Conducted every five years, the National Beef Quality Audit (NBQA) surveys the beef industry’s production improvement efforts.
During an interview with the Radio Oklahoma Ag Network, Dr. Clay Mathis discussed the 2022 audit’s findings for industry workers and consumers alike. Mathis is the Director and Endowed Chair of the King Ranch Institute at Texas A&M University-Kingsville.
“These quality audits have been a great tool for our industry to be able to benchmark our progress, to help us build strategy to make improvements,” he said. “At the same time, as we get better at what we do, that is good for our industry because consumers can see that.”
The audit is a tool that supports continuous improvement in the beef cattle industry on many fronts, Mathis said.
“This Beef Quality Assurance program and training are key to being able to do a good job and continually do better,” he said.
The audit revealed that some slaughter cattle are carrying more fat than preferred by industry standards.
“The market signals that we want to feed these cattle a little bit longer to make sure they will grade in that upper part of choice and into prime,” Mathis said. “So there are incentives to get these cattle a little fatter. We just need to be thoughtful about how much trim is going to come off those yield grade four and yield grade five cattle, and get back more money for higher-quality carcasses.”
The market supports feeding cattle longer, he said.
“During this audit period, COVID was going on at the same time,” Mathis said. “That is when the cattle were in these plants, and a lot of them just couldn’t find shackle space so they got fed a little bit longer.”
Another integral part of the audit is sustainability, he said. Overall, consumers are happy with the high-quality beef they have access to today.
“We know that when consumers think about sustainability, when they think about our industry, the first thing they are concerned with is animal well-being,” Mathis said. The beef industry has been dedicated to animal well-being practices for centuries, he said, but the NBQA provides another way to showcase those practices.
“I think it is good when somebody looks at our industry from the outside and says, ‘Look at all this educational effort to ensure that we are taking care of these animals well’,” Mathis said. “This is a way for us to showcase our industry-driven effort to achieve excellence in animal handling and animal well-being.”
The full audit can be found at bqa.org.