FORT MORGAN — Industries of all sizes may be automating, but industrial cattle slaughter is still a hands-on job.
And Cargill thinks it can take some of the challenge out of the work for their employees, with a new artificial intelligence tool created through the company’s Factory of the Future initiative that puts more tech into the recipe for commercial beef production success.
Cargill executives say their plant in Fort Morgan processes 4,000 cattle per day, and all of that carving can be hard on employees.
The proficiency with which it’s done also affects the bottom line, says Jarrod Gillig, senior vice president of Cargill’s North American beef business.
Those are just two reasons Cargill has invested $24 million of a projected $90 million in technology upgrades at the Fort Morgan plant, including a computer “visioning” system called CarVe they say will get more meat off every animal while keeping their workers healthier, safer and motivated to work harder.
CarVe works with cameras above a factory production line watching workers and delivering instant feedback on their performance to frontline managers. It’s operating on limited lines in two of Cargill’s eight beef processing plants in the United States and Canada. And it’s getting rave reviews from those managers as well as a worker Cargill provided feedback from for this story.
Cargill says with the U.S. cattle supply at its lowest in years, “even a 1% yield improvement can keep hundreds of millions of pounds of beef in the food system annually, helping amid tight supplies and higher prices.”
And with CarVe cameras capturing everything from the pace at which an employee works to the sharpness of their knife and even their “emotional behavior” influenced by factors on and off the job, once it’s up and running in all of their primary beef facilities they could improve yield enough to produce more than a million additional meals from the cows they slaughter, Cargill says.
Turning a cow into beef
The cows arriving at a Cargill meat processing plant in Fort Morgan take a small army to process.
Once on premises, they’re moved into a single-file chute designed by Temple Grandin, author, inventor and animal science professor at Colorado State University. The chute leads to a center track conveyor belt, which lifts them by the belly and carries them to a person in charge of shooting an 8-inch-long retractable bolt into their skull, knocking them unconscious before giving them brain damage and rendering them brain dead, said Kaitlyn Gill, food safety quality and regulatory manager at the Fort Morgan plant. Those practices and the following are included in the USDA’s Humane Methods of Slaughter Act.
The animal’s carotid arteries are then cut, it’s hung upside down so its blood drains out and another crew steps in to skin it. And when that’s done, hundreds of Cargill employees per day get to work carving and cutting a thousand pounds of animal into ribeyes, sirloins, flank steaks and burger.
But those cows are in far fewer supply than they were five years ago, says Kenton Oschner, executive director of the Colorado Beef Council, whose mission is to create demand for beef through promotion, education and research.
“We’re at record-low cattle numbers based on a drought that started several years ago,” he said. “That affected a huge part of the U.S. and made it so producers had to sell. And they haven’t rebuilt their herds, meaning they haven’t added younger females to produce more calves since around 2020.”
Yet American consumer demand for beef is record-high, and in the last couple of years, there have been record prices for cattle, he said. “And that makes it really hard from a producer’s standpoint not to say, ‘If I can get this much even for cull cows or calves instead of keeping heifers in the herd, I can sell them off and get more money without feeding extras.’ So it’s been a culmination of a number of events that have caused us to be where we are now,” which is having a low number of cattle going to packing plants, leading to a slowing of the beef production industry.
Fallouts have included Tyson deciding to permanently close its Lexington, Nebraska, beef processing facility this coming January and Greeley-based JBS, the world’s largest beef-processing plant, permanently closing its Los Angeles facility this coming February. “But on the flip side, we’re producing more beef per pound than we have in a long time, because during COVID, packing plants lost workers who could harvest cattle, and producers kept feeding them,” leading to larger animals with higher percentages of muscle and body fat, which creates prime quality cuts that consumers love, Ochsner said.
So high cattle prices + high beef demand + low cattle supply = Cargill’s imperative to create technology that can get as much meat off of every carcass as possible.
CarVe in action
Cargill isn’t the only processing giant to implement big changes to optimize operations and address labor challenges, however. By 2020, many were converting to automation, robotics and digital analytics.
But Cargill was further along than other plants when COVID hit and those plants had to back burner some of their projects. Parts of Cargill’s Factory of the Future program were launched even as the cattle supply started to get wonky.
In the years since, they’ve deployed smart saws, foreign object detection technology, automated package handling and early warning systems to sense equipment failures, safety risks and operational anomalies before they become major problems. There are more than 100 Factory of the Future projects across 35 Cargill protein-processing facilities in North America.
But CarVe focuses on people, and the “gamification” element of it is “truly a game changer,” said Ron Logan, Cargill’s slaughter manager. It can spot specific weaknesses on a given fabrication line so that instead of calling out every worker when something goes wrong, a manager can zero in on an individual employee and give them real-time coaching.
It can also capture an employee doing a great job and incite manager praise, which “sustains consistent workmanship” and improves efficiency across the value chain, Logan said. And on a break, an employee can check their place on a digital performance scoreboard, which can be an instant morale boost or incentive to work harder depending on the score.
Execs also believe CarVe will “stop sending injured people to the hospital” due to one-time injuries like cuts from the knives they use for carving, or repetitive-motion issues from things like moving “the equivalent of a brick 10,000 times in a day,” day in and day out, as Brad Down, Cargill’s case-ready protein operations manager at several U.S. facilities, put it.
“But this is not about Big Brother watching,” Gillig said. “This is about being productive in the best environment we can for our food safety. We’ve proactively engaged with union leadership to explain the scope of CarVe — what the tool is and what it is not — and to ensure clarity around how it will be used. Our commitment is that CarVe is a coaching and training tool, not a disciplinary one.”
The employees on the fabrication line at the Fort Morgan plant were mostly smiles when Logan and other leadership gave a tour in early December. And Steve Rodriguez, who started out on the line and worked his way up to operations superintendent managing daily production, safety and operation goals, said, “I wish we’d had (CarVe) 20 years ago.”