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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Robots could gain valuable slaughtering skills as the meatpacking industry begins to test greater use of automation [npr.org] in its plants:

Slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants throughout the country employ a lot of people. About a quarter of a million Americans prepare the beef, pork and chicken that ends up on dinner tables. But some of those workers could eventually be replaced by robots. The world's largest meatpacking company is looking at ways to automate the art of butchery. Late this fall JBS [jbssa.com], the Brazil-based protein powerhouse, bought a controlling share of Scott Technology [scott.co.nz], a New Zealand-based robotics firm.

While many manufacturers have gone to automated machines [wsj.com] to process and package everything from food to furniture, the beef industry has stubbornly held on to its workers. It still takes thousands of workers to run a modern beef plant. In fact, U.S. meatpacking plants are expected to add jobs in the next decade, as the appetite for pork, chicken and beef grows in the developing world.

[...] JBS is looking at how robots could fit into its lamb and pork plants first, Bruett says. Sheep and pigs tend to be more uniform than beef cattle. "Now when it comes to beef packing, beef processing, the fabrication of the animal, it's very difficult to automate beef processing," Bruett says.

The meatpacking robots of today [youtube.com] use vision technology to slice and dice, but the key to butchery is touch, not sight, Rupp says. And the company's beef division president, Bill Rupp, says right now, robots just can't feel how deep a bone is, or expertly remove a filet mignon. "When you get into that detailed, skilled cutting, robots aren't there yet. Someday, I'm sure they will be," Rupp says.

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The technology isn't quite ready for a massive roll out, but could the economics of widespread robotic use in the beef industry ever work? Not any time soon, says Don Stull, an anthropologist who spent 30 years studying the cultures of meatpacking towns at the University of Kansas. "Workers are really cheaper than machines," Stull says. "Machines have to be maintained. They have to be taken good care of. And that's not really true of workers. As long as there is a steady supply, workers are relatively inexpensive."

There's a stream of immigrants and refugees, most from Somalia, Rwanda, El Salvador and Guatemala, ready to put on the chainmail and pick up the knife, Stull says. In large, modern plants, companies pay less because the skill needed to work on the fabrication floor is so low. Some jobs take less than a week to fully master.

Turnover in the industry is high, Stull points out, because of the physical demands. "After you do the same thing thousands of times a day, six days a week ... your body wears down," Stull says. While the industry says it has dramatically improved on worker safety over the years, meatpacking jobs consistently rank among the most hazardous in the country. Increased automation could ease some of those injuries.

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