Beef: Will yield be the next grading target for the beef industry?

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

'Yield in cattle is just as important as butterfat is to the dairyman,' says beef consultant Charlie Gracey. And an animal yielding more lean meat will cost less in feed

by DON STONEMAN

A hundred years ago, says beef consultant Charlie Gracey, butter makers complained that Holstein milk contained so little fat you could drop a dime into a milk pail and "tell whether it landed heads or tails."

Butter makers decided they were going to measure butterfat content and pay farmers for it in their milk, and the rest of the story of the famous Canadian Holstein industry is history. Why not pay producers more for cattle which produce more usable product?

A carcass is now graded based upon quality, with a higher grade given to animals with more marbling. Gracey says that meat yield is just as important but a yield measurement system, introduced in 1993, was "watered down" to speed grading and is inaccurate. Based upon tests done over three years at Manitoba packer National Valley Farms, Gracey found that almost 90 per cent of 3,000 cattle were lumped into two of three grades, with a wide variation of usable meat yields.

There is a huge variation in yield in one grade, agrees Mike McMorris, general manager of Beef Improvement Ontario. Based on $150 a hundredweight, two thirds of cattle fall within a value range of $142 to $161. That's a range of $20 per hundredweight on a 700-pound carcass.

"Yield in cattle is as important to cattle as butterfat is to the dairyman," Gracey says. The lower-yielding animals are more expensive to feed because the part of the carcass that isn't meat is fat, Gracey says. An animal yielding 57 per cent lean meat carries 49 pounds more fat than an animal producing 64 per cent lean meat. Putting fat on an animal takes three times as much feed as does lean muscle. At a conservative cost of 56 cents a pound for gain, that lower yielding animal ate $27 worth of feed that was converted into fat and trimmed off at the packing plant.

With individual identification, which is required to trace beef cattle in case of a BSE outbreak, grades of individual cattle can now be linked back to the farm of origin and used to improve breeding plans. The Canadian Cattlemen's Association is keenly interested in it, Gracey says. After meetings across the country, Gracey concludes that "producers want this information. Up until we had individual ID, we couldn't do much about it. We need to get the information back to the guy who bred the cow, not just the guy who sold the finished steer."

Some packers don't want to share grade information, Gracey admits. He says producers should be able to access grade information on their cattle via the database maintained by the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency.

Working through provincial and national organizations and convincing reluctant packers to come on board will take time. McMorris thinks that a small-scale approach working with local marketing initiatives via the Ontario Cattlemen's Association will get quicker results.

Cattlemen who want to be in the business in five years "realize they have to do something different," he says. There will be more demand for better beef sires. "If you send an economic signal, the beef industry will change what a carcass looks like," McMorris says. Producers "have done that every time the grading system changed." BF