Agricultural News
Beef Quality Audit Adds New Facet for Collecting More Comprehensive Data
Mon, 27 Aug 2012 11:58:51 CDT
The 2012 National Beef Quality Audit is now in the books and Jason Ahola, associate profession of beef production systems at Colorado State University, says the results are helpful. He is one of the authors of this year's study and says the BQA did something a little different this year in hopes of gathering even more useful data in the future. Ahola spoke with Ron Hays in the first part of a two-part Beef Buzz on the BQA.
"This year, we tried to involve producers. The challenge is we would like to be able to document improvements that producers have made in that time, but this is the first time that we measured that. So, we can only speculate about what are producers doing today and how maybe that's influenced the improvements we've seen in the other data."
He says past BQAs focused almost entirely on meat packers and how they viewed the quality of beef, but it was time to involve producers for a broader understanding of how to consistently turn out a better product.
"It was a great start in trying to measure producer behaviors and how that influences quality, but we still do have future audits to go to try to really track what producers are doing differently."
Even though the data isn't complete, Ahola says it appears producers are improving their practices and that is having an impact on beef quality. BQA
"I think this audit has really shown that producers who do things consistent with Beef Quality Assurance-that's where they give injections, how they handle cattle, the records that they keep, a variety of those things-the things they are doing consistent with BQA are improving or they're doing more of those and that is clearly influencing the end product in quality, value and the incidence of any kind of defect."
Click here for the results of the Beef Quality Audit.
The Beef Buzz is a regular feature heard on radio stations around the region on the Radio Oklahoma Network- but is also a regular audio feature found on this website as well. Click on the LISTEN BAR below for today's show- and check out our archives for older Beef Buzz shows covering the gamut of the beef cattle industry today.
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