Good evening, everyone. Thank you. 

One of those things that we are here today is actually in line with that the provocation series which we hold and the very word provocation to me is about creative thinking is about challenging.

It's about thinking out of the box. It's about making sure that our brain whatever be our age is still young and can think out of the box. So here we are today to hear from distinguished professor Jane Quinn who will be presenting on the topic optimising yield growth and use of the fifth quarter. 

Jane I'm very keen to hear about the fifth quarter for Australian agricultural food access and market security. 

We are here in Wagga at the very heart of agriculture, the very heart of where we can make a difference for us for the region but for the world as well. 

So please join me in welcoming professor Jane Quinn.

Thanks very much Nina. 

Thank you for everyone joining us this evening whether you're here in person or online, and it's a real pleasure to talk to you tonight. 

I'm going to take you on a little journey about food. I'm a passionate person when it comes to what I eat and I've had the real privilege of working in the livestock production space now for several decades. And so I've really got to look at how we produce our food, how it travels to us from the paddock through to the plate and what that journey looks like. 

And I'm not sure everybody is embedded as I am. And I will explain what the fifth quarter is moving forward. 

One of the things that we know is that we're in a world that faces challenge every day. Whether it's been our experiences through COVID, recent cost of living crisis, and all of the climate change scenarios that we are living day-to-day in our lives. 

But one of the biggest challenges we probably have is that we have an increasing population to feed globally. So that population is not reducing and we are needing to be responsible for battling against food insecurity globally and that's an emerging problem not just in nations where you might traditionally think that to be a challenge, but also here in Australia as well. 

This graph at the top shows an increasing level of food insecurity in Australia both at a whole population level but particularly among women and those of us who need to feed families. Women are often the last people to be fed when there's other mouths to be fed in the family. 

We're needing to meet consumer demand and we're needing to meet it in an ethical and responsible and economically responsible way.

In addition to that, consumers, and that's all of us, have an increasing expectation of the way that our food is produced. So even though we may not be as intimately connected to food production as we used to be in previous eras, we're much more focused on how that happens. 

There's an increasing consumer sentiment that's driving both government and market priorities. And perhaps this image of the live sheep export trade is something that all of us can accommodate as being a recent change in consumer expectation around the way that we produce meat globally. 

Another thing is that consumers are getting largely more educated about the food that they eat. We're much more focused on the cost and the price. And what we want is something that's ethically produced. We want it to be priced at a point which we're willing to pay, but we also want it to be really good quality. 

None of these things, if you take them together, are particular challenges, but if you put them in a context of how you develop that as a global pathway and a global solution for feeding the world, we've got a lot to do. 

Now, Australia has an enormous role to play in international food security. What we as people in the livestock industries are really aware of is that Australia is one of the key international producers of meat products internationally. 

And more than that, and this nice heat map produced by the FAO shows this really clearly, anywhere that's in red is where we we're consuming high numbers of calories. This is a calorie map and we can see that Australia is bright red down here at the bottom as are many other first world nations and that's a function of two things. 

It's a function of the fact that we have relative to cost reasonably priced product. This is a map focused on red meat. We're looking at the red meat calorie consumption per capita and Australia is pretty secure and in fact it's so secure that we can export our red meat internationally. 

We produce way more than is required for our national demand and all of these arrows are pointing to key international markets for red meat products produced in Australia. 

We have a multi-billion-dollar industry in producing meat and that meat is transported all the way around the globe. We're responsible for the food security not just of our own nation but of other nations internationally and globally.

Now what's also apparent and has been occurring increasingly over recent years is that our connection to those industries that produce our food is reducing. Whilst we're here in the beautiful Riverina region of Australia, we're fortunate that we're touching agriculture on a daily basis. 

You've only got to drive a kilometre out of the city and we're into some of the most productive arable and pastoral lands in Australia. But that's not the case for everybody. So, as our population in Australia has been increasing, our connection to that producing country has been reducing. 

And this graph is showing what's been happening just in the last 40 years, which is the amount of native pastures been reducing, the amount of land associated with cropping and arable production has pretty much stayed the same, but as a proportion those two figures are going down. 

