Meat+Poultry - June 2019 - 25

labor. Prestage Foods of Iowa, the Prestage
family, Epstein, Null and his team have taken
the largest collection of meat processing
technology and built a state-of-the-art facility
around it.
The animals come from lairage consulted
on by Temple Grandin and enter the elevator
to be lowered into the pit for COၷ stunning.
To save water and put less heat and stress on
the animals' skin, Prestage Foods uses vertical
scalding. This also keeps the animal cleaner
as the water is filtered, as well as not using a
common bath.
On the kill floor of the plant, large Mareldesigned robots open the carcasses with an
efficiency and consistency impossible for
humans to duplicate. Every time the arm opens
an animal the blade needs to be sanitized. Each
robotic arm carries two sets of blades and
breakers. The arm spins the just-used blade
back into a housing for automated clean-inplace sanitation, while another blade comes
out of the housing sanitized and ready to open
the next carcass in line.
The animal moves to the next station
where robotic arms automatically drop the
head. Newer to the industry are robotic split
saws. One of the harder and more dangerous
jobs on the floor, the automatic split saw
removes the need for a person to perform this
demanding task.
"These are all based on vision. High-speed
cameras take pictures of the animals and tell
the computer exactly where to go down and
then the robotic arm goes down and does the
task and finishes up," Null says.
At the end of the kill and split, automatic
touch-free controls load carcasses onto the
cooler rails. No handprints on pigs and no
bacteria spreading from pig to pig by human
hands creates a consistently cleaner and higher
quality meat.
On the cut floor, vision assist ensures
accuracy on ham and shoulder cut off.
High-speed imagery of the carcass informs
the saw and instructs it to move back and
forth accordingly. The saw then cuts the
meat consistently and perfectly every time,
something a human and a laser light is unable
to do.
"Automatic loin pullers, automatic rib
pullers, which are very new in the industry,
and water jet cutting on bellies, the industry is

moving in that direction," Null says. "So, quite
a few vision assisted machines on the cut and
the kill that are making either high precision
cuts or taking away a very laborious and
dangerous job."
For Prestage Foods' customers, the
automation and technology provide a
consistency and uniformity of finished product.
This consistency helps the plant's customers
create higher yields from a more dependable
and uniform product.
"That's what you sell the customer,"
Null says.
For the plant itself, attracting labor is
more difficult than it was in the past, and
robots don't have bad days or miss work.
Facilities still need labor, but now they
need maintenance personnel with two-year
electronics degrees, machine operators and
engineers rather than people with just a
strong back.
"A plant built in the late 1980s doing
the same thing this plant would do, would
probably have 200 more people in it than this
plant," Null says. "That's the labor savings of
better design, better automation, better flow.
A lot of that is these robots, but a lot of that is
also that we've learned just to build a better
design through the plant."

The new Prestage facility
contains over five miles
of conveyor belting.

FORWARD PROGRESS
As of April 3, Prestage Foods of Iowa employed
638 people and killed approximately 3,500
head a day. Null projects to steadily increase
production by 200 to 300 head per week until
the plant reaches 10,000 head per day on a first
shift. As production numbers go up, so does
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