Beefing With The System

How a system designed to reward yield may drive down beef production

Dec 03, 2022

TL;DR The current beef grading system rewards yield on an individual animal basis, not on a whole farm basis. This leads to unintended consequences for animal welfare, farm profitability, and beef quality

‘Draw a line between the brisket and the hooks of that beast there. The half of the animal below that line is worth double the other half.’

And so, by a (very proud) beef farmer, I was unknowingly introduced to a system which has influenced a lot of my working life.

Unintended consequences are the Universe’s ‘gotchas!’. Of course, hindsight allows for high-def vision.

Today it’s the EUROP grid - not the sexiest topic, but consider that the Global Financial Crisis of 2007/8 started life in the anodyne small print of mortgage-backed securities. My point is, significance is often borne out of the mundane – the wingbeats of a butterfly, you know the story.

In the UK, farmers who sell finished (ready for slaughter) beef animals to an abattoir are paid for each animal in a consistent way, outwith niche contracts e.g. Wagyu, direct sales. The total price they receive for each animal is a combination of deadweight (the weight of the saleable meat in kilograms) multiplied by an assigned value, expressed as pence per kilogramme (PPK).

VALUE (p) = PPK (p/Kg) x DEADWEIGHT (KG)

There are several factors that affect the assigned PPK:

- Category: broadly age and sex.

(Defra)

- Buyers, especially their region. For example, Scottish prices have historically been stronger than those south of the border.

(AHDB)

- Organic vs Conventional status

- Breed premiums e.g. Angus, Shorthorn

- EUROP classification

‘EUROP’ refers to a classification where a carcase is graded on two factors: conformation and fat cover. The ‘perfect’ conformation is found at the extreme end of a spectrum which prizes the ‘double-muscled’ animal. The classes descend, with a few subdivisions, from ‘E’ through ‘U’, ‘R’, ‘O’ and finally ‘P’. In contrast, the ‘perfect’ fat class would be somewhere in the middle. This classification system is best expressed as a grid.

Why was the EUROP grid introduced? To reward beef yield in a uniform, fair way – or in a ‘harmonised’ way, to use the Brussels dialect. European beef farmers responded and the UK is no exception: compare the average beef-bred animal in the UK to those from other major beef-producing nations such as Australia, Argentina or USA; they are remarkably different in shape and size.

In Britain, cattle are often finished for slaughter by different farmers to those who breed cows to produce the calves – but finishers will pay better money for the animals they think will fetch the E and U grades (at least that is the perception), so there is a trickle-down effect of the EUROP grid. ‘Shapey’ has synonymised with ‘good’. Consequently, cattle that conform tend to dominate the top prizes and prices at auction marts and shows across the country.

Harmony achieved. Not everyone is convinced that our harmony is in-tune though.

We could talk about the nature of selecting for animals genetically programmed to lay down muscle, rather than fat – meaning that ‘E’ grade cattle often have little fat (extra- or intramuscular fat), so the finisher may wave goodbye to an E grade premium because of a poor fat cover score. Likewise, we could talk about the omission of intramuscular fat measurement, which forms the basis of several other meat-grading systems because it is highly influential on eating quality.

As a beef vet, the finer points of the beef supply chain and eating quality are not my wheelhouse. Many other writers have already covered these areas, including here, here, here, and here.

However, here are a few things that fall into the veterinary sphere:

(i) Calving ease

Selection for more muscular calves often goes hand-in-hand with selecting for heavier birthweights. Everything else being equal, bigger calves are more likely to require assistance at calving. These traits are complex and involve many genes which have yet to be teased out, but myostatin is one gene with a profound and disproportionate effect on (increased) muscularity and (reduced) calving ease.
As anyone who has calved Belgian or British Blues will know, conformation plays a role directly as well; when in the normal birth position (anterior; front end out first) these calves can be deceptively dainty at the front end, only to have monstorus hips, predisposing to the dreaded ‘hip lock’, an outcome which stalks the nightmares of many a cattle vet. Perversely, some of the more extremely conformed breeds can be prone to narrow pelvic canals as well - compounding the issue.