What this means is that the connection between us as individuals, us as consumers, us as members of the population, and the food that we produce is getting less and it's been getting less and less over time. 

These graphs are really interesting I think and this is Australia specific. This is showing that our rural population has basically stayed the same. The proportion of those of us who live in rural and regional communities has not increased over a substantial period of time, but the proportion of the population living in urban communities absolutely has. 

We're in the minority here in Australia in in this room and those of people who are watching internationally. Some of you may be sitting in similar kinds of regional areas where your connection is very strong to the lands that produce the food that you eat, but that's not the experience of most people in Australia today. 

What does this mean in terms of how we understand where our food comes from and what then matters and how do we have this balance of the responsibility to produce as a consumer for our own nation but also for nations globally who are fundamentally reliant on Australia as an export as an exporter of particularly meat-based products, to make sure that we can create food sustainability and food security for the globe as a whole. 

One of the things that has become really apparent over the last few years, and I know that we're all suffering from this, is that food costs have increased. So that economic responsibility that we have, we're actually in a much safer position than other nations internationally, too. 

If we look at these graphs and this is the most recent FAO data on economic spending at a family level on food, we can see that around 21% of the amount of money that we spend in a shopping basket is spent on our red meat products and I'm focusing on these lovely red sectors here. 

But if you're in an African country, that component of your diet is substantially more expensive. What does this mean? If you are needing to feed a family and if that's a large family or a growing family, how is this going to influence the food that you buy, the meat that you eat, the proteins that you source? 

Well, it's going to make a big difference.

One of the things that's also come to the forefront in recent years is that there has been a question of trust about protein production. 

Any of you who are interested in red meat as a product, or protein as a as a food source will know that there's been a lot of contention around the role of proteins and meats particularly red meat in particular in our diets. 

And there's been a lot of publicity out there that has suggested that the amount of red meat in the diet should reduce. Actually, there's evidence to suggest that that's been really bad. 

Whilst there were underlying threatened causes of red meat being involved in causing cancer, actually the reduction in red meat intake, particularly red meat intake for young people, for children, for adolescents, particularly for women, has shown that we're seeing increasing levels of subclinical malnutrition for particular key biomedical components such as calcium, such as iron, and that's becoming pervasive in our populations.

So, what had also occurred at the same time was that the consumer confidence in the red meat industry had seen a decline and meat and livestock Australia who do an annual community trust survey had been showing that this decline had been occurring over like the last decade. 

Interestingly, in the last 24 months, we've started to see that change. So, their annual survey this year had some really interesting findings, and I think these are incredibly positive. So, the key findings were that for the first time, Australians were consuming more red meat than they had been in previous years. 

That's a positive given the cost of living crisis and the given that we had been really concerned about the amount of meat in people's diets and that particularly young people were consuming more. 

So those young adults and children in a growth phase who are so dependent on having a really full diet that's rich in vitamins and minerals who had been seeing a depletion in that had now seen an increase. 

Those are really positive findings. But this all puts more pressure on us to produce high quality product at a reasonable price while still trying to stabilise and provide for international food markets that are meeting the food security needs globally. 

Now that's a big challenge but one that Australia's actually risen to the forefront to meet.

When we come back to thinking about where our food comes from, one of the questions that's been really at the forefront of my mind for quite a long time is, how connected are we really? 

The data is showing that we're more urbanised, that we've got less connection to regional communities, that we're less connected to the food that we eat. And because I deal with some of the more functional ends of the food processing chain which is that transition from an animal being a live animal in the paddock to being a piece of steak on your plate.

The question of connection to me has been something I thought about a lot.

How it used to be was this. 

It was really common for people to keep stock at home. It was very common for stock to be killed in front of members of the community often as part of rituals or services but on a regular basis. So that transition from a live animal to a carcass was not something that most people in the Middle Ages or even up into the 17th 18th century were really unfamiliar with. 

That's really different to what happens now. This is our generally our experience of how meat ends up on our plate.

