An Applied Meat Scientist with PIC North America said the trend toward reducing the level of fat in pork has reversed to improve eating quality.

Dr. Neal Matthews speaking at the 2018 Manitoba Swine Seminar in Winnipeg last February said back in the 1990s most of the breeding programs changed to reduce fat and in the 2000s fat levels dropped extremely low.

“It was getting to a point, especially from a North American perspective where we did not have enough fat to have good belly quality and the quality of the fat was even getting bad,” said Dr. Matthews. “It was softer fat so, as we progress farther, I think we’ll see less pressure on reducing back fat into it and maybe just holding it at a steady pace as we move forward.”

He said it’s felt that fat, or intramuscular fat, in the meat gives a benefit to eating quality. That’s very true of beef but in pork, it doesn’t provide as much of an improvement in eating quality as things like pH would come into play.

“So a lot of people are focusing on improving pH to improve the eating quality. Whereas people can easily see intramuscular fat, and they can relate to it because they know beef, so there’s a perception that it has a big improvement in eating quality,” said Matthews. “It’s very marketable; it’s something we can use and, as long as we continue to get paid for it, we’ll keep providing high quality marbled pork.

Dr. Matthews said it costs more to increase fat content, regarding feed efficiency and other costs producers need to account for when selling that product, so it must trade at a premium in to overcome that loss in the cost of production.

He said people have talked on the proposed grading in the US and that could be a way to improve these traits.

“I think we need to go about it in a very scientific manner putting too much weight on the proposed ones,” said Dr. Matthews. “It’s not very well accepted if you read the reviews of it, but it’s not to say that we shouldn’t have some program for evaluating eating quality. It must fit in with the system because the beef system is completely different from the pork system. We don’t rip carcasses and things. It needs to be things that we can measure in a scientific level to accomplish better eating quality, but at the same time, be something that fits within the process of what’s going on in these slaughtered plants at this time.”

Speaking for the company he is part of, PIC they’ve designed the Duroc line to be fatter and to look across to the other genetic companies, they will have their Duroc lines too, which is going to add more fat to it.

Matthews said the pork industry needs to have a system to match up.

“The current system has a lot of the pork we’re calling high-quality pork that’s going to Japan right now that wouldn’t classify in one of those,” he said. “We know it’s good eating quality pork and we need to have a system that’s going to cover all of the quality and reward the producer,” said Matthews. “I think that’s going to be very difficult to get because of 60 to 70 per cent of what we see in quality from the standpoint of pH and so forth gets developed after the producer leaves the pigs at the slaughter plant.”

He believes to have a producer paid program to improve pork quality is going to be very difficult. There are things that they can do, but it must be a concerted effort between producers, the slaughter plants, and further processors to have all of those things in line to get optimum eating quality in pork. “It’s all about the science, and that’s what we try to follow.” •

— By Harry Siemens