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Posted: Sat Jul 16, 2005 8:35 am
by Sylvia
Can anyone direct me to a website which covers this subject. Browsing for it yesterday I found one which would have helped me prepare a human for human consumption (No I didn't look in it!!) but I can't find the cattle grades. I know R is the ideal but how wrong are the - and + grades on either side?
Posted: Fri Jul 29, 2005 12:30 am
by TONY LIMB
Hello Sylvia
I am not an expert on grading beef cattle but seeing that nobody else has replied to you I will tell you what I understand!. Basically cattle and sheep are graded by MLC Inspectors at abbattoirs if the abbattoir wants to pay for the service, they are completely independant from the abbattoir, some choose not to have this done. The system they use is based on the letters that spell EUROPE, except they don't use the last E, this is for the conformation of the animal with E being the best ( like the Belgian Blues with their big rear ends ) going down to P which is very poor narrow back ends like a Holstein.Just to complicate matters in the cattle grading they split the O into O+ & -O & the P the same way. So the grades go E U R O+ -O P+ P- ,in most abbattoirs the price is based on the R grade with deductions or additions for grades either side, so they consider this to be the average grade.However in the dexters most of our cattle grade in the O grade,occassionally we get an R & sometimes a P, but as this is only one persons opinion different graders can grade animals differently.I spoke to someone from the North of the country who said most of their dexters graded U's!!.If I haven't totally confused you I will go onto the fat class this goes from 1 to 5 ,1 being very lean to 5 being very fat, again they choose to split one grade 4 into low & high ,so the grades for fatness go 1 2 3 4L 4H 5.So if your animal comes back as a 1 or 2 you should have fed it more & if 4H or 5 you fed it too much. Ideally in the Dexter world I would say if you can get R 3 or R4L then you are doing well, but you may have to settle for O+ 3 or 4L. Hope this has helped, if you look on www.eblex.org.uk & go to the Quality standards for beef you will see all the different cuts of beef & what to do with them but I can't find anything about grading!
Tony
Posted: Fri Jul 29, 2005 8:34 am
by Sylvia
Thanks Tony, I've printed your info out for future reference. Very helpful.