Mobile Abattoir for professional rural slaughtering

The Mobile abattoir has been developed in many countries over many years to suit various needs. We have been looking into the mobile abattoir and wrote this post to help you understand what it is used for and what it is capable of.

Initially, the need was to service small farm holdings to safely slaughter their farm animals with properly qualified meat inspection. Also, the simultaneous development of different technologies developed in the last decade in Australia for kangaroo hunting and in South Africa for game harvesting but lately also for slaughtering of cattle in remote rural areas and to facilitate the recovery of meat through the commodity-based trading principle in Foot and Mouth Disease infected control zones.

The slaughter unit is powered by a solar system that supplies a winch, lights and compressors. The compressor unit, in turn, supplies air pressure to de-hiders and pneumatic saws.

Currently, only cattle slaughtering is done with de-hiders to ensure quality skin for further leather products.

This will now also become available to supply high-quality game skins for the market.

The unit will also have a system where offal can be cleaned to ensure that valuable protein is not lost.

The unit has a primary purpose of ensuring maximum retrieval of products traditionally hunted with limited recovery of products due to the rudimentary practices associated with it.

The development now allows for a highly skilled and safe process to maximize the return on investment.

With the acceptance of commodity-based trading as a method to retrieve meat from traditionally Foot-and-Mouth infected areas, the unit has shown its value. The process of slaughtering animals in their respective grazing areas, and thus leaving the infective material at the source without having to transport live animals has proven the mobile abattoir can assist in opening markets all over Africa where the scourge of FMD has assisted in poverty of its people.

The mobile abattoir was developed to be a lightweight structure that can be transported into the bush by a hunting vehicle/chiller truck, or to a predeveloped site for livestock, deployed in an acceptable time frame to operate and again dismantled to be transported to the next site.

The mobile abattoir concept was accepted and approved by the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of South Africa as a fully licensed abattoir under the Meat Safety Act (Act 40 of 2000)

The mobile abattoir has various unique features such as:

• Quick deployment and stabilization on most terrains.
• The height of the fully extended crane unit allows the abattoir to accommodate from a giraffe to a duiker or from buffalo to cattle and sheep.
• The compressed air system assists in reduced water usage as it can be used during the cleaning process.
• The unit is equipped with hot water hand-wash basins, boot-wash and knife sterilizing facilities for effective sanitation during slaughter.
• The slaughter unit can be used alone when a few animals are slaughtered before camp is moved or can be used in combination with chiller units mounted on separate trailers/trucks when the hunt or harvest is extended to several days.
• The chiller unit docks tightly to the slaughter unit with rail connections to ensure clean transferal of carcasses.
• All the units are fitted with solar power or can be charged from conventional power sources to allow for operations anywhere.
• Powerful winches allow for the easy handling of the carcasses and therefore ensure clean and hygienic slaughter procedures.
• The abattoir is easily cleaned due to the internal finishing and powerful pressure cleaner that can use modern day cleaning technology.
• The interior walkways are non-slip with underfloor effluent drainage.
• A “slaughter bed trolley” is available to assist with larger animals.
• Extractor ventilators assist with insect and temperature control/airflow in the unit during operations.
• Two 1000l water tanks will supply water during the operations. It allows for filling prior to slaughter in such a way that it enhances easy handling and supply to the abattoir.

About us

Mobile Abattoirs is a privately-owned company established in January 2015 after the need for a safer way to harvest game meat for the local market was identified.

The company is now trading as Mobile Slaughter Technologies due to the versatility and diversification to cattle, sheep and goat abattoirs as well as the development of pig and poultry containerized abattoirs.

Dr. Tertius Bergh, the owner of the company, was born and raised in the Limpopo town of Louis Trichardt /Makhado. He completed his studies at Onderstepoort as a veterinarian in the seventies.

Doing various disciplines over the years as a state veterinarian and in private practice as a large and small animal practitioner, he found his interest in the nineties with Public Health and meat safety.  As a seasoned veterinarian working in the field of meat safety for many years with wide expertise in meat regulations, training of inspectors and abattoir approvals had a vision of closing the gap that existed in the game industry by rather bringing the abattoir to the animals if game animals could not be brought to the abattoir.

Contact details:

For further details on these products and expertise on the subject, please contact Dr Tertius Bergh at:
PHONE. +27 (0)82 902 8914
MAIL. trts.bergh@gmail.com
WEBSITE. www.mobileabattoirs.co.za

If you have any questions or want to become a featured company on our website to broaden the scope of your business, please send us a mail on info@agri4africa.com.