June 17, 2008

JF Equipment, a South African poultry processing equipment developer, has developed Off-Loading Bay, a customised equipment that is designed to accommodate a slaughterhouse's space and budget.

When delivering poultry to the slaughterhouse, the challenge is to minimise stress and injury.

The Off-Loading Bay can be built in any suitable configuration. Beginning at one end, forklifts transport the birds in large modules from the truck to a de-stacker. Each module contains three columns of crates stacked four crates high, with the de-stacker placed between pusher rams and a conveyor belt.

Once the module is placed on the de-stacker, the rams will extend through the module and push the crates onto a receiving slide plate, which facilitates crate movement from the module to a conveyor. The air-operated slide plate will then drop to leave the three crates resting on and moving along the conveyor, with the vertical movement only about 50mm.

The crates will then travel along the conveyor to where the birds would be taken out of the crates and hung on the overhead line taking the birds into the slaughterhouse. The crates would continue on to the automatic crate washer before being transported to the empty module bay where the reverse process is applied and the clean crates loaded back into the modules. The clean and stacked modules are then replaced onto the delivery vehicle.