Opportunities to build beef profits at an industry and single farm level tied together the presentations at the South West Beef Conference in Ballarat yesterday.
Speakers from Meat & Livestock Australia, Department of Environment and Primary Industries (DEPI) and processors, as well as farmers covered ways to optimise profits, including through genetic selection, nutrition, understanding market.
About 80 farmers and service providers attended the conference. The speakers encouraged them to use information available within these areas to set goals and plan changes they could make to their operation to increase productivity.
Trevor and Margery Smith of Jan Juc Pastoral Company said the presentations intermeshed to provide a good overview of how to run a good operation and grow good cattle.
The Smiths and fellow beef farmers Tim Cooke of Linton, said DEPI’s Fiona Baker’s presentation on weaner nutrition would be particularly useful to their operations.
“You can feel you have cattle on good grass but they don’t put as weight as you’d expect, and Fiona’s talk made me consider that maybe it’s because there is too much protein in that lush pasture. I hadn’t realised the extra energy needed to excrete that extra protein,” Mrs Smith said.
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The farmers said Meat Standards Australia (MSA)’s Terry Farrell’s presentation on the changes to the MSA accreditation helped them understand them better.
The new MSA Index score is calculated by taking the predicted eating-quality value from the MSA model for each of the 39 cuts in the carcase, based on their most common cooking method and multiplying each of these scores by the predetermined proportion of the muscle that each particular cut makes up.
The MSA index ranges from 30-80 but most cattle are expected to fall between 50 and 75 with the higher the number the better potential eating quality, replacing the existing 1-18 boning groups.
Fourteen of the 42 MSA accredited plants in the country have moved to the new customised system (known as MSA optimisation) and the rest will have to make the change by the end of the year.
Each processor will be able to choose which cuts they want to pack with an MSA accreditation, that way cuts on the same beast that might not have made the grade but were not going to be MSA packed don’t need to be included, and thus no longer drag down the whole carcase’s rating, Mr Farrell said.
Mt Egerton Angus beef farmer Joe Toohey welcomed the changes saying they could simplify the MSA accreditation process and see more of the worthy beef succeed in getting the MSA accreditation.
Read more on the South West Beef Conference in next week's Stock & Land.