So how connected are we to the food that we eat? How much do we understand the value of the whole carcass as opposed to the packet that we pick out in the supermarket? And why does it matter?

Well, it matters because traditionally most people are familiar with this. These are the four quarters. The four quarters of a carcass, two hind quarters, two four quarters, and they produce all of the cuts that you can buy in the supermarket in one of those lovely packets. 

And they'll have a name. We all know scotch fillet, we know rump steak, we might know flank, we might have had some brisket, and then we'll have a whole pile of other cuts that might contribute to something called trim. And trim is the stuff that ends up in your hamburgers and your sausages, but it's all parts of what is the red meat component of the carcass. 

And that's the bit we're probably most familiar with. 

However, that's not all of the carcass. There's this whole other part which we're now calling the fifth quarter. 

And why is the fifth quarter important? Well, it's important because that selection here constitutes about 20% of the total weight of the animal whereas the fifth quarter is the other 80%. So that's a lot of volume and there's value in that volume. 

So, how can we maximise if we're thinking about ethical, sustainable, economically ethical production?

How can we utilise the whole of the carcass, not just the 20% of the parts?

Because to many countries, many cultures, that 80% is actually some of the rarest components and some of the pieces that are most valuable.

The other reason that we might consider that that fifth quarter, the remainder of the carcass is really important is because it can make the economic difference between that carcass being of value to a processor and remember this carcass has to be broken down into the sum components of its parts by a butcher or a processing company. 

And that can often be the difference between that carcass making them a profit and then breaking even or making a loss. There's an economic importance around what are called the non-meat components of the carcass. 

And this is something I really am passionate about. 

The rest of the carcass is just as valuable to me and to you, I think, as a consumer as the bits of meat that you buy to put on your barbecue. 

So, what is it? What does it contain?

I'm going to take you on a little journey through that and then I'm going to talk about some really exciting reasons why being in the meat processing sector is such a novel environment and such an emerging area of excitement I think for us as a society to know about.

Here's our fifth quarter more than the sum of the parts. 

All of these component parts of the animal can be used for something. Here we've got our dressed carcass. So that's the fourth the four quarters we were talking about before. 

But then we've got this entire selection of by products including bits that nobody wants to eat and all of them have a value. 

There isn't a single component up here that doesn't have a financial dollar sign sitting next to it whether that's large or small. On this side, we've got our edible offal components. So, some of these you'll be pretty familiar with. We've got kidneys and lungs and tongues and

maybe some other bits you might not have heard of that we actually have people eat. 

Spleen, thymus, some intestines and gizzards. 

If anyone who likes faggots, you'll be used to those. 

But then we've also got other stuff on this side which is what you would think of the things that you probably just thought were being thrown away like the contents of the guts and parts of the trim and bits that really can't be eaten by anybody. 

But they also have a use case. They also have a value. And some of those are generating some really novel products for us now, including things like bio gas, which is a recycling of some of these digestible components that can then in turn create gas that can be used for combustion and production of heat or other energy sources within the sector. 

If we look on the right-hand side, we can put these into a hierarchy of the things that we don't get very often but are really high value, to the stuff that we get a lot of which is some of these things - gastrointestinal contents, hides and skins, feathers that sort of stuff but can have a value in terms of producing chemicals or producing heat or producing a product and I don't think many people know that. 

I don't think many people know what bits of the carcass are the stuff that you would think just gets thrown away that actually have a fundamental use and a purposeful value.

But who cares? Well, there's a lot of people that care. 

If we go back to this map, which is our calorie map and our red meat production map, a lot of the product that we produce that's exported internationally also contains some of those edible offal products. And these countries where we're seeing that calorie map being less than ours, a lot of those edible products are transported to those countries and are producing value add edible products into their food chains.

By making sure that we're producing quality, high quality non-edible or offal products from the carcass, we're supporting that international export market with that quality outcome. 

What are the sorts of things that we're talking about? 

These are what are called variety meats. Has anybody heard of variety meats? 

They were really common in Europe and in the Middle East. And some of these you might be more familiar with than others. 

