Teys: DEXA mechanising red meat sector

“New technology might come along in five or 10 years’ time but we’ve got to start doing this now in this industry,” he said to Fairfax Agricultural Media at a cattle producer open day at the company’s Jindalee feedlot near Springdale in Southern NSW last week.

“Our costs are blowing us out of the water and we have to keep producers’ costs down by rewarding them for producing a better quality article for us.

“We’re not going to compete in the world manufacturing, price market because of India and Brazil coming online so we need to do it better and smarter, with better performing quality and yields.

“We’ve been talking about this technology for probably the past three years and we’ve very excited about it coming along because now we finally have a tool that we can use and believe we can use, to provide the right answers.”

Mr Teys said cattle producers understood where the company was coming from in adopting DEXA in its meat processing plants and were “all very excited” about the potential to improve carcase yield measurements and deliver objective data.

But he said producers had to understand, the company wasn’t going to push the technology onto others unless they were “comfortable and understand it and understand where we’re going”.

“A price mechanism could be three or four years away but we need people to get behind DEXA now and understand it,” he said.

“We’re not going to stay in the pond with everyone else; we’re going to get out and make this industry better.”

Mr Teys said DEXA would scan the carcase to provide meat yield measurements before it was put through to the boning room pre-trim stage, “to make sure everyone is equal”.

Large NSW cattle producer Pat Pearce of YavenVale stud near Adelong and Tumbarumba said the use of DEXA technology would deliver a “massive improvement” for the red meat industry.

“Everyone I’ve spoken to about DEXA is all for it,” he said.

“That’s not 100pc but it’s a modern technology and it’s going to happen, it’s a simple as that, and Teys has been leading the way.”

Mr Pearce said DEXA had “great benefits” for the red meat industry in helping to improve trust between producers and processors with the accuracy of its application already proven through 30-years of use in the medical sector.

“It loses the human factor I suppose you could say, in making objective and more accurate carcase measurements,” he said.

“It’s been trialled with thousands and thousands of carcases and you can’t argue with modern technology - it’s just got to happen.

“We can’t keep standing still, we have to keep moving forward and adopt these modern technologies once they’ve been proven.”

Mr Pearce – who is also chair of Herefords Australia – said the new x-ray technology would also provide “absolutely positive feedback” to show producers what direction they should head towards, in breeding programs on-farm.

“It’s obvious that muscle, EMA (eye muscle area) is a driver in yield which we’ve all basically known but the loud and clear message is, don’t just chase yield, balance it with eating quality, which in other words is marbling, which we’ve already known,” he said.

“If you go too much one way towards muscle, eating quality will drop off, and if you go too much the other way towards marbling your yield will drop off, so it’s about balancing your traits.

“I don’t know if there are too many pitfalls (with DEXA) but people could get carried away and return to where we were a few years ago, producing meat that’s too lean, with too much muscle, in trying to chase too high a yield.

“That’s up to the individual and they will sort that out on-farm, but it will also depend how the meat processors pay us too.”

Teys Australia corporate services general manager Tom Maguire told the producer forum DEXA’s adoption was being underpinned by changing dynamics in the global beef market with Brazil and India coming along rapidly, as competitors.

Mr Maguire said Australia had enjoyed a period of time where those two countries had been banned from different beef export markets globally because of FMD (foot-and-mouth disease) and/or BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) and it was “unrealistic to think that’s going to continue”.

“We’ve got to do something and we’ve just got to be smarter than them because we’re not going to be ever cheaper; we don’t want to be cheaper,” he said.

“We’ve pushed our customers to the point where they’re paying what they can pay but we’ve got to extract more value and that’s why we’re committed to what we’re doing.”

Mr Maguire said another “really exciting” aspect of DEXA was its capacity to drive robotics, like those already used in processing for the pork, chicken and lamb industries.

“There are lamb boning rooms where there’s scarcely a person to be seen so it’s really exciting,” he said.

Mr Maguire said Brad Teys recently returned from Europe where he observed a chicken plant processing something like 40,000 birds per hour and there “wasn’t a person to be seen”.

“Chickens are a bit like pork - they’re almost all the same - they only vary by 200 grams,” he said.

‘But the challenge for them of course is speed - they’ve got to manage millions and millions of birds per year - but if they can do it with the right attitude, so can we.

“And the other really exciting bit for us with this technology is the ability for us to start holding our boning room teams really accountable for the product that we produce.

“We know the weight absolutely of the cattle or the sides of beef that go into our boning room and we know how much product we collect, but that’s a big average.

“It’s very hard for us to hold individuals accountable for what they do in our plants but this provides a potential tool, to hold our people really accountable.”