Nice to see McDonalds supporting Canadian beef, A&W still hammering away.

[Happytrails]

GF there is no doubt excellent beef in many countries. I do think that our average quality is the world's best but I suppose that is debatable. A word of warning tho, don't go to Argentina expecting outstanding beef.

I don't hate aussies or aussie beef. I do take issue with A&W promoting aussie beef as superior to our's.

[grassfarmer]

You could certainly debate whether we have the highest average beef quality in the world. You are not going to convince me though as I disqualify both Canada and the US commodity beef automatically on the grounds that it is all loaded with hormone implants and then there is the little Zilmax/Ractopamine issue. When 160 countries in the world wouldn't import your beef because it contained these products how could you seriously be a contender for the worlds best?

[smcgrath76]

For the most part I actually tend to agree with GF (Did I just say that - LOL). I think we could change that pretty quickly based on the size of our industry, but it is pretty hard to argue we are the world's best when most of us operate in a disjointed market system with limited consumer signals and very few seedstock providers are even ultrasounding sale bulls for carcass quality. Very few feedlots are scanning to sort feeders into outcome groups. We don't even have a large scale research and development program in comparison with our competition.
I am not sure what we are doing extra special to produce this "world's best" label. Basically the way our industry works is to kill extra cattle and sort them after the fact to fill orders. Best is subjective to the buyer, but we don't even do a very good job of pre-sorting live cattle to outcome. How many extra days are some cattle fed to hit a grade? Or how many cattle are fed that will never hit a desired end target. I think we do as good a job as anyone, but I sure couldn't claim we do the best. Perhaps the greatest thing we do compared to a lot of beef producing countries is to have winter so we don't have Bos Indicus as a player in our industry and we solve a lot of health issues.
Not to be negative, I think based on our size, if we were to get serious we could do a lot of good things in a hurry, but $2.50 calves are not going to provide that impetus any time soon.