The Irish beef industry needs to ensure that all meat we export is of really high quality to maintain consumers eating experience of eating Irish beef as a positive one.

How can we ensure this?

The processing industry has made improvements over the last 20 years in terms of ways of hanging beef and ensuring beef is of the highest eating quality but the industry needs to look at where the next improvements can be made.

Teagasc and ICBF are now looking at what else can be done within the industry to affect meat eating quality. Breeding and the genetics used on Irish beef farms has been identified as a possible route to increase this. Can we breed for higher meat eating quality? The answer is yes we can.

Shear force, panel tenderness, juiciness and flavour can all be influence by genetics. ICBF are well positioned to capitalise on this by using meat eating quality in the construction of their genetic indexes.

The trial

Data on meat tenderness, flavour and juiciness were collected on Irish cattle for the past five years by Teagasc and ICBF.

All cattle performance-tested at the ICBF Tully test station have been evaluated for meat tenderness since 2014. These animals have also yielded information on performance traits such as growth rate, feed intake and therefore feed efficiency, providing knowledge of the relationships among all these traits.

The aim is to have 8,000 meat sensory results by the end of 2020, ensuring that the dataset held in Ireland is three times larger than the next-largest international dataset on meat sensory results generated from a trained panel.

The results

Simmental animals are coming out worst for tenderness but there is huge within breed differences. Angus and Hereford top the taste test for tenderness, juiciness and flavour. ICBF will launch meat EBVs for AI sires in the very near future which will allow farmers select on these traits when selecting sires for their herds. Judge said “the next step is to talk to processors about how higher meat eating quality will return higher prices from the market.

Comment

By selecting on the current terminal index, tenderness of the meat will increase by 0.07 units, juiciness will remain constant and flavour will decrease by 0.03 units.

Decreasing flavour is a worrying trend as it’s an important trait for consumers when purchasing and eating beef.

So what can be done?

Michelle wondered what a halt in the decline in flavour would do to affect other traits in the index.

When flavour was focused on, this had a negative effect on conformation. That poses the question – is the current grading system and index system fit for the current consumer market?

Farmers have been told to focus on the terminal index and in the current grading system factories pay more for U grade animals.

Market sentiment towards beef and eating beef at the moment is challenging. We need to be conscious that many people may eat less beef in the future, so any eating experience that they may have needs to be a positive one and the industry or farmers can’t run the risk of this eating experience being a bad one.

Grading systems

Other countries like Australia or the USA have moulded grading systems around marbling, with a direct link to meat-eating quality.

We are the envy of the world in terms of our genomics database so it makes perfect sense to move to the next step in terms of incorporating meat eating quality into our genetic indexes so progress can be made. We depend on exports exporting 90% of the beef that we produce so any unique selling point that we can look at has to help underpin Irish beef at the top of the market.