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Industry insiders: Judging cattle a guessing game

Published 5/26/2009 in Beef Empire Days-Industry

By STEPHANIE FARLEY

sfarley@gctelegram.com

You can have some of the best-looking cattle you've ever seen and mark the animals down to do well in both the Live and Carcass shows, part of 2009 Beef Empire Days festivities.

Once the cattle go off to slaughter, though, it's a different story, and that carcass will come back, clear of the skin and hide, and "it's a sorry son of a gun," said Carcass Show Chairman Gale Seibert.

"It's a guessing game," Seibert said of the Live and Carcass shows, which essentially allow people in the industry and the common person to try their hand at guessing the correlation between the quality of the live animal and carcass.

A steer could be ugly on the outside but have high-quality meat on the inside, Seibert said.

The Live Show judge — this year it's Marcine Moldenhauer, a K-State graduate with a bachelor's in animal science and meat technology who has spent 22 years with Cargill Meat Solutions as part of the cattle procurement management team — will rank, in her opinion, the top steers and heifers. The judge, Seibert said, is typically someone known in the cattle industry and who has a reputation for live evaluation of the animal.

While it's a guessing game, Seibert says, "there are clues that tell us" what could make one animal grade better than another as far as the meat.

Breed can have something to do with how the meat might grade, he said, but just because an animal may be a certain breed, such as Angus, doesn't automatically mean they're good on the inside.

A judge can decide to keep the animal in the running or throw it out, Seibert said.

Then, Wednesday night after the Live Show — Moldenhauer is expected to start final judging around 10 a.m. of the top steers and heifers at the Finney County Fairgrounds — when the cattle arrive and start being processed at Tyson Fresh Meats, Seibert comes in and records the ear tag numbers. The numbers are the association between the live animal and the carcass.

It's not quite a 48-hour chill in the freezer for the carcasses before Seibert and Carcass Show judge Tom Carr, professor in the Department of Animal Sciences at the University of Illinois, start working with the cattle on Friday.

A computer formula that takes into account six or seven factors, including size, marbling and fat, etc., helps rank the carcasses — every carcass starts with 100 points, Seibert said, and then the score is added to or reduced based on how the carcass scores.

The judge then comes in and either agrees or disagrees — with the ability to change — with the rankings.

Seibert says the end goal is to see how the top live animal matches up with the No. 1 carcass animal, and very few times is the top carcass the top live animal.

What to look for

Clint Alexander, chairman for the Grandstand Judging and Carcass Evaluation contests, says his advice to anyone, whether it's "average Joe" or someone who's trained in judging the quality of cattle and their meat, is to look at the animal in every dimension.

There are some tools, he said, that can help people judge the animal, including the weight, frame size and amount of fat and muscle people can figure the animal's carrying.

Usually, the more marbling on cattle, the better or higher their meat grades, Alexander said. The marbling plays a role in the juiciness and flavor of the meat.

According to National 4-H curriculum, when judging, people typically look for muscling, trimness and quality in the cattle, and the best combination of the three characteristics.

• Muscling is the amount of muscle tissue that an animal has.
• Quality is a measure of how good the muscle tissue is; color's an indicator of quality; the amount of marbling is an indicator of quality; and age of the animal at the time of slaughter also is an indicator.
• Trimness is the absence of excess fat. Some fat in a carcass or cut of meat is good — it gives flavor — but too much fat is bad. Alexander also explains that as fat is heated and melts with the meat, it serves as a type of lubrication that makes the piece easier to consume.

Alexander said one of the biggest mistakes people tend to make during grandstand judging is assuming that one characteristic or breed means the meat will grade higher. For example, Angus cattle are black, but just because some cattle are black doesn't mean they're Angus. And an Angus isn't automatically guaranteed to grade higher.

Alexander invites anyone to try their hand at judging the animals. And while Alexander says he's more than willing to try and help someone at judging the live animal, he warns he doesn't have the answer either ... at least, not until the animal gets to the meat packing plant and the carcass is on display.

Live Show Chairman Kurt Snyder says that if people want to learn how to judge an animal and its meat, he suggests they attend both the Live and Carcass shows.

To judge both the live animal and carcass, though, Snyder said, people almost have to have X-ray vision in order to judge what the animal will be without his hide on.

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