Brahman crosses meat quality study links sire breed and finishing to tenderness

Why the Meat Quality CRC set up this trial#

Beef buyers choose on a handful of things: quality, price, reputation, freshness and guarantee, as the paper notes when framing its reasoning. For beef specifically, eating quality sits at the centre of that list, covering taste, tenderness, flavour and marbling. The Australian beef industry was, at the time of this work, building quality assurance pathways under what became Meat Standards Australia, aimed at delivering a more reliable eating experience to consumers.

The Meat Quality Cooperative Research Centre set out to understand how the proportion of Bos indicus genetics in an animal affects its eating quality, once growth path, backgrounding, finishing regime and slaughter process are all accounted for. Brahman cattle, a Bos indicus breed, are valued in northern Australia for their tolerance of heat, ticks and poor-quality forage, but the industry needed hard data on how straightbred Brahman and various crossbred progeny actually performed on the plate. This paper reports the first calf crop from a larger Northern Crossbreeding Project designed to answer that question over three crops, and it builds a foundation that later crops in the same project were expected to extend with additional seasons and larger sample sizes. Understanding these breed effects properly required following animals right through from mating to the point of sale, across several different market specifications at once.

How the cattle were bred, raised and finished#

Brahman females were joined to sires from eight breeds: Brahman itself, Santa Gertrudis (a Bos indicus x British-derived breed), Belmont Red (Sanga x British derived), three British breeds (Angus, Hereford, Shorthorn) and two European breeds (Charolais and Limousin). This design let the researchers compare straightbred Brahman calves against seven different first-cross combinations, spanning a wide range of Bos indicus content.

Calves were born and weaned on two central Queensland properties, Brigalow Research Station and Duckponds, then held on one property until about 180 days of age. From there, roughly a quarter went to a southern grow-out property, another share moved north to a feedlot known as Goonoo once an early grow-out phase finished, and the remainder stayed behind at Duckponds to be finished on pasture. Target endpoints were the Australian domestic market at an average carcass weight of 220 kg, the Korean export market at 280 kg, and the Japanese export market at 340 kg, with pasture-finished and grain-finished cohorts both represented. Heifers went to domestic and Korean weights only, while steers were also taken through to Japanese weights, and half the northern steers received repeated Compudose implants from about 15 months of age.

Meat quality measurements followed established protocols referenced from Robinson and colleagues. Tenderness was assessed on the strip loin using Warner-Bratzler shear force or Instron compression, intramuscular fat was measured by chloroform extraction or near infrared spectroscopy, and cooking loss and ultimate pH were also recorded. A problem with electrical stimulation during early slaughters meant tenderness data from those kills, including all pasture-finished steers, had to be dropped from the analysis entirely, which narrowed what the final comparisons could show for that group of animals.

Sire breed differences in fat and toughness#

Three of the British-type breeds stood out for fat deposition: progeny sired by Angus, Belmont Red and Shorthorn bulls reliably carried more intramuscular fat than the other groups. This pattern matters because intramuscular fat, or marbling, is one of the traits the CRC used as a marker of eating quality, alongside direct tenderness measures.

Every toughness indicator in the study pointed the same way: on cooking loss, ultimate pH readings, shear force and compression testing, calves sired by Brahman bulls came out as the toughest group. Both the steer and heifer progeny from Brahman sires recorded shear force readings above the threshold the paper treats as acceptable for consumer tenderness, meaning a sizeable share of straightbred Brahman carcases would likely be judged too tough to eat comfortably. Differences between sire breeds were less clear-cut under Instron compression testing than under the other toughness measures, and the authors suggest this points to collagen content not being a major driver of toughness in this particular dataset, noting that all animals were under 2.5 years of age at slaughter.

What happened at the domestic, Korean and Japanese market weights#

Differences between sire breeds in intramuscular fat percentage were not expressed at the lighter domestic market weight, where fat levels were very low across the board. As animals moved up through the three market categories, from the lightest domestic endpoint through the Korean weight to the heaviest Japanese target, intramuscular fat percentages rose in both steers and heifers, a pattern consistent with the greater age reached at heavier endpoints.

