Originally published in the Sept. 4, 2013, issue
By Dallas Duncan
Generally, students are expected to pay
attention in class. But for University of Georgia poultry science graduate Eric
Ayers, daydreaming during lecture could actually pay off.
He remembered professor Scott Russell
telling him that if he could develop a poultry harvesting system that would
save water and save the carcass, he’d have “a billion dollar idea.”
“It actually hit me in the side of the
face one day,” Ayers said. “For the remainder of the class, I just drew and
drew and drew, just drawing what I had in my head. I immediately went up to him
and asked if I could have 10 minutes of his time … After that, he advised me to
start looking for investors.”
Ayers, now a regional account manager
with Water Management Resources, is finding a way to turn his classroom
drawings into a tangible piece of equipment.
“It’s based on the time-old concept of
using rubber fingers to remove feathers. The machine itself is not a new
concept, but the style of finger that I have developed is what sets it apart
from any other unit,” Ayers said. “It allows you to reduce water while using
the system, because technically you won’t need any water with the design of
these fingers.”
The concept is designed to reduce wing
breakage and carcass damage, which are costly to the poultry industry.
The defeathering machines on the market
now use rubber fingers that rotate to knock feathers off the bird carcass.
Portions of a carcass damaged by rubber fingers have to be cut off and
discarded.
“It’s a yield loss thing,” Russell, a
former poultry science professor of Ayers’, said. “Wings are $1.25 a pound. If
you’re breaking wings, you’re losing that money.”
Though it took a little while to find
backers for his concept, Ayers developed a partnership and has plans to patent
and develop the project, though is not sure what his timeline will be. The
rubber finger concept he’s developing can cost upwards of $6,000 to make one
mold – and if that mold doesn’t work, it’s back to the drawing board and he’s
out several thousand more dollars.
“You want to make sure you have a solid
concept. You want to make sure you have that kind of money to go ahead and
develop instead of dragging it out,” he said. “My machine will only be able to
use my fingers, and my fingers will only be able to be used in my machine.”
Russell said there have not been
significant developments in the picking, or plucking, portion of poultry
processing since the 1960s.
“It’s worked well and people think why
fix it if it’s not broken, but the reality is there is a lot of issues with
current picker systems,” Russell said.
Aside from the issues of carcass damage,
another concern with existing machinery is the amount of water used. Though
Ayers’ concept will not be completely devoid of water, he plans for it to
reduce the amount needed.
“It’s good at what it does, because it
clears the chickens of all the feathers and the same concept has been used for
30 years,” Ayers said. “The huge downfalls are that it does beat up the bird
[carcass]. It damages the bird in a way that decreases profit. It also uses
water to wash down the feathers.”
These systems use between five and seven
gallons of water per bird. That’s because unlike beef, pork and lamb, where the
hide is exposed to bacteria and thus removed, the skin of the chicken is what
has the potential to come into contact with fecal and bacterial material in the
processing facility. It takes more water to wash the poultry carcass to keep
these things at bay, Russell said.
“Water usage is very, very expensive.
[Poultry plants] use a million to a million and a half gallons every day. They
have to pay for the water and pay for the water to be treated,” Russell said.
“In the picker systems they use a lot of water to spray over the birds and wash
the feathers. If you don’t have to use all the water to pick that bird, it’s a
lot of water savings.”
With that in mind, he said there is
potential for Ayers’ concept to take flight in the poultry processing industry.
“It’s really amazing that Eric was
sitting in class and just used that opportunity to come up with something new …
something completely unthought of that revolutionizes the way we do things, and
I think it might just do that,” Russell said.
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