Meat+Poultry - February 2018 - 58

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

Bright Coop cages loaded
with birds move through
the Humane-Aire CAS
chambers for stunning.

MEAT+ POULTRY | 02.18 | www.meatpoultry.com

Miller Poultry

58

was a natural fit due to Bright Coop's years in
the industry.
"Bright Coop has a wealth of knowledge
and experience in the live handling of the
birds from the farm to the shackle line, which
is important to the success of the system,"
Geertman says. "They were involved with
each step of the design process, loading of the
birds, to the transportation, and handling the
birds at the processing plant. The equipment
used to handle the cages and birds was fully
redesigned from a manual operation to a fully
automated system."
Grandin commended Bright Coop on its
efforts in a Nov. 4, 2017, letter to engineering
manager, Francois Roux, after seeing a system
in the field. The letter stated, "The installation
at the processing plant I visited in the United
States was excellent. Moving the entire Bright
Coop through the controlled atmosphere
stunning eliminates stressful shackling of live
birds. The system was well designed and will
be easy to maintain."

Midway Machine provided its Humane-Aire
technology developed and proven in the turkey
industry and combined it with Bright Coop's
many years of proven chicken handling and
transportation technology.
Bright Coop started providing live poultry
handling equipment in 1951. Over the years,
Bright has continued to innovate in providing
effective equipment that transports birds from
the farm to the shackle in the most humane
and cost-effective way possible.
"The uniqueness of the Bright Coop/
Humane-Aire CAS System for chickens, is that
it utilizes equipment that customers are already
familiar with, but has new design features and
improvements that produce a safe, consistent
and genuinely humane handling of birds (no
live bird handling) into the plant," says Clem
Russell, president and CEO of Bright Coop Inc.
The traditional method of getting birds
from the house floor into the cage to be
transported, also known as chicken catching,
involves an intense amount of human labor.
Bright Coop offers an alternative that furthers
humane handling from beginning to end. The
Apollo Generation 2 harvesting machine gently
lifts birds from the house floor to the cages.
Rough terrain forklifts can then load and
offload cages to and from the recently designed
Viking curtain side transport trailers.
Bright Coop Inc. subsidiary, Viking
Specialized Trailers LLC, manufactures the
Viking Poultry Curtain Sided Trailer to provide
a significantly more comfortable ride to
the plant, another method of furthering the
humane handling goal.
"In hot weather environments, a Cline Coop
Fan Trailer can be provided by Bright Coop
Inc. that allows dampened cooled air to evenly
flow through the entire load while awaiting the
load to be completed, secured and readied for
transport," Russell says.
Bright's cage and unloading systems
maintain a certain standard and a basic
componentry for the industry, but equipment
can be arranged or modified to fit the layout
of a specific plant. Several factors such as line
speed, bird size, access and others determine
the final design of the system. All things
considered, systems are ultimately custom
designed to suit particular plant requirements.
"The equipment layout is larger than the
standard manual Bright Coop unloader, but
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