Prediction of carcass meat, fat and bone yield across diverse cattle genotypes using live animal measurements

Abstract

Live measurements of weight, height, length, girth, fat depth, stifle- and hip-width were obtained prior to slaughter to develop prediction equations for carcass traits. The animals were boned out after slaughter and comprised 182 steers from the Southern Crossbreeding Program (progeny from Hereford cows crossed with seven sire breeds: Angus, Belgian Blue, Hereford, Jersey, Limousin, South Devon and Wagyu) and 59 steers from the Davies Gene Mapping Project (pure Limousin, pure Jersey and Limousin x Jersey). Stepwise regression was used to indicate the relative importance of variables in each model designed to estimate the percentage of meat, bone and fat from the carcass weight. The meat, bone and fat yields correspond to 70, 19 and 11% of the carcass on weight basis. The prediction equations developed accounted for 93, 87, 74 and 65% of the variation in carcass, meat, bone and fat weight respectively without breed in the model. This study has shown that some carcass traits may be determined accurately from measurements on live animal.