Senior Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) managers have outlined bold plans to drive the uptake of the Meat Standards Australia (MSA) system.
MSA project manager Mick Crowley said MLA was looking to drive the adoption of the system, to ensure every animal processed was at least eligible to be graded. “By 2020 we are hoping to grade 50 per cent of the national cattle slaughter – it’s about 35 per cent today,” Mr Crowley told the Bendigo Future of Eating Quality forum. He said it was also hoped to continue pushing up the index, which had increased .94 points over the past five years, to now stand at an average of 57.6. The index predicts the eating quality of 39 cuts in a carcase, using measurements collected by accredited graders.
Mr Crowley said the My MSA benchmarking system would allow producers to select cattle to meet specific markets and encourage them to look at changes, required for improvement.
MSA operations manager Sarah Strachan said the MLA now had 57 million pieces of information on carcases which went through the processing system. “The time is right to start using this information and getting the biggest bang for our buck,” Ms Strachan said. “Let’s actually dig a little bit deeper into the data and find out what’s driving eating quality changes, and what is driving compliance.” Last financial year, Victoria had 10 per cent of Australia’s MSA graded cattle, or 265,014 carcases. There had been a 500pc growth in MSA grading in the state, since 2010-11, but Ms Strachan said it still stood at only 14pc of adult cattle slaughtered.Victoria’s average MSA index was 59.61, compared with the national average of 57.61, while a larger proportion also had values of above 60. “For the grass fed producer, to be in the top 50 per cent, you need an MSA index of 59 – for grain fed, its 57,” she said.
While most carcases were meeting better than the average benchmark, there was a jump in non-compliance from the summer to the winter months. “The peaks they were getting in that compliance was due to dark cutting, a dark meat color and high pH – this is consistent with all production categories, in all states.” Dark cutting resulted from the nutrition consumed by the animal and the amount of stress it was under.
“There is going to be stress on those animals, that stress could be in mustering, in transport, in loading, that is completely inevitable. “If they don’t have enough nutrition in the first place, there will not be enough glycogen to protect them against the stresses they come across.”
