Meat Eating Quality Trial

I am excited to have hosted the Coopworth Meat Eating Quality (MEQ) trial at Boonerah. The trial consisted of 14 sires from 6 Coopworth flocks. 300 of our Boonerah performance recorded ewes were AI’d by these sires. The progeny of these ewes were raised the same and had their performance recorded.

On the 6th February at they were slaughtered with their meat eating quality measured. The had an average dead weight of 25.3kg.

This trial is exciting to be apart of. For our breeding group it allows us to generate accurate IMF and shear force breeding values and it also provides valuable linkage between flocks to improve accuracy of the data. For our clients, this means our data is more relevant and reliable.

This is the second time Boonerah has hosted a meat quality trial. The first was in 2013 when we were a Producer Demonstration Site for validating the MEQ breeding values. This trial gave us a really good idea how our sheep compared to industry and I was very pleased with the results then.

So 10 years on it is good to benchmark again and I’m looking forward to sharing the findings with you soon in late 2024.

Lachie