THE ability to pack and trade beef on eating quality alone via a new cipher in the Australian Beef Language has the potential to deliver a whopping additional $46.5 million a year to the supply chain by eliminating the lost opportunity of high quality meat being downgraded due to dentition.
That’s the finding of Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) analysis as the new Eating Quality Graded (EQG) cipher is launched as an optional alternative to dentition ciphers such as YG and YP.
Extensive research has concluded dentition - the number of teeth and animal has - has no impact on the eating quality of beef, yet it has been a long battle, waged mostly on the part of producers, to remove the traditional trading indicator of a beast’s age/maturity.
Cattle that grade Meat Standards Australia (MSA) but are downgraded by processors on dentition is a large cost to the beef industry, producer leaders say.
Under current conditions, where cattle supply is short and feed is abundant in many regions, the losses are particularly stinging.
MLA’s general manager producer consultation and adoption Michael Crowley has described EQG, which is one of the first recommendations to be commercialised from last year’s review into the Beef Language, as a “game changer.”
Already commercial companies were behind it and product was going into international markets using the EQG descriptor, he said.
“Over 100,000 consumers who have eaten over 700,000 individual samples of beef over the past 25 years have told us dentition doesn’t impact eating quality,” Mr Crowley said.
MLA looked at a scenario of four and six tooth cattle over the past 12 months which met MSA specifications and most company eating quality specifications.
The price differences were estimated as: Four tooth were 5 cents a kilogram below YG graded cattle and the six tooth cattle were discounted by 30c/kg.
“If we could have packed that product on outcome first - without downgrading those animals - the extra value to producers would have been close to $9.5m,” Mr Crowley said.
“For the processor, brand owner and wholesale sectors, the extra value would have been $16.5m and at the retail level another $20.5m, based on known price differentials of MSA product collected at the retail sector.
“The total to industry is $46.5m in lost opportunity per year - what a great incentive for every step of the supply chain to get behind this.”
EQG is just one of the MSA changes in progress driving growth of the eating quality consistency program, which turns 20 in 2018. Another has been the removal of meat colour as an MSA requirement.
Shan Goodwin
Shan Goodwin steers ACM’s national coverage of the beef industry. Shan has worked as a journalist for 30 years, the majority of that with agricultural publications. She spent many years as The Land’s North Coast reporter and has visited beef properties and stations throughout the country and overseas. She treats all breeds equally. Contact 0427686187. E: s.goodwin@austcommunitymedia.com.au
Shan Goodwin steers ACM’s national coverage of the beef industry. Shan has worked as a journalist for 30 years, the majority of that with agricultural publications. She spent many years as The Land’s North Coast reporter and has visited beef properties and stations throughout the country and overseas. She treats all breeds equally. Contact 0427686187. E: s.goodwin@austcommunitymedia.com.au
