Technology company Cirrus360 presented their 5G-edge-cloud innovation for workflow automation for small and medium meat processors, at the 2026 International Livestock Congress held March 4-5, 2026, in Houston, Texas, during the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo.

Small and medium sized poultry and meat processors provide many advantages to society at large, enabling a diversity of choice in meat and poultry products, local employment often in rural communities, a more efficient and reliable food supply chain, and a low carbon footprint farm-to-table food chain within a local community. However, they do not have the advantages of scale that allow their larger competitors to maintain large teams for quality and compliance as well as install complicated and expensive Information Technology (IT) equipment to support their workflows.

In collaboration with meat processing specialists at Rail19, and Texas A&M meat science faculty, Cirrus360 presented an automation assisted, affordable and integrated solution, Edgware, to address the above challenges with sensors, 5G edge, cloud and automation technology. This solution allows a small meat processor, with little to no IT investment, to leverage an automated system for monitoring and analysis of their production flows and processes - to meet their business needs, prevent waste and overhead, as well as meet the requirements of USDA/FSIS and state regulatory bodies.

 "This technology will help small businesses to streamline their daily operations automating tedious and time-consuming processes, reducing manual effort wherever possible, and enabling real-time incident detection and reporting, through a centralized management console," said Sudipta Sen, founder and VP product engineering at Cirrus360.

"Cirrus360's work with the USDA to develop and advance affordable technology for small meat processing plants gives us great hope for the future of our industry. Many low volume meat processing plants struggle to attain technologies and software as many are unaffordable or too complex for our scope of work," said Katie Koon, managing partner for Rail 19.

"This collaboration between Cirrus360 and Rail19 has resulted in innovation that combines communications and data sensing technologies in a very applied, sensible way to solve the complex problems faced by small meat processors in trying to achieve their business goals while adhering to the highest standard of food safety and the associated regulations," said Penny Riggs, Department of Animal Science, Texas A&M University.

Cirrus360 appreciates USDA NIFA for a Phase III Meat and Poultry Processing Research Initiative (MPPRI) award, which provided the funding for this research and development of Edgware.

The 5G system integration and validation leveraged Cirrus360's, Gabriel platform, developed with funding from US Department of Commerce, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund.

The integrated solution incorporates private 5G hardware from Pegatron Corp., including an Intel Xeon Icelake-D server, Pegatron radio unit, Pegatron 5G camera, sensors, and the open source OCUDU ocudu.org 5G stack.

Source: Cirrus360 Corp.