Efficiency at Silver Fern Farms' Te Aroha Plant

Silver Fern Farms Te Aroha, the first major beef processing plant to be built in New Zealand for many years, cost $67million and replaced a plant destroyed by fire in December 2010. It is designed to hot bone process manufacturing cows, steers, bulls and heifers.

The new plant is named Te Kaauta, the place to see, hear, speak and prepare food. It was named by local iwi, who were involved in the opening of the plant last December. The building was intended not to look like a meat plant, but to blend in with the mountain behind the plant. From the air its easy to see the carpark designed as a frond, which is part of the Silver Fern Farms brand. Other design features of the grounds include some large concrete fins with “proud”, “partnerships” and “progressive” carved into them.

The plant was designed around energy and water efficiency and a health and safety focus on ergonomics. Processing areas are designed to minimise workstation hazards and the workstations are ergonomically designed to maximise productivity by limiting operator fatigue and discomfort. There’s a new separate viewing area for observing the process and the plant is designed especially to separate vehicles and pedestrians. Through the entire process, the chain area is designed at a height where operators don’t have to bend. In the boning room they have adjustable trimming platforms and there is additional harnessing for those on rise and fall stands and operators working above two meters.

This new plant uses the same consent conditions as the previous plant, but has a 30% greater throughput of product. Instead of increasing consents, Silver Fern Farms wanted to try and make a more efficient plant. That means they use the same energy and water for a 30% greater throughput.

They still have the previous boiler, which is a very small coal boiler and didn’t add any extra thermal capacity for this plant.

The main process in preservation of food for sale is refrigeration. Normally with that refrigeration process, the energy used creates heat which would normally be wasted. Now this waste heat is used to heat all the water requirements up to 65degC.”

To save water they moved from a conventional wash down type system and invested in a pressurised system. Normally conventional systems have a pressure of six Bar, but the new system, which uses less water, takes the water up to the much higher pressure of 25 Bar – it is like a water blaster. They use a lot less water to achieve the same cleaning effect.

In a normal plant, water use is up at around 1800litres/carcase. SFF has reduced water use to between 1100-1400litres/carcase. All the clean stormwater from the roof, defrost water and water from the refrigeration process is recycled, (up to 300 to 400cubic metres a day) and used for cattle and truck washing.

All the plant’s effluent is treated on site. The plant produces the same amount of effluent as a small town, so a significant treatment plan is needed. At the end of the process, the water is collected and treated and put into the recycled water system.

As well as the other efficiencies built into the new plant, processing time per animal has also increased from the previous 120 minutes down to the current 90 minutes.

Production at the new plant is not yet at full capacity as they are still building skills in their team. There is the potential to process more than 1000 animals a day in two shifts.

As part of the design process, the design team looked overseas at best practice meat processing plants, and picked the best innovations.

John Perrins, Engineering Manager for Te Aroha and Paeroa plants says “The Australians are very good at saving water for instance. It was always our aim to be best practice from the very beginning. We tried to build the ultimate beef plant by first designing the process, and then putting the building around it. We also wanted to improve animal welfare, so the yards were signed off by US expert Temple Grandin from Colorado. I went to her with my cattle yard designs.”

“We are most proud of the new technology. We have a new Marel computerised deboning and trimming system designed for complete traceability. Operator performance, based on throughput and yield, can be measured using this system. Yield can also be measured per cut or per carcass.”

During the past summer staff numbers peaked at 369, and this will rise to around 420 staff and contractors working at the plant as it comes up to full capacity. $13 million is paid in wages to the local community each year.