ENSURING GOOD BEEF

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 July 1940, Page 9

ENSURING GOOD BEEF

IMPORTANCE OF FEEDING. It is not always sufficiently realised that the production of beef of high quality is very largely a matter of feeding. Reasonably good beef can be produced by the ordinary method of grazing store cattle on grass, with or without other feed, but in few cases is beef of the highest quality produced by these methods. This is due, not to any fault in the feeding during the fattening process, but to the fact that the animal has been at a previous period in store condition, or even possibly in good condition. Prime quality in beef is largely a of “Marbling,” that is to say, the animal must not only be fat when killed, but the lean meat must be marbled with minute streaks of fat deposited between the fibres of the N muscles. Beef of this kind is not dnlj' \ always tender, but has a most superior flavour, and is, therefore, classed as V prime quality. Experience shows that this marbling is not always obtained in ordinary fattening, however well finished the animal may be. The secret of the matter, seems io. be that if well-marbled beef is required, the animal must have been kept in really good condition from the time it was a calf, and more particularly that it should have been in high condition during the first five or six months of its life. A calf running with its mother and kept in good condition, produces this marbled flesh, and having once produced it in this way it would seem as if the tendency to deposit fat between the fibres of the muscles was retained throughout life. On the other hand, it seems just as certain that if the calf is starved and is allowed to become really lean during the first few months of its life it loses this tendency to deposit fat afterwards between the fibres of the muscles to the same extent.