The 2011 checkoff-funded National Beef Quality Audit (NBQA), released August 2012, continues to provide recommendations for beef and dairy producers on management practices which can result in an improvement of end-product characteristics. The NBQA also helps to identify opportunities for improving cattle production practices to more consistently meet packer and merchandiser specifications and consumer demands.
In order to help communicate these results back to producers, the checkoff recently released the second in the series of Producer Fact Sheets on the NBQA, titled“Quantifying willingness-to-pay, best-worst scaling, and current status of quality characteristics in different beef industry marketing sectors”. The fact sheet provides a ranking of quality challenges and shows where the industry needs to improve to increase product value.
The first fact sheet in the series, titled “Results and Recommendations from the 2011 National Beef Quality Audit” can befound here.
“The significance and importance of the Beef Quality Assurance program for producers is that it is alive – and by that I mean it changes relative to the opportunities and challenges we see with our production systems in the United States,” says John Maas, DVM, cattle producer in California and member of the Beef Quality Assurance advisory committee. “We’ve checked off a whole lot of BQA successes, but we don’t just stop there. We are using the information from these audits and challenging ourselves as producers to fix any others problems as they come up.”
For more information about the NBQA, visit BQA.org. For more information about your beef checkoff investment, visit MyBeefCheckoff.com.
Source: The Beef Checkoff Program