Here we've got some tongue, which is basically a big muscle. Really tasty. Hearts. This is stomach, kidney. We'll just note those. 

Some nice sheep heads. These are intestine. These are thymus. These are all edible cooked products that are often delicacies in many cultures and cuisines. 

But then we've got these other things.

This is the other stuff that gets a really high value use out of those other components of the carcass. And these are things such as serum.

We pay thousands of dollars for this in scientific research. This is bovine serum dried down, collagen support tablets. 

These are nutraceuticals made of beef. And then we've got a whole industry around pet food which consumes an enormous amount of the offal and other edible products that come from the carcass on a yearly basis. 

Anyone who has a dog or a cat, you're feeding really good quality offal to your family pet every day. 

And then we've got some other things that are really interesting. We have aortas, we have tendons, we have parts of the gut that are used for extraction of various different types of proteins. 

And we've got things like these bile stones. They're produced in the bile duct in ruminants and they are worth 330 Australian dollars a gram. 

That's slightly more than gold I think and ads like this one appear in the US gallstone buyer, open up your gall bladders and see what you've got because you might have a 50 gram gallstone in there and that can be worth a significant amount. 

There are all sorts of products out there that are produced from all of the rest of the carcass, that fifth quarter that all of you probably come into contact with on a daily basis, and you may never really have thought about where they come from. 

So why do I get excited about this stuff? 

Well, I get excited about it because there's a really fantastic interface in the meat processing sector between biology, product, and technology. 

And I think that's a really exciting place to work in. 

What happens when a carcass is processed? This is probably something that most people have never thought about, but I'm going to take you through a little journey on that one, too.

We have stock delivered to an abattoir. 

We have an animal that arrives at the abattoir and it's taken into the processing chain and there is a point where it goes from being a live animal to being a dead animal. That's just a natural fact of the process. 

We can't eat them when they're on the hoof. We have to eat them when they're on off the hook. And they come through this processing chain.

The animal comes in, various parts of it are removed. So hides heads and all of those pieces. 

These edible offal products, either go into a production line or they go into rendering and rendering products have a value too. That's what's producing some of your fertilizers and you know the blood and bone that you put on your garden. 

You're still buying those even if you didn't really know where they came from. And then we go down and the carcass is gradually broken down into pieces. It's cut into those sides. 

This is where we've got that fourth quarter and those sides go into a chiller and then they're cut into specific cuts which is what ends up in those supermarket packets.

But at every point in this journey that the carcass takes, every bit of it that can be used is removed and it is put into a production chain of some sort.

Now what's really important is how we do that. And the reason why these little icons of people are in here is that these are the points of inspection. So as that carcass is broken down, we have multiple points where there is an inspection process that looks at that product and says, is it fit for human consumption? 

Is it fit for animal consumption? Is it fit for nobody's consumption? 

And each one of those still has a value. 

We've got a whole series of humans, who are in this process determining what the value proposition of that particular part of the carcass is. 

This is the meat inspection process. And those meat inspectors are really important because they determine what you eat on your plate and they also determine what's eaten on the plates of people in every other country in the globe that we export to.

What are the things that we can do that can streamline and accelerate that process? 

And technology has been really widely adopted in the meat processing sector over decades now. And if you're not aware of how automated these processes, I'm going to show you. 

Technology can be several things. It can be an enabler. It can be an accelerator or it can be a displacer. 

And there's a lot of disruption around how we use particularly machine learning or AI in a whole range of different areas and disciplines. 

And the meat processing sector is no different. 

Machine learning, assisted technologies, robotics, computer generated processes, they've been in this industry probably faster and longer and are more widely used than any anybody is probably aware. 

Why does this make a difference to us? 

This is the manual process of that carcass breakdown. It's very labour intensive. It employs an awful lot of people and that's a really good thing. 

We don't want to change that. But what we can do is we can accelerate and attenuate that and we can also use machine learning or AI assisted processes to take away the components of that work that might be dangerous, where that might involve heavy lifting, that might involve access or exposure to large cutting items for example. 

