Feeding incremental plant extract to grass-silage-fed beef steers resulted in enhancement of the fatty acid 18:3n-3 and increased the longer chain derivatives EPA and DHA, resulting in improved polyunsaturated:saturated fat and n-6:n-3 ratios.
Finishing beef cattle on legume/cereal wholecrop silage had no effect on muscle fatty acid composition or instrumental meat quality relative to grass silage based diets.
Selection for improved feed efficiency will not have any unfavourable repercussions for carcass traits.
There is a potential benefit that can be achieved from including genomic information in selection programmes in beef cattle.
The low heritabilities estimated for meat quality traits, such as juiciness and tenderness, and the obvious difficulty involved in measuring these phenotypes, limits the effectiveness of traditional quantitative breeding.
Many aspects of cattle transport contribute to bruising.
The implementation of genomic evaluations in Ireland has been very successful and the uptake of the genomically selected (GS) bulls has been encouraging with dairy producers using several bulls as recommended to reduce the risks.
Increasing the proportion of forage in the diet of dairy-origin bulls has only a marginal effect on carbon footprint.
Both soya and linseed oil have the potential to reduce enteric CH4 emissions from grazing dairy cows.
Ultrasound tissue depths, measured before and after finishing, combined with live weight can predict fat weights and proportions in beef carcasses and carcass quarters with high accuracy.
