BIXS a first step in fixing a broken industry

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

The new Beef InfoXchange System will share information on carcass yield and quality grade among all members of the value chain, helping to identify the animals in demand

by DON STONEMAN

Wellington County beef producer Bob Wilson is excited about the possibilities offered by the Beef InfoXchange System (BIXS), launched in September.

"The beef industry is seriously broken and it has been for some time," Wilson says.

He laments that there's no connection between the meat that consumers want and the cattle that are raised on beef farms across Canada.

Wilson and his family calve out 60 beef cows on a diversified operation in Erin Township.

He is enrolled in Beef Improvement Ontario (BIO)'s two-year old BIOTrack program, which automatically became part of BIXS when the Canadian Cattlemen's Association announced it in September. Other producers will be able to register for the program independently.

BIXS captures grading information from cameras at plants run by Canada's two major packing companies, XCEL and Cargill, including the latter's Guelph Better Beef plant.

The plan is that, within two years, BIXS should have 95 per cent of federally inspected packer capacity in Canada contributing carcass yield and quality grade. More data will become available as electronic carcass measurements come online over the next year across Canada. A version of the computer software involved is being tested for faults by a limited number of producers.

BIO's boss, Mike McMorris, says BIXS is an opportunity for Ontario's beef producers to get back the $15 million they have invested in bar code and radio frequency identification ear tags since individual animal cattle identification became mandatory in 1997.

BIXS is an information system shared among all participants in the value chain.

Participating producers can benchmark and compare their production management systems against an industry average and, over time, track their own improvement.

Beef industry consultant Charlie Gracey says BIXS has the potential to change the cattle that are produced, because it will clearly identify the animals that are in demand.

Change is urgently needed, Gracey asserts. Lean meat yield is the "forgotten component" in beef grading. Pork producers have been paid on meat yield from individual animals for years. Poultry has been bred specifically for meat production for decades.

"Cattle happen to be the least efficient of the main meat production species and cattle production has lost ground to both poultry and hog production. Is it just an accident or a coincidence that both the pork and poultry industry have used genetics and carcass evaluation much more effectively than has the cattle industry?" he asks.

Gracey sees the potential for beef animals to be priced on actual percentage of meat yield rather than yield classes. He worked with now defunct Natural Valley Packers in Saskatchewan. Natural Valley paid more for the high yielding cattle and less for the lower yielding animals. Lean meat yield from a beef carcass ranged from 50 to 70 per cent. On average, Gracey says, the plant was paying no more for cattle than other plants.

By and large in Canada, beef cattle settlement is still based on liveweight basis and, to a lesser extent, on yield. The exceptions are for cattle sold into branded programs, or on a packer's grid.

Will producers get paid more for their good cattle using BIXS?

"We aren't making that promise," says Larry Thomas, the program's national co-ordinator. "But that would be a logical evolution of this type of information flow."

However, he concedes that packers haven't committed to going that far. It will take movement on the industry part to get payment on a yield basis. "This BIXS system will enable us to move that information to the people who register the Canadian Cattle Identification Agency information to their BIXS account," Thomas says. 

Producers will have to register that information to a BIXS account if they aren't already automatically registered via a program such as BIOTrack.

It will take time for producers to get information on the cattle they raise, Thomas says. "It may take two to three years of data for the images information to start showing up, the really positive and beneficial stuff in your operation or the stuff that is costing you money and is inefficient."

"The more information that is available to us, the better," adds Wilson, who sells seedstock as well as some beef into a branded program. "The more information that I can use in decision-making, the better I should be able to respond to market demands from the packer or the consumer. Getting carcass data back is not going to fix a broken system, but it is one more step." BF