This Week On Tower Sector Report - Robotics

This Week On Tower Sector Report - Robotics Monday 25th April 2011 At 8.30pm

This week, TOWER Sector Report travels to the deep South and delves into the exciting and promising new world of robotics in agribusiness with visits to two cutting edge businesses.

Host John Stewart investigates Silver Fern Farmsf Finegand works at Balclutha for a glimpse into a world that could have come straight from the pages of a sci-fi novel.

Fully dressed lamb carcasses come into a cutting room via a highly complex x-ray machine which scans them twice in 3D and sends the data to a set of robots, all with different functions. The robots, swooping and swerving around the carcasses with their deadly knives and saws, carve them into forequarter, saddle and hind quarter before reducing them even further. Then the cuts are on a conveyor belt for boners to trim them into their final form for export.

The Silver Fern Farms venture is a joint venture with Dunedin engineers, Scott Technology, and has been eight years in the making.

Both companies say itis certainly paying off by removing far more bone from the meat than a human trimmer can. And thatis because the highly accurate map of a lamb carcass sent to the robots allows them to capture more meat with accuracy down to a millimetre. There are huge savings in wastage.

John Stewart discovered. not all lambs have 13 ribs. Quite a few have fourteen and the robots are programmed to allow for that when cutting up the lamb.

The data is also sent to farmers so they can adjust their breeding programmes accordingly to encourage the production of fourteen-ribbed lambs. Silver Fern Farms says one driving factor behind the robotic technology is safety for its workers because it drastically reduces the need for boners to use lethal band saws, a common cause of workplace injury. Also, the introduction of automation has not meant job losses. The company needs workers in other departments, where they can be taught new skills. TOWER Sector Report also travelled to Winton in Southland to take a look at a state-of-the-art robotic dairy farm.

The 350 cow operation is run by a Dutch couple, Bill and Janet Overgaauw, who came to New Zealand ten years ago because the opportunities were better than in their homeland with its much smaller herds. They also run another herd of 550 nearby, which are milked conventionally.

Robotic dairying means the cows can wander in whenever they feel ready to be milked, which is generally around once every eight hours. The cows carry a responder around their necks which transmits a huge amount of data into the robotic system through an x-ray they pass under when they come in to be milked. If the cow is not ready, the system detects that and opens a gate to direct her away from the bail and to a water trough.

In all this process, no human hand is involved even when the cups go on the teats . a fascinating process to watch.

John Stewart reports Bill Overgaauwis estimate of cost is a million dollars for the four robotic bails and associated equipment. Itis an investment which has paid off handsomely, with a twenty percent increase in production, which is now up to ten thousand litres a day.

ends

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