Stuart Ellingham, the general manager of Hawke’s Bay’s Horizon Farming Ltd, led the FITT project which took carcase data from the Progressive Meats 1st XV farmer group.
“We were getting a whole lot of data from Progressive Meats on the carcases, but no one was understanding it. We decided to try to zero in on it and investigate further.”
Livestock geneticist Aimee Charteris was employed to look at how feed, breed, birth rank and sex influenced carcaseweight, fatness and saleable meat yield.
While no on-farm EID data was supplied, the farmers had split the lambs into male and female lines. If the lambs were grown on different diets, these were sent for processing separately.
Charteris found ewe lambs were on average always fatter at the same age than male lambs, but there was no significant difference between carcaseweight and saleable meat yield between the two sexes.
As expected, single lambs were heavier and fatter and had lower saleable meat yields than twins.
Single born lambs should be slaughtered earlier to achieve better saleable meat yields, but that means farmers need to have a way to separately identify the singles.
They also found a 3% drop in saleable meat yield in March and April when the lambs become sexually active.
Charteris says this variation is likely to be due to a combination of declining feed quality and the lambs reaching sexual maturity: “They are not concentrating on eating grass.”
Ellingham says that’s a good reason to separate male and female lambs at weaning, particularly terminal-sired lambs. And while many farmers now leave male lambs entire, farmers could reconsider castrating these lambs.
Condition scores should be monitored closely and ewe lambs killed earlier than the males at lower liveweights to avoid lower saleable meat yields.
“Evaluating what can be done in your own farming system to minimise a decrease in yield could well result in some serious dollars added to the bottom line.”
Ellingham says this shows farmers should preferentially feed entire male lambs to finish them before yield drops off. At docking the small male lambs can be castrated and the bigger lambs left entire.
Charteris says more work is needed to fully understand breed variations and the correlation between dressing out percentage and saleable meat yield before she would recommend on-farm breed changes from this dataset.
As a result of the research, Ellingham’s farming business is going to make some changes:
- Killing single lambs earlier to take advantage of higher saleable meat yield. That occurs now anyway because they are bigger lambs
- Separating the male and female lambs, and prioritising their feeding and drafting over the season.
- Targeting entire ram lambs’ feeding to get them killed before sexual maturity because of yield drop off, and
- Castrating male lambs at docking that will not make the first draft.
Quality question
Why aren’t farmers paid for how good their lamb meat tastes?
And where is the in-market research to find out what customers in different markets will pay for in terms of product qualities?
These questions have come up through the results of a FITT trial in Hawke’s Bay to look at on-farm ways to improve saleable meat yield.
The trial, which analysed lamb data and saleable meat yields, has thrown up some interesting issues for the meat industry.
Horizon Farming general manager Stuart Ellingham heads the 1st XV group of farmers who supply Progressive Meats.
Now farmers can opt for payment based on saleable meat yields at Progressive Meats, and get lots of data back about their lambs. Ellingham says farmers want to use this information to make the best decisions about how to breed animals for the future.
Geneticist Aimee Charteris asks that if saleable meat yield goes too high on a carcase, what does that do for product quality? “It looks detrimental to go over a certain threshold.”
As yield increases past a threshold, there is a trade-off between the yield and the product quality, Ellingham says.
Charteris says the issue is that, at the moment, there is no objective measurement or financial reward for product quality for lamb meat.
This is problematic for the whole industry. Not only do farmers not know what to aim for with their flocks, the breeders making decisions now to influence the future flock also do not know what they should be aiming for.
Ellingham says most people set their breeding objectives around economics, but at the moment the economics reflect yield rather than quality. “That is nothing to do with what the product tastes like.”
What bothers both most is that the New Zealand meat industry is not making much of an effort to find out what customers in different markets do think of our product quality.
“We don’t think there is a lot of marketing going on with customers,”Ellingham says. “Emerging markets give us the power to start from scratch with our customers.”
Charteris would like to see market research into the most favourable attributes customers would like to see in a product. Then it’s a question of what customers may pay extra for.
“We need that information to come back to the breeders, farmers and processors so we can design a better product which is better aligned to our customers.
“We want breeding, production, processing and marketing to all be aligned, and we want to be able to provide the customer with what they want and what they are willing to pay for.”
They recognise that one lamb carcase is cut to go into many different markets, but they are talking about high-value cuts such as racks and loins.
Ellingham can imagine different animals being bred for different markets such as a northwestern European lamb, and a North American lamb, and a Chinese lamb. Both want to see this shift occur so all participants in the supply chain improve returns to their bottom line.
“We have to have information coming back from our customers via marketers for us to aim at. At the moment it is a big blank space,” they say.
