The National Junior Angus Show, conducted annually in July, is best known as a place where junior Angus members display breeding heifers in the show ring. However, it’s the
carcass steer competition, possibly less famous as far as junior cattle shows are concerned, that brought the level of competition to new heights this year. Forty-two registered Angus steers were harvested in this year’s contest. This exemplary set of cattle graded 30% Prime, 60% Certified Angus Beef ® brand (calculating both Prime and Premium Choice) and just 7% Select. The Prime carcass percentage more than tripled the recent industry average and the CAB share was almost double the brand’s recent average. The real highlight in this set of steers is the fact that nine head, or 21% of the carcasses, were Prime, YG 2’s. It appears in the data that they would also have qualified for CAB® Prime. It’s a fairly special set of cattle that can hit such a lofty marbling achievement while remaining this lean in