For tex plans $10M slaughter plant

Press, 19 June 1986, Page 2

For tex plans $10M slaughter plant

By

HUGH STRINGLEMAN

farm editor

The farmer-owned Fortex Group, of Christchurch, will build a $lO million, single-chain, lamb and goat export-slaughter plant near Ashburton. Eighty per cent of the plant’s output, which is designed for 900,000 lamb equivalents annually, will be further processed into lamb cuts and supermar-ket-ready portions. The announcement yesterday by Fortex of the plant is a very significant move in New Zealand’s troubled meat industry. It is also good news for sheepfarmers, carrying the promise of lower killing charges, increased meat works competition and efficiencies, and increased further processing of lambs, so essential for the New Zealand sheepmeat industry to have any future at all. The new single-chain facility will be alongside the Fortex Group’s existing deer-slaughtering and lamb-cutting plant at Seafield, outside Ashburton, and is expected to double the present 100-strong workforce.

The Fortex chairman, Mr John Austin, acknow-

ledged that the move was “counter-cyclical” in that sheep and lamb populations were dropping because of greatly reduced returns to farmers, and

several large meatworks throughout New Zealand would have to close. But the Ashburton works concept had been costed very carefully, he said, and its viability and efficiency established with Fortex’s existing lamb requirement for overseas markets. The plant is designed to put through 900,000 lamb equivalents annually — doing with one chain working two shifts what a medium-sized Canterbury works would do with three chains in about six months of the year on single shifts. Year-round employment would be offered and the "follow-on” facilities of chillers and freezers would accommodate shift work, said the group’s managing director, Mr Graeme Thompson. Two-shift operations have already been introduced in the adjacent lamb-cutting plant, the first such agreement with the Meat Workers’ Union in New Zealand. The new lamb-killing plant will employ 34 people on the chain, compared with the industry average of about 50, and will use some new, but proved, technological advances such as inverted dressing and computerised grading. Half of the $lO million cost of the plant will be

borrowed and half sought from shareholders.

Mr Thompson said the Seafield killing plant would be competitive with the processing charges of other Canterbury meat works.

Fortex believed existing killing and processing charges were too high, and had therefore done its sums for the new plant at a much lower level. Seafield will draw on the lamb crops of 600 farmer-shareholders in Fortex Group, Ltd, which was formed recently by the merger of Canterbury Venison, Cattle Services, and the trading assets of Fort Export, Ltd, the original farmer co-opera-tive.

The exporting business of Fortex, including a major supermarket contract in West Germany, needs all the output of the new Seafield plant. The company would kill that many lambs at the facilities of other meat companies this year, although it was not planned to withdraw from any of these plants, Mr Thompson said.

With first priority to existing shareholders, lambs would be sought over a wide area of the South Island, from Otago to Nelson.

The existing lamb-cut-ting facilities already take chilled carcases from the Fairton works of Canter-

bury Frozen Meat nearby at Ashburton. So the new slaughtering facility offers the most direct challenge to C.F.M., which is wholly owned by the farmer cooperative, P.P.C.S., which also has 6.5 per cent of the Fortex Group. While agreeing in principle with the formation of a national, farmerowned and sympathetic meat company grouping, as being promoted by the Meat Board recently, Messrs Austin and Thompson said there was no need for Fortex to participate, with benefits for shareholders and customers in remaining “independent.”

The Fortex announcement yesterday is good news for Mid-Canterbury, increasing employment prospects for Ashburton, and raising the possibility of out-of-season lamb rearing for specialist farmers. Included in Fortex’s reasons for building is its demand for a year-round supply of fresh-chilled lamb carcases, and its keeness to develop goatmeat exports as a necessary spin-off from New Zealand’s rapidly expanding goat-fibre flock. Construction will begin at Seafield in August and be completed in March. Water supply and effluent disposal requirements have been met, and pelt processing and by-pro-ducts rendering will occur elsewhere at existing facilities, such as South Canterbury By-Products, of Washdyke.