But we can also use it for really fine-tuning the way that we break down a carcass or data collection or all of the above.

This is some of the work that we've been involved in. 

We've been working with a company called PMP Optica and PMP Optica produce inline hyperspectral imaging systems.

Why is that cool? 

Well, hyperspectral systems can see things that we can't see. So, they can pick up quality components in in meat products. They can pick up defect components in meat products. And we've been working with systems that can do that faster than the human eye can do it.

This system that we've built and we've been working with PMP Optica on has been looking for defects in offal.

And whilst most people think, "Oh, why would you want to do that?" To me, that's how we provide that value ad to the industry. How can we accelerate and attenuate and support the process of inspection that's already occurring?

Why do we need to do that? 

Well, processing happens at volume and it happens at speed. Anyone who's been inside of an abattoir or inside a meat processing factory knows that they are working to a time schedule with a lot of people and a very fast process. 

Beef carcasses are processed at about one a minute. Lamb carcasses are processed substantially faster than that. So sometime humans just you can't have enough of them or they can't operate fast enough. 

How can we help that occur? 

This is an example of us using our hyperspectral imaging system to look for inedible defects in offal products which happens at volume and at high speed. 

So how do we do that? And this work's been done at CSU in collaboration with PMP Optica who are this amazing Canadian company and Meat and Livestock Australia because there's a value proposition in us being able to identify defects at volume and at speed if we can do it in an automated manner. 

How do we do that? 

Well, we go about making machine learning models. This is where the AI component comes in. We scan in this case these are livers and these are kidneys and we ask that machine learning process to look for defects. We are initially telling it where the defects lie. And so here's the outline of that product scanned under the hyperspectral camera and it's identified these particular blue regions which when we look on the vision image we can see here they're clearly areas of defected tissue. 

Likewise, over here are some kidneys, several in the tray. And here we look at the scan above and we've clearly identified some regions which if we look on the vision image, we can see are areas of defect. 

Now, this is a training program and so we're looking at how effective it is, how often it's making the right choice. But the next step for this program is to take it into a processing plant and instead of just putting a few hundred images through it, to put thousands of images through it. And that's the point where the machine learning comes into real play because it then starts training itself as to what it's looking for. 

And that's really exciting. So where do sensors get used? 

This hyperspectral imaging system is a sensor system. Sensor systems are probably more common in the processing industry than in many other industries. There are multiple points in that production chain where we're attenuating either the inspection process or a decision process with imaging systems. 

So here we can we can put them on the map. We're using them at the point of intake of animals into the into layer or pre-slaughter checking those animals and being able to oversee them without necessarily a human being in the room. 

Here's the point where we might have our hyperspectral imaging system. Here we've got three-dimensional computer assisted camera imaging systems that are picking up identification of carcasses and size of carcasses as they're moving through the processing chain. 

And particularly at this end, there are imaging systems that are now detecting whether we're putting the right meat in the right box and we're labelling it correctly. And all of that's incredibly important if we're thinking about product integrity for our export markets where those export markets will immediately turn around a carton that has got the wrong label on it for the wrong product that's in the box. 

This is protecting our international security in terms of market access and export quality. 

And it's also helping that inspection process. 

This isn't removing those inspectors. It's not replacing them. It's attenuating them, supporting them and giving significant volumes of data that we can use then as evidence for product assurance and quality assurance in the meat processing sector.

What does this need if we're thinking about how this happens in the future?

And I'm just want you to show you these couple of videos. These are examples that are attenuation of products within the processing chain that do everything from cutting the carcass to picking and packing it to putting it in a box to sorting those boxes through the warehouse to providing specific support tools for identifying quality metrics within the carcass and doing and assisting some of those tricky, difficult, repetitive or time consuming or labour-intensive jobs to allow staff to be overseeing those in a really effective manner. 

There's no point in the processing chain that doesn't have some level of automation associated with it now. 

If we think back to those images where we had our medieval counterparts physically breaking down a carcass, this is the way that your food arrives on your plate today. And I think it's really exciting.

