Determining Feed Intake and Feed Efficiency of Individual Cattle Fed in Groups

The beef industry in the United States is developing programs to minimize excess fat produced, increase consistency of product and to identify and reward individual owners for superior performance in the feedlot. In the U.S., Strategic Alliances between cow-calf, feedlot and packer segments of the industry are being developed to accomplish this goal. Integrated production and marketing systems are being developed that can make Strategic Alliances work. Their objective is to market animals at their optimum economic endpoint, considering live and carcass incremental cost of gain and carcass prices for various grades, and avoiding discounts. To accomplish this, cattle are marketed as individuals when at their optimum carcass composition, which typically requires having cattle with different owners in the same pen. This requires allocating and billing feed fed to a pen to the individual animals in the pen. To make individual animal management work, the method used to allocate the feed consumed by animals from different owners that share the same pen must accurately determine cost of gain of each animal in a pen.