RESEARCH on whole-of-carcase assessment during processing has reached the early adoption stage and has some big benefits for all levels of the lamb supply chain if uptake is successful.
Price signals have traditionally encouraged lamb producers to breed heavier, higher yielding lambs, but it has been at the expense of eating quality traits such as tenderness and intramuscular fat, says Murdoch University associate professor Graham Gardner, Perth.
“In the technological marvel which is the Australian lamb market we are largely paid on the basis of carcase weight… and that’s it.”
“On its own it’s not a terribly good predictor of eating quality.”
Nor was the common fat depth test of palpating the lamb at the 12th rib – known as the GR (grade rule) site – accurate for lean meat yield prediction.
“That variability (in accuracy) has quite a serious cost from a lean meat yield perspective because we end up with more fat being trimmed from the carcase and that means extra labour and more waste,” Mr Gardner said.
“It also leads to inconsistent retail cut sizes, so the supermarkets don’t like that.”
The poor feedback these methods provided also meant price grids lacked capacity to reflect end consumer value. Dr Gardner said these factors combined to erode consumer confidence because consumers were never sure of what they were buying.
Unfortunately, the only real indicator of poor confidence in lamb’s consistency was the drop off in return customers.
“Now this can be managed – within an abattoir it can be managed through optimised carcase sorting prior to bone-out and if you could track those cuts through the boning room, then you can even sort based on size and eating quality, but only if you can measure it.”
In recent years, carcase weight has been increasing rapidly and lean meat yield has been following.
“That’s great, because these are profit drivers, but as often happens in production animal industries – we’ve seen this in pigs, this is no surprise – eating quality suffers.”
Indicators for eating quality, such as intramuscular fat, were in decline.
Shearforce (a measurement of tenderness) was also concurrently increasing, meaning tougher, harder to chew meat.
To combat this, key industry stakeholders, such as the Sheep Co-operative Research Centre, were developing tools such as breeding indices to address this, but more was needed.
“We need the indicator measurements for those traits as feedback so you can actually benchmark how your own animals are tracking and we also need it to underpin a price grid so you can get the right price signals to the producer,” Dr Gardner said.
With this aim, the federal government has backed a project called Advanced Livestock Measurement Technologies – of which Dr Gardner’s work is part – to accelerate the development of such measurement tools.
The project is being conducted across lamb, beef and pork and focuses on measurement within the value chain with the aim of increasing the transparency of the value transactions that take place along the production line.
“That means you get paid for the amount and the quality of what you sell,” he said.
The devices to make this possible are being created both for the live animal, for forecasting of meat yield, and for the carcase to provide within-abattoir measurements.
“Where possible, we’re going to try and find synergies with automation (ie. so the new technology can fit into existing equipment for a seamless adoption).”
The latter two thirds of this project are therefore going to be all about capturing data in abattoirs and feeding it into systems such as genetic databases, like Lambplan, to enhance breeding tools, and to improve producer feedback.
“The on-farm systems will lead to forecasting of what’s coming and those abattoir measurements will enable processors to start predicting the cut weights and their quality and then optimising the use of the carcase to meet the market’s requirements,” he said.
“The key focus here, because of the source of the funding… is that we need to get value returned to producers.”
