20 - Automated grading of beef carcasses

Abstract

Carcass grading forms the basis for quality-based payments to producers and is a common language to facilitate trade in carcasses. A good grading scheme can lead to improvements in efficiency, as producers have a financial incentive to modify their production methods to produce carcases that are the most desired by consumers. Different beef carcass grading schemes were introduced in the main beef-producing regions, but they all used trained classifiers to assess certain carcass characteristics. They were therefore seen as being subjective and prone to influence, thereby limiting their effectiveness. The development of instrumental objective methods to grade beef carcasses has mainly concentrated on using video image analysis technology (VIA) to mimic grader assessments. In Europe, the rules governing beef carcass grading were changed in 2003 to allow mechanical grading. This has led to many installations in several countries of three different systems. In the USA, handheld VIA systems have been authorised to augment the grader assessments. Future developments in Europe may include using saleable yield assessments from the VIA systems as the basis for qualitybased payments; and in the USA there is a move towards fully automated assessment. Ideally, grading should be based on palatability, the consumer perception of quality, but reliable methods to measure this on-line are lacking.