McDonald’s, Beefbooster and BIXSco Inc. (BIXS) have released a report demonstrating the value that can be created in the Canadian beef community by transforming data into shareable information and knowledge to fuel discussions and make business decisions.
Beefbooster collaborated with BIXS and McDonald’s to enlist the help of investigators from Livestock Gentec to analyze nearly two million records entered by packing plants into the Canadian Livestock Tracking System (CLTS) during 2012 to 2014 as part of a federally sponsored project.
They discovered that with proper analysis, valuable information can be extracted from raw data to help producers discover economic opportunities for their ranches and feedlots. “The investigators looked at the data two ways. A high level analysis was done on all the available records with good quality carcass data and birth dates. A second, deeper analysis was performed on a subset of those records where genomic technology was used to identify the specific Beefbooster sires of 813 calves.” said Jennifer Stewart-Smith, CEO at Beefbooster.
The high level analysis discovered the following opportunities:
1. Cattle harvested before 19 months of age realized the best profit opportunity. It is also worth noting that ~41% of the Canadian cattle harvested during 2012 to 2014 were 19 months of age or less.
2. Cattle harvested at 18 months instead of 24 months generate 1.2 fewer tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions CO2e per head. In the future, this could create the opportunity for beef producers to generate voluntary carbon credits based on an Alberta Offset System protocol currently under review by Alberta Environment and Parks.
According to Stewart-Smith, “The deeper analysis showed that calves sired by Beefbooster Terminal Cross (TX) bulls had a $219 higher carcass value than the average calves harvested during the same period of time. Not only did we discover variance in the carcass value between the five different Beefbooster breeding lines, but we also discovered meaningful variance within the calves sired by the same line of bulls.
It is important to recognize this is not a comprehensive analysis of the potential impacts if any assumptions are changed…nor does this analysis investigate the potential impacts on individual ranches, feedlots and packers’ particular business models and relationships in the market.
“For McDonald’s, the results of this initiative demonstrate the value the entire beef supply chain can generate through collaboration and information sharing. We appreciate the collaborative work of the entire team. This is the kind of teamwork McDonald’s supports; it has the potential to increase the economic viability, social responsibility and environmental sustainability of the entire Canadian beef community”, said Jeffrey Fitzpatrick-Stilwell, Senior Manager of Sustainability, McDonald’s Canada.