Techniques for evaluation of beef muscle "biopsies" as a means of estimating palatability and composition of live animals

The livestock industry of today is becoming more cognizant of the importance of producing animals that will yield carcasses with superior meat quality, combined with a high proportion of lean cuts. Until recent years, the emphasis placed on the amount of finish as an indication of quality in live cattle has presented livestock producers with a slightly distorted picture of the characteristics most desirable in meat animals. Some animals produce carcasses with a relatively small amount of fat and a high proportion of muscle tissue, but with meat quality equal, or even superior, to those animals that are much fatter. These desirable animals often are difficult to recognize and do not always receive proper recognition in livestock shows and sales.

The present widely used method of selecting superior meat type animals on the basis of their carcass characteristics, as determined by physical and chemical analyses, is a laborious and expensive process. Through the use of high frequency sound instruments, research workers now are able to accurately measure the fat covering in live animals. These instruments also are used to measure, with a lesser degree of accuracy, the size of selected muscles in live animals. These measurements, when properly calculated to animal weight, may be used to predict the meatiness, or muscle to fat ratio, of the potential carcass.

The development of an accurate and relatively inexpensive method of analyzing live animals to determine the palatability of their carcasses would be helpful to all segments of the beef cattle industry. Therefore, this investigation was undertaken to determine the possible carcass quality factors that could be determined from a small section of the longissimus dorsi muscle, similar to a biopsy sample taken from a live animal, and the relationship of these factors to carcass data from the same animals.