Turkey Farm & Processing Plant Tour: Temple Grandin

[Music] [Music] [Music] I'm temple Brandon I'm professor of animal science at Colorado State University just a large barn full of turkeys on ready for market and we're going to be showing you how they load the turkeys and they kind of gonna be herding them like cattle they go up a conveyor and then done show them going through the whole entire process I am really pleased that we've got this opportunity today to see this barn full of turkeys and we're going to watch them being loaded onto the trucks tonight and going on through the processing plant and it's just not possible to bring tour groups to all these places because of disease requirements I have to wear these claws and then I had to be away from all birds for over a week before I was allowed to come here because you got to be really careful not to bring in diseases these are typical large sheds where turkeys are raised for up to 19 21 weeks today we're going to be loading out from one of these barns a question that came up where as are the turkeys in the buildings afraid of people well if people regularly walk through the barn and get the turkeys used to people walking through them they'll come up here I mean I had males displaying to me and showing off the bad birds that are afraid don't do that on a really good farm a person will walk through the entire field walking through the turkeys the whole entire ability to inspect for animals that might be sick animals that might be injured baguettes the birds accustomed to people walking through them these sheds have curtains on the side so they can be a opened up in summertime to keep the building cool close them up in the wintertime those are the waterers and when the birds are loaded out the water is a left off it's always important always have access to water you can see right here we have a lot of space they have not started to blow it out yet this is a normal stocking you get into a building it's over stock you wouldn't have this amount of space in market-ready Birds they're getting the truck back up now and they've got some wood panels that set up and kind of a funnel and then the truck boilers will come in remove small groups of turkeys are similar to moving cattle up in small groups and they jump on the conveyor line up into that conveyor into the truck what they're doing is bringing out groups of turkeys and there's a conveyor in there the turkeys ride up the conveyor into the truck as the birds ride up mr. mayor they remain upright it will stand on the conveyor as they go up they'll be loaded into compartments this whole entire conveyor can be raised up and down below the different level compartments on the truck one of the advantages of using a machine like this is it doesn't get tired people get tired and these birds are really really heavy notice that this operator there and he's controlling this then he's got to go back and shut the doors but I want to emphasize what equipment makes it easier to have good handling but you also have to have management they've got to make sure they operate this equipment correctly the equipment we have nowadays some such a big advantage all used to have this turkey conveyor is a really big improvement [Music] this is a truck arriving at the plant after loading at the farm and a plant employee is going to inspect the load of turkeys to make sure they were loaded correctly make sure they didn't have trapped wings there's other obvious problems the next step is the way the truck with all the birds in it and then after the birds are unloaded at the plant the empty truck is weighed so they can get accurate weights another really important part of this is record-keeping and the plant employee here at the computer is entering the name of the farm name of the loading crew time if the load arrived this is all really important information for tracking down problems the truck is backed into a holding shed which is equipped with a big bank of things one old side it's just solid fans and it has misters to blow on the birds to keep them cool it's extremely important not to let them get overheated in the summertime the trucks have completely open sights you've got to have that for ventilation when it's 90 hundred degrees hot Fahrenheit in the wintertime the birds would get too cold if they were in open trailers so fiberglass panels are put into the side of the trailer so the birds do not get cold in the summertime it would be too hot to have the sides of the trailer covered the trailer with the bird zone is pulled into the unloading bay and there's a hydraulic lift and in case doors are open an employee moves the turkey into the conveyor takes it down into the controlled atmosphere stunning [Music] with window you can see in here watch the birds as they get anesthetized one thing is very important with poultry is you have to have a slow gradual rise of the co2 the pig plant you very quickly put them in a 90% you can increase the co2 levels faster than you can for chickens but not as fast pigs and you have to get that just right to avoid flapping and escape movements of trying to get held with the chain rule [Music] the truck pulls into the unloading bay the employees are on hydraulic platforms that go up and down they open up the cages and they pull the birds out and hang them live on the shackles and they go through what's called a water bath stunt where their head is immersed in water and just electric current passed from their head through the shackle and that will make the bird insensible electric study then order for electrical stunning to make an animal insensible it has to cause some epileptiform activity in the brain when the birds are merged from the stunner you will have some twitching and movement but you have to make sure there's no blinking and when I'm training people to audit electrical stunning I say go out into the holding shed I want you to look at the live birds and holding shed and see what a natural blink looks like [Music] this shows the anesthetized turkeys merging from the control atmosphere stunner and then the employees will place these birds on the shackles and see if the heads are very limp they're coming out completely limp now if the turkey was actually fully conscious he would put his head up like this that's the position they would be in if they're fully conscious if the turkeys got a metal long neck it would it'll curl up like this the next step is birds go through an automated bleeding machine any bird that missed the automatic cutter would be cut by the backup man because it's absolutely essential that all birds are cut before they go into the scholar because we absolutely have to make sure that a live birds never go into the scold er the birds are now emerging from the scholar have had their feathers softened up by the skull burr and then the next step is to go into the picking machine which has a whole lot of rubber fingers that rotate that take off the feathers there are a few little bits and pieces of feathers still attached and employees on the line will remove those and then the next step is to put them on a different type of shackle that just holds it by the drumsticks because they feed up and remove then they go further on down the process where the insides are taken out the first step in making sure that the carcasses stay clean there's a hose is used to evacuate thisis it's very important to avoid fecal contamination on the carcass and then as they turkeys move down the line the innards are removed in varying steps and it's really important during these steps to not rupture and break the innards because again that would contaminate the carcass many of these processes are done by hand and turkeys this would be very similar to pork processing plants in chickens a lot of these processes are highly highly automated but in turkeys they're bigger the lines of slower so these uh you know step-by-step process of carefully removing the innards is done by hand at this point there is a USDA inspection station where the innards of the bird are inspected in all types of a meat processing you don't want to waste anything so all different parts of the animal get different uses this point they're cleaning out any remnants that might be left after the innards have been completely removed there's an employee that does checks for for carcass defects this is a really important part of the plants quality assurance program also it's part of continuous improvement these sorts of inspections are really important for ensuring quality product this shows turkeys going into a chiller tank to get chilled when this particular plant uses a water bath join the turkeys are sold for five hours the birds are emerging from the chiller got to be a rehung back up on the shackles so they can go into into the deep boning line and be taken apart [Music] another really important part of maintaining good animal welfare at the poultry processing plant is a lot of damage measuring things like bruises stunning efficacy broken wings damn its legs because you manage the things that you measure so auditing is a really important part of good animal welfare I get asked all the time is all you need yes I do only turkey beef chicken pork all of the different animal proteins and I feel very strongly we got to do things right if you're interested in more information lots more information on animal meat plant issues at my website www.africanelements.org [Music]

Channel: National Turkey Federation

Views: 4,140,257

Keywords: turkeys, animal welfare, humane treatment of animals, National Turkey Federation, turkey farm, raising turkeys, Temple Grandin, Dr. Grandin, poultry, colorado state university, humane slaughter, American Meat Institute, NTF, AMI, Glass Walls, Glass Walls Project, turkey video, Domesticated Turkey (Organism Classification)

Id: 852zxDEAR-Q

Length: 13min 22sec (802 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 08 2013