What do we need? What do we need for this industry to grow? Who are the people who have to be involved? 

Well, it's not just me scientists. It's not just vets. It's not just producers. There's now a whole range of people working in the agricultural industries from electrical engineers to machine learning experts to data programmers to integrated systems managers who are building the integration processes around these components. 

And these are all jobs that are exciting and emerging and we can be looking at our emerging industries and training our graduates to go into these particular roles. 

Meat processing is not what people think it is. It's about the most automated area of product development that you can think of outside the space race. 

I think that's incredibly exciting.

And you as the consumer, you're the people that's helping drive this process because you're the one saying, "We want an ethical, economic, and socially responsible product."

All right, so that's the end of my exciting talk. And I shouldn't get too excited about meat processing, but I do.

Sorry, the last thing I'm going to tell you about is a little bit about the group that I work with and the team that we have at Charles Sturt University in the Gulbali Institute for Land Water and the Environment who are working in products around agricultural innovation.

We've got a really amazing team. Charles Sturt University has had a significant longevity in agricultural research dating back to the original training and research farm that was on the Wagga Wagga campus site more than 100 years ago. 

We have people working in all aspects of the production value chain from the paddock which produces those livestock or those crops or those beans through to people like me who love to work in that processing end as well as the production end.

We have an amazing group. It's a large group too. We need to understand that this is an integrated teaching and research function of the university and we've got a beautiful collaboration between our teaching and research staff who train our students and work in our schools, to those research focused staff who are within the Gulbali Institute delivering on projects and producing some of the work like I've shown you today. 

We've got more than 100 people involved in this program and that includes around 30 higher degree by research students. This is where we're actively training the next generation of agricultural researchers, crop agronomists, meat scientists, people who are interested in robotics and automation like me and hyperspectral machine learning systems and all of the gammuts that our agricultural systems now require in order to support them and to grow those systems, agricultural industries for the future.

We work across a large number of domains, but they're integrated. I've taken you a bit on a journey today of how the food that you eat ends up on your plate and what that means in a global and local context. 

We've got people who are working both vertically and horizontally across all of those domains as well because these are integrated systems. They're not operating in isolation and we don't research them in isolation too.

We also do research that impacts us nationally and internationally. So, some of the processing systems, some of our crop development systems, we're working here in Australia, but we're also working in Southeast Asia, or the Philippines or other areas

internationally and globally because we're not just translating the knowledge that we have to our local community, we're translating it out into our global communities, too. 

I'm really proud to work here in Wagga. I'm really proud to be proud of Charles Sturt University and the Gulbali Institute and the agricultural innovation program. 

I want to leave you thinking a bit more about that. Thank you very much.

Thank you. How nice to hear about the fifth quarter, but not just the fifth quarter, but the value act that this industry can bring to the world.

Happy to take questions now from the audience here. I do have some online questions popping up as well, but if there are any questions here first from the people sitting in this room, happy to take one.

M says, "I'm not allowed to ask this question because it's not serious, but that's actually my job to ask the non-serious question." Jane, we all want to know what you use the gallstones for, don't we? We all want to know, right? 

I miss saying that they they're used in herbal medicines, naturopathic medicines and they have an extremely high value for that. 

I can't say I've tried them, so don't ask.

Thank you so much, Jane.

I was actually not aware that in the last 24 months there's been an increase on red meat consumption that I was actually quite shocked. I didn't know that. What are your thoughts? What are the key reasons of why this red meat consumption has increased in the last two years?

I have some interesting theories around that. I think that there's probably two things that have occurred. I think one thing is that there has been a shift in the focus around red meat being a problem food. I think some of the past discussions around red meat consumption have started to be discounted in terms of evidence. 

The other thing I think is that people are cooking at home more. One of the things that occurred and it was a response to COVID was that people started to actually cook again and that was largely driven by people needing to eat at home to make good of the products that they had and the massive expansion in online training in cooking through videos and celebrity chefs doing things online which they had never done before. 

