equipment that transports birds from the farm to the shackle in the most humane and cost-effective way possible.
“The uniqueness of the Bright Coop/Humane-Aire CAS System for chickens, is that it utilizes equipment that customers are already familiar with, but has new design features and improvements that produce a safe, consistent and genuinely humane handling of birds (no live bird handling) into the plant,” says Clem Russell, president and CEO of Bright Coop Inc.
The traditional method of getting birds from the house floor into the cage to be transported, also known as chicken catching, involves an intense amount of human labor. Bright Coop offers an alternative that furthers humane handling from beginning to end. The Apollo Generation 2 harvesting machine gently lifts birds from the house floor to the cages. Rough terrain forklifts can then load and offload cages to and from the recently designed Viking curtain side transport trailers.
Bright Coop Inc. subsidiary, Viking Specialized Trailers LLC, manufactures the Viking Poultry Curtain Sided Trailer to provide a significantly more comfortable ride to the plant, another method of furthering the humane handling goal.
“In hot weather environments, a Cline Coop Fan Trailer can be provided by Bright Coop Inc. that allows dampened cooled air to evenly flow through the entire load while awaiting the load to be completed, secured and readied for transport,” Russell says.
Bright’s cage and unloading systems maintain a certain standard and a basic componentry for the industry, but equipment can be arranged or modified to fit the layout of a specific plant. Several factors such as line speed, bird size, access and others determine the final design of the system. All things considered, systems are ultimately custom designed to suit particular plant requirements.
“The equipment layout is larger than the standard manual Bright Coop unloader, but the flexibility of the equipment will allow us to setup different layouts to fit the requirements of the customer,” according to Geertman.
Bright Coop’s long history in poultry handling and transportation has seen its equipment become the standard in a majority of US plants. Initial conversations regarding layout at particular locations are often assisted by drawings and records that Bright has on file, and with any new installation of live animal technology, the support of consultants and technicians is a critical part of the investment.
