The Camera on the Rail

More and more plants are letting a camera do part of the grading. If you sell cattle on the rail, and especially if you run Angus cross calves, you should know what the camera looks at and what it does not. I will tell you what the official record says and where I cannot back something up.

Technology and approvals move, so check with USDA and your packer. This site has no ties to the brand or the Association. For a trucker, vet or consultant, there is agriculture.directory.

What is approved

USDA's marketing service lists five approved instruments. All five predict marbling. Four of them, the two JBT/Marel/E+V systems, the MEQ camera and RMS/CVS, also measure ribeye area and predict yield grade. The fifth, from Global Meat Imaging on a Google Pixel 7a phone, is approved to predict official marbling score only. That is straight off the USDA announcement.

So the camera does more than yield. Marbling is the number that sets Choice versus Select versus Prime, which is the money on most grids. Yield grade is the other piece.

What it sees

The plant ribs the carcass, the camera takes a picture of the ribeye, and software works out the lean area and the fat flecks. It estimates the marbling score and the ribeye size, and feeds a yield grade with the fat and weight numbers. The upside is that every carcass gets the same look in the same light. The downside is that you cannot argue with it the way you could argue with a grader at the end of a long shift, so you want to know how the plant checks it against USDA graders.

What I cannot tell you

I looked for accuracy numbers, and for anything that says how the cameras do on crossbred cattle versus straight Angus. I did not find any in the official sources, so I am not going to make it up. The standard for marbling is the same no matter what breed is in the carcass, so an approved system should be reading a cross calf by the same yardstick. If somebody tells you the camera hates black baldies or loves them, ask for the study.

Cross calves and the brand

For the brand, the hide goes first. The Association's journal says the live animal rule is hide color: solid black with no other color behind the shoulder, above the flanks or breaking the midline (Angus Journal). A black baldy with white across the midline does not meet that rule. A solid black Angus cross can. The camera checks the carcass, and the hide check is a separate job done on the animal under USDA oversight.

After the hide, the ten specs apply no matter the breed mix: marbling, texture, age, ribeye area, weight, fat, muscling and the appearance items. Cross calves with good hybrid growth often have the weight and ribeye to run into the size limits, which is a different problem than marbling. See our piece on modest marbling for the quality side.

What the camera cannot fix

A camera measures the carcass after the fact. It cannot tell you why a carcass missed. If you want to know whether the problem was genetics, feed, health or handling, you have to look at the cattle's history. Did that pen have a sickness outbreak? Did they ship in a heat wave? Were they a mixed bunch of ages? The picture is only one part of a record.

It also does not replace a person's eyes on the plant floor. Dark cutters, capillary rupture and other appearance defects are judged by trained people, not by the ribeye camera. If you hear that a load was discounted for one of those, the instrument was not the one that caught it. Our article on dark cutters and blood splash goes through what causes them.

Small herds and the data problem

If you sell ten head at a time, the data from one load will bounce around a lot. A single bad steer in a small set can swing the average. Do not change your whole bull battery because of one load. Add the numbers up over a few years and a few sire groups before you make a big move. If you are small, it may help to team up with neighbors who sell on the same grid and compare notes on which bulls worked for each of you.

How to use the camera data

1. Ask the packer if the plant uses an approved instrument and what data you get back.
2. Get per-carcass marbling, ribeye and yield grade, not only the grade and the check.
3. Sort by sire and by dam breed. If your cross calves out of one bull run a point better on marbling and yield, you found something.
4. Compare year to year. One load is noise, three loads is a pattern.

The cross-calf decision

Crossbreeding adds hybrid vigor, growth and sometimes better feed efficiency. It can also mean carcasses that are heavier or bigger in the ribeye than the brand's limits allow. A cross that grades well and runs 20 square inches in the ribeye is a good animal that may not fit the brand box. A straighter Angus type may fit but give up some growth. There is no right answer, only the answer that pays on your grid. Farm.fm's page on marketing your Angus beef gets at where the buyer's checkbook is.

Bottom line

Cameras read marbling, and most also read ribeye and yield. Nobody has shown me they treat cross calves unfairly, and nobody has shown me they do not. Get the data, compare it, and pick bulls on what the data tells you. Current approvals are listed at USDA's beef grading page.