And the accessibility of how to cook meat, I think stopped people being so scared of doing it. And I don't think we've shifted away from that yet. And I think that has followed with this consumer sentiment that it's actually a really good part of the diet now that people are cooking it more. 

I think they might be just reflecting those two things in my experience.

Thank you. 

I'll take a question from the audience now. Everyone is excited about the fifth quarter, Jane. 

How do we get more people eating the fifth quarter? Do we need to engage the likes of my kitchen rules or master chef George Karis to create meals from the fifth quarter so the general public has some ideas on how to use these parts. What would you suggest?

I absolutely agree and I think that bringing some of the delicacies out that are produced by cooking the fifth quarter in many different cultures more into the public domain is going to be key. People are scared of cooking them. They don't know how to cook them.

They don't know what's safe. They don't sometimes find the texture odd and that's fine. But there are definite delicacy recipes that people can cook really easily and be really safe and secure in the way that that food is going to be taste once they've once they've eaten it. 

I just think it's getting more out there into the public domain and people remembering, that 100 years ago we used to eat a lot of this and now we don't. 

Okay. And linked to that, what's your what's your favourite fifth quarter product? What's your favourite one? Have you eaten one? And if so, what is it? 

Oh, yeah. Lamb's fry. Lamb or calf liver. Just fantastic. Super tasty. Fried just delicately, don't overdo it. Gets really rubbery if you do that, but just fried delicate. Fantastic.

Thank you, Jane. Any more questions from here?

You were wonderful. I'm glad I came here this evening.

I'm a bit of a history buff, I really got turned on by some of the early photos of medieval carcass dissection and people being exposed to that. It made me think about the disconnect that we have between the consumer and the product. You're automating it even further.

Are we actually really dealing with the disconnect through this process or can we use this process to try and lever off the next generation's interest and bring it back to the people's side as well? 

Yeah, it's a really interesting one. I think some of that disconnect historically has occurred because of the physical nature of the breakdown of a carcass, the need to manage and dispose of the products that you don't want to use. 

And that has become a domain that's very much become a profession rather than something that everybody was experiencing because they had a butcher that lived three doors down and they knew exactly what they did. And absolutely the automation of the meat processing industry has accelerated the number of carcasses that can be processed on a daily basis. It hasn't necessarily taken that human touch away. 

I think exposing more young people, more students, more undergraduates to that processing line so that they see that there's a functionality to the way that that carcass is prepared going from a live animal to the food that you eat on the plate and familiarising people with the process, how that occurs. I think that starts to get us back in tune with the fact that this was a live animal. it was prepared carefully for slaughter so that we could benefit and receive those products as part of our diet. 

But that involved 100 people. It's a human effort to get that to our plate and I think that's sometimes the thing that we've lost track of too. I think the exposure is really key and perhaps showing people how exciting that industry can be. 

If you want to go into robotics, there's nothing more accessible than the meat industry to do that.

I really loved your example of the JBS facility in Brooklyn. I've actually visited that before and it's mind-blowing to see it in person, to save I think it's something like $7 per carcass just through accuracy.

But my question is that type of innovation costs a ton of money. I don't know the exact figures but I think it was something in the region of $30 million for that particular system.

And it's very rare to find companies in conjunction with MLA and so on that are willing to fund that innovation. How can we encourage more funding of innovation whether it's as big as that or as small as a few thousand dollars? How do we encourage more spending on innovation within this using fifth quarter using livestock in a better way? 

Yeah, it's all about risk isn't it? The risk taking actually isn't just the domain of the large multinationals. We see that kind of innovation occurring really broadly at a medium-scale enterprise level in Australia. 

Australia is probably one of the countries at the forefront of all agricultural innovation. And this is why it's so exciting to be here.

I think that innovation has been largely left out of the venture capital space and so it has been the domain of the large conglomerates or the big multinationals who are willing to make that investment because they can see how that's going to generate their return. 

I think there just needs to be a broadening of the venture capital space into the agricultural sector, in particularly agricultural technologies in meat processing which I haven't really seen occur yet. 

I think there's a role for government in driving some of that. Hope they're listening.

