More than a Beauty Contest: The Importance of Carcass Contests

As a commercial sheep producer who is also the father of two daughters who have shown lambs at our local fair since they were nine years old, I'm sometimes conflicted about the value of showing livestock. Selecting the best lambs (or the best steers) in 15 minutes of watching them walk and evaluating their muscle and fat cover by eye or by feel can be challenging for even the most accomplished judge. Stock shows, for me, can seem like superficial beauty contests. As a commercial producer, I get paid for the quality of the meat I produce. Sure, structural correctness and conformation are important – as is the appropriate feeding regimen – but ultimately I get paid to produce meat that provides consumers with a delicious and nutritious meal.

To me – and I suspect to many commercial producers - carcass contests, where fair animals are judged on the quality and quantity of product post-harvest, are an important way to enhance the educational value of youth livestock projects. These contests recognize those youths who produced the best meat product, rather than those who raised the most stylish animal. Thanks to the Tahoe Cattlemen's Association and Superior Farms, our beef and lamb carcass contests for the Placer County, Nevada County, and Gold Country Fairs were especially innovative in 2018.

Beef Carcass Contest

The Tahoe Cattlemen's Association (TCA), which represents beef cattle producers in Placer and Nevada Counties, has long sponsored the beef carcass contest for our three local fairs. The affiliated Placer-Nevada CattleWomen have concurrently sponsored a rate-of-gain contest (which also brings economics into the equation). Like many local cattlemen's associations who sponsor these competitions, TCA has used criteria established by the California Beef Cattle Improvement Association to provide monetary awards for Carcasses of Merit and Gold Seal Carcasses. This year, these criteria were as follows:

These criteria, obviously, are designed to reward those exhibitors who select and feed steers that best meet consumer demand for tender, delicious beef. Here are the results for this year's fairs:

TCA, however, takes the beef contest one step further. To select the top carcass in each fair, TCA uses a modified version of the Certified Angus Beef carcass grid to help exhibitors understand the economic value of specific carcass parameters. Each carcass received premiums or discounts depending on its merit:

These premiums and discounts are designed to provide incentive to produce what consumers want to buy – and to reward producers (youth exhibitors, in this case) for producing beef that generates profit for all sectors of the beef production chain (from producers to processors to retailers).

TCA provides a trophy buckle to the exhibitor of the top-placing steer from each fair, based on this grid. This year, TCA also provided the actual monetary premium that each of the top three steers at each fair earned. In other words, the top three exhibitors actually made extra money on their fair steers based on the quality of the product they produced! All told, TCA awarded more than $3,000 this year to the next generation of local beef producers – and provided a valuable lesson about the economics of raising beef in the process!

Lamb Carcass Contest

While Placer and Nevada Counties do not have an active local sheep producers organization like TCA that supports our lamb carcass competition, we are fortunate to have the ongoing support of Superior Farms, the foremost processor of lamb in the western United States. I should note that Superior also donated lamb for the tacos we served for dinner – for some families, this was their first experience tasting lamb - I think they're hooked!

In the last year, Superior implemented an innovative electronic grading system at their Northern California facility. Using digital photography and a computer algorithm that estimates carcass quality and product yield, Superior can now accurately grade lambs electronically at normal processing speeds – the grading process no longer requires a human grader to measure backfat or loin eye area.

This year, each fair used electronic ear tags in exhibitor lambs to facilitate data collection at Superior. Superior, in turn, provided carcass-specific data generated by its electronic grading system. Each exhibitor received information about his or her lamb's quality and yield grade, retail product yield (a new component Superior calls “ovine carcass cutability”), and primal cut yield (that is, the weight of the rack, loin, leg, and other primals). Superior then developed a point system designed to emphasis optimal traits in the following areas:

Similar to the grid used in our beef carcass contest, Superior's scoring system rewards those exhibitors who hit the bulls eye in terms of product quality and yield of high value cuts (leg of lamb, rack of lamb, and lamb loin). And thanks to a generous donation from Laura Farmer (who served for many years on the Gold Country Fair Junior Livestock Association), the top exhibitor from each fair went home with a trophy buckle - and (hopefully) with a greater appreciation for what it takes to be profitable in the sheep business!

Youth livestock projects, whether through 4-H or the Future Farmers of America, teach young people invaluable lessons about responsibility, animal care, and marketing. The livestock shows and junior livestock auctions at our county fairs are a culmination of the hard work of these young producers. Ultimately, however, I believe it's important to also learn about the responsibility that goes into raising food – and this includes a responsibility to understand meat quality and economic viability. The innovative new approaches developed by the Tahoe Cattlemen's Association and Superior Farms help provide this real-world focus!