YOUNG SA Angus breeder Kate Fairlie has sharpened her livestock assessment skills, travelling thousands of kilometres across the United States with the University of Illinois livestock judging team.
The 2014 winner of Angus Youth's National Judging Competition and scholarship completed a semester late last month as a guest of the university, describing it as the "most amazing experience ever".
During her four months in the US she visited "hog", sheep and beef properties, and attended lectures in numerous subjects including meat science, carcase evaluation, and US sheep production.
The livestock judging team trained three times a week, visiting livestock properties to judge animals, plus sessions evaluating carcases and practising their judging reasons.
They competed at San Antonio Livestock & Rodeo in Texas, which had 16,000 youth entries and is the largest barrow (pig) show in the US, Sioux Falls in South Dakota, Illinois, and Iowa Beef Expo.
But Miss Fairlie's favourite event was the three-day National Meat Animal Evaluation competition at Still Water, Oklahoma, which included feeder cattle grading, live cattle estimates and a keep-or-cull class.
Last year she completed a Bachelor of Agricultural Science from La Trobe University, Melbourne, and has been involved with Angus Youth since 2007.
Her family runs Lanark Angus stud at Mount Gambier and she has been the youth representative on the SA Angus state committee for the past two years.
She says the scholarship has given her a remarkable insight into the US beef industry, which she says is heavily focused on grain-feeding animals in feedlots with the use of hormone growth promotants.
Interestingly though, in her meat classes there was discussion about multiple chain restaurants going for "grassfed", "natural" or "organic" imported beef from southern Australia.
She also noticed the strong emphasis on crossbreeding with crossbred seedstock classes on the show circuit.
Miss Fairlie said US cattle producers were enjoying good times, with feed prices moderating and cattle prices at record levels.
"But like everything, with the high prices consumers are moving to a different protein source such as pork or chicken," she said. "Pork is already a huge part of an average American diet."
Miss Fairlie was surprised that the US had not embraced electronic tags and an individual traceability system similar to Australia, and is not even looking at implementing it in the near future.
She said their only use of electronic tags was in research animals to measure pre and post-weight of feed when an animal went over a feeder.
Miss Fairlie thanked Angus Australia and Angus Youth, and University of Illinois' Dan Shike for the opportunity of a lifetime, as well as the people who had taken her under their wings and mentored her in the past few years.