I have a question. From your perspective, do you see a trend toward producing healthier and higher nutrient meat content for the elderly population? 

It's a critical requirement. The two ends of the age spectrum that are most vulnerable to impacts of reduced levels of meat in their diet are the elderly and the young. 

Definitely we've seen that change occur in the last 20 years. Making those products more accessible, easier to cook, probably finding smaller cuts that are more targeted at people who have a smaller appetite. 

Someone in their older years doesn't want a cut the size of some of the ones that we're producing. Can we generate some carcasses that are meeting the need for a more discreet cut, but still really high quality one? 

What are the next potential sensing and AI technologies that you are excited about? 

That's a really good question. I think obviously we're working in the hyperspectral and vision imaging space but that combination of speed and accuracy with novel sensors that actually is a technological challenge and that's really exciting to me. 

But there's a lot of value that we can get from using vision technologies for things like product identification.

Where we can remove the need perhaps for a physical label because we can look at a fingerprint of a primal or a subprimal and know exactly where that came from, in which animal and traceability back to the original animal level. 

I think the technology is there to do that and it will come in the future.

Thanks very much, Jane. It seems to me that you offer also some positives in respect to animal ethics, the whole issue of consumption, the more complete use of every death unit, if you want to put it as bluntly as that. Have you put any mind to how you actually engage with maybe not the vegetarians or the vegans but the broader attitude around animals being exploited by humans?

if you want to put it inverted commas. Yeah, I think we've got a huge responsibility as a society ethically and economically for every animal that's slaughtered and we need them as a society to function. 

But we also need to be responsible in the way that we do that. One of the most forward thinking industries in my opinion is actually the meat processing industry, in terms of entire animal use and that's the thing that I think is not widely understood. 

If we can get that message out further into the community to say, the bit that you might buy might be one part of a sub primal, but the whole of the rest of that animal has been used and it has been carefully used. This isn't an arbitrary process. It's not something that happens one day and doesn't happen another day. 

It happens every day to every carcass in every processing facility, and I think that's not widely known. So getting that information out there about the way that we are using to the greatest extent the material that has been given to us in terms of the carcass breakdown I think meets some of our ethical responsibility and our societal and cultural responsibility when we choose to grow our animals for food.

Okay. Question about product versus technology. Commercialisation of the technology beyond the shores of Australia. There are plenty of cultures that absolutely appreciate the value of offcuts and what have you. Have you explored the issue of selling the technology overseas and giving it away?

PO is our partner in that research work. They're based in Canada and they sell systems into North America and across Europe as well.

We're still requiring a level of technology capability in order to integrate these sorts of technologies into the processing chain and we know that there are countries where we're not even at that base level yet.

I think making those technologies line friendly for locations that perhaps don't have the level of internet capability or electrical access or other types of technological services in the future is going to become really important. 

How do we level the playing field across all of those countries to allow them to process in the way that we process here in Australia or occurs in North America or in Northern Europe? 

I think that's a question that society hasn't yet grappled with, but we probably should. I had China in mind by the way.

Thank you, Jane. Do you think the role of traditional meat products on the dinner table is at risk or decline and or what is the consumer sentiment here when we are looking at lab grown meats versus the red meat industry?

That's a question that provokes a lot of thought. 

I don't think that the role of traditional meat products is ever going to disappear in society. 

The lab grown meat industry is going to take a long time to be scalable to an extent where it could be put into the consumer domain. 

I think it will still be a product that will be considered only by a subset of people who eat meat. Now, there may be really good reasons why people would want to source a meat that can be grown without the requirement of an animal to do the growing. 

But those meat products are still fundamentally animal-based. If they're cultured from cells, those cells still have to come from an animal to produce that. 

Interestingly the pharmaceutical by products that we were talking about also come from animals which are required to grow lab-based meat.

Maybe I'm thinking of space travel where maybe we can't grow an animal in that environment. Lab-based meat absolutely could be the way forward. I think for the rest of us, until I've got my holiday home on Mars, probably not.

Okay. All right. Thank you, Jane. Thank you very much.