Despite that rise in fat, meat toughness did not increase significantly with age or carcase weight in either sex. The paper draws a direct practical conclusion from this: the long-standing industry habit of accepting the fixed costs of slaughtering animals lighter for the domestic market, in order to guarantee tenderness, is not supported by this data, and processors and retailers finishing stock to heavier weights could potentially save money without sacrificing tenderness. That conclusion, if it holds up across the later calf crops in the wider project, would have real implications for how producers and feedlots schedule turn-off against market specifications and contract weights.

Feedlot and pasture finishing effects on Brahman crosses meat quality#

Grain finishing lifted intramuscular fat percentages substantially above pasture finishing in the north, in both northern and southern feedlot settings. Ultimate pH was consistently lower in cattle grain-finished in the south compared with those finished on grain or pasture in the north, though the authors flag that this may reflect a difference in abattoir rather than a true finishing effect, since early northern and southern kill groups were processed at different plants.

Because tenderness data for pasture-finished steers were excluded due to the electrical stimulation problem, the clearest pasture-versus-feedlot comparison comes from the heifers. Heifer progeny raised on northern pasture came out tougher than their counterparts finished in either feedlot setting, a pattern that held whether the researchers judged toughness by shear force or by compression testing. This finishing-regime effect runs alongside the sire breed effect and the market endpoint pattern, and the paper treats all three as separate, additive pieces of the overall picture of what drives eating quality in these crossbred cattle.

The interplay of these three factors, sire breed, market endpoint and finishing system, gives the study a layered structure rather than a single headline number. A producer reading the tables has to keep in mind that a tough result in one table cell might stem from breed, from age at slaughter, from the finishing pathway, or from some combination the trial was not designed to separate given the missing data and single calf crop involved. This layering is part of why the authors fitted carcass weight as a covariate within each market endpoint, so comparisons between groups were adjusted to a common carcase weight rather than left to vary by chance.

How much weight these findings can carry#

This is a single calf crop from a project intended to run across three years, and the authors state plainly that it is the first instalment of a larger analysis. The missing tenderness data for pasture-finished steers is a genuine gap, not a minor caveat, since it means one whole finishing pathway in one sex has no toughness measurements at all. We would treat the market-endpoint conclusion about domestic slaughter weights as a pointer worth testing further rather than a settled recommendation, given it rests on one year's data and an abattoir effect the authors themselves could not rule out.

That said, the sire breed result is consistent across several independent measures of toughness, which strengthens confidence in the finding that Brahman-sired progeny were tougher than every crossbred group tested. The paper's design, comparing eight sire breeds crossed onto a common Brahman female base and finished across matched market endpoints, is a reasonably structured way to isolate sire breed effects from management effects, even with only one calf crop in hand. Readers assessing the strength of these numbers should also keep the relatively small group sizes within some sire breed by market endpoint combinations in mind, since this affects how precisely each mean can be estimated and how confidently the ranking between breeds can be generalised beyond this particular herd and these particular properties.

Where this sits alongside other Brahman and domestic market research#

The paper's finding that domestic market cattle carry low intramuscular fat regardless of sire breed, and that toughness does not rise with slaughter weight, speaks directly to how Australian feedlot production is set up to meet grading targets for the domestic trade, a theme also explored in feeder steer specifications and domestic grainfed grading outcomes. The growth management side of running Brahman cattle in tropical production systems, examined through a different lens, appears in molasses feeding and Brahman steer growth rates, which covers the same breed under comparable northern Australian conditions.

The work reported here was published through the Association for the Advancement of Animal Breeding and Genetics, whose conference proceedings sit within this index's AAABG Conference Proceedings collection alongside other cattle and sheep breeding studies from the same research community.

Sources and further reading#

• The paper at AAABG proceedings (aaabg.org), free PDF
• AAABG proceedings online: the association's own site, where its proceedings are free to read
• Meat & Livestock Australia: red meat industry research and marketing body
• BREEDPLAN genetic evaluation: genetic evaluation system for Australian beef cattle

Questions#

— The Livestock Library team