Calving ease provides a neat segue into…

(ii) Fertility

Intervention at calving, by farmer or vet, is well recognised to have a detrimental impact on next year’s fertility. Even the most sympathetic assistance entails a degree of trauma of the reproductive tract, as well as contamination dragged into the uterus from the rich flora of the vagina and beyond. With a twelve month cycle and a nine month pregnancy, there isn’t much leeway for slow conception.
Assuming most farming systems have a finite feed resource, we also cannot overcome the 1st Law of Thermodynamics: energy can only be conserved, not created or destroyed. Nothing comes for free, so if an animal is genetically programmed to lay down muscle, it is going to be at the expense of something else, whether that is its fertility, milkiness, immune system, fat cover, longevity – something has to give. In a feed-restricted environment, it seems likely that extreme conformation animals will compromise their fertility before their musculature.

(iii) Mortality

As you can imagine, calving drama often ends in disaster for cow and/or calf on the day. Even if the calf survives the event, it is nearly twice as likely to not get enough colostrum, putting a target on its back for the big beasts: joint ill, navel ill, calf diarrhoea et al. As a vet, I can confirm we do not operate on a ‘no-win no-fee’ basis.

An c-section calf safely delivered - the right decision for the situation and recieving diligent care from the farmer. Great for the veterinary messiah complex, however this calf is not out of the woods yet.

So, breeding for extreme conformation can add work, risk, cost, and compromise welfare. You might expect farmers to be fairly remunerated for running this gauntlet – for the midnight rounds in the calving shed, for the veterinary costs they shoulder after each calving and caesarean section, for the hours spent nursing slow calves, and so on. Are they?

Imagine two farms: both breeder-finishers with 100 cows apiece. Using typical Scottish figures, we would expect them to rear 88 calves. For simplicity, let’s say they are all steers, and all kill out at a respectable 350kg deadweight. However, Farm 1’s steers all grade at R4L (456.2p/kg), and Farm 2’s all grade at -U4L (459.3p/kg). Using GB-wide figures for the week starting 12th November, Farm 2 would be better off by £10.85 per head, or £954.80 across the herd.

Isn’t this the sort of marginal gains that all top businesses should be chasing? Why shouldn’t we aim for our farm of 100 cows to rear and finish 100 calves at an E conformation with acceptable fat cover? ‘Shoot for the moon, and even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars’ (or something?!). Am I being unambitious?

The problem with this approach is that it ignores fundamental trade-offs like those discussed above; this will not come for free. One of the best aspects of being a jobbing vet is that we get to move between systems and to assess performance in these different systems; I can tell you that in my experience, the farms achieving rearing %s in the mid to high 90s without killing themselves on inputs and labour at calving time are not those chasing conformation.

Another expensive hazard of high-birthweight calves that can really ruin a cow’s (and your) day - uterine prolapse.

The conformation-centred system carries extra cost and extra risk – in additional labour units, in greater calf and cow mortality, in added veterinary and medicine costs, and so on. Unfortunately, we don’t have great data available in a UK setting so putting a precise £ value on how this cost increases, say, per grade up the scale, is very difficult. American data suggest - for their system - that for breeding herds, fertility is 5x more important than growth, and that conformation barely registers.

What we can say is that, with an 350kg R4L steer valued at £1596.70 (versus an -U4L steer at £1607.55), you would only need to raise an extra 0.6 calves per 100 cows to meet the deficit in revenue. And that’s before considering potential for cost-saving when rearing a plainer animal. If we dropped the grade of Farm 1’s steers down to a O+4L (445.2p/kg), the herd-wide deficit jumps to a more eye-catching £4342.80 – but this equates to a relatively modest 2.79 calves per 100 cows, again before considering any cost-savings.

I’m a farm vet – I will come and calve cows for farmers all day, every day. But I’d like to be in a job for at least the next 40 years, and for that I need farms to still be there. It isn’t, to use the tired adjective, sustainable.

The EUROP grid incentivises yield on an individual basis, inadvertently hampering yield on a farm basis. Conformation clearly counts, but it is disproportionately weighted by the current system to the detriment of animal productivity, beef eating quality and long-term health of the UK beef industry.

The good news? Brexit has untethered us from the EUROP system, meaning we can pursue an alternative that better balances all of these aspects. But even before we get there, back of the fag-packet sums demonstrate that unless the average drop in conformation is extreme, farmers would be better off raising a greater number of ‘plainer’ calves, boosting their kg beef raised per hectare, and most likely cutting costs at the same time.

Feel free to leave me some feedback below!