Measuring What Matters

This report explores how the Australian beef industry can enter its next frontier by adopting objective carcase measurement for red meat yield, to run adjacent to objective eating quality traits that industry already measures well. It highlights technology that is predominantly being used throughout the Northern Hemisphere to drive price signals through livestock supply chains, explores trials and work completed domestically here in Australia. The report also challenges why Australia, a global leader in beef eating quality, has not yet captured the same value from yield.

Drawing on extensive travel through Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Zimbabwe, Chile, Poland, Romania, United Kingdom, Ireland, Denmark, Spain and France, this report draws together conversations, observations and published scientific research from across the red meat supply chain, to examine the technology available, the trials undertaken and the benefits they have delivered, and could deliver for future adopters. It also makes the case that linking these objective measurements to a transparent feedback system will drive the right behaviours from producers to processors, while continuing to pursue eating quality and productive traits. The measurement of yield allows the processor to put a value on it. When that is measured and realised, the right payment incentives and can be fed back to producers, based on the measured performance of each carcase, regardless of the route to market.

The report is structured in four key parts. First, it documents the variation in beef carcase yield that exists before any processor decisions are made, drawing on bone out trails completed during my Nuffield Scholarship and published scientific studies. Second, it sets out the technologies available to predict individual carcase yield at commercial speed. Third, it explains how this technology can be adopted, installed and accredited within Australian processing plants. Finally, it builds the business case for why this technology, paired with a transparent feedback system, will be paradigm shifting for the Australian beef industry.

The scale of the opportunity is best illustrated by a bone-out trial I completed during my scholarship in partnership with Murdoch University. Seventeen carcase sides, representing a wide range of weights and fat depths within a single breed, reflecting a daily production run for this beef program, were dissected into commercial cuts and individually weighed. At the same carcase weight, the leanest and fattest carcases differed in value by as much as $300 per side ($600/Hd), while cumulative cut-weight range varied a 20kg range that carcase weight alone simply could not see (Williams, Carter and Gardner, 2025). 

The findings align with broader industry research, which show that lean meat yield within a single processing lot can vary by 34.99% at the same carcase weight, with a standard deviation of 6.40% (H. Calnan et al. 2021). Using an average hot standard carcase weight (HSCW) of 300kgs, each 1% increase in yield represents 3kgs of additional lean meat. At an average value of $10-30 per kilogram of saleable red meat, this represents what it is being substantially under or overvalued per carcase, because it is neither measured, rewarded nor fed back to producers.

My conclusion is that the technology is available, the science is settled, and the gold-standard reference methods exist. What is missing is the industry architecture: an accredited device/s, a new yield trait in the AUS-MEAT trading language, a payment grid that rewards yield, new breeding values that lets producers chase that reward, partnered with a transparent objective feedback payment platform that connects the boning room back to the paddock. Australia built exactly this architecture for eating quality through Meat Standards Australia and this measurement of carcase yield in sheep. We now need to do it again for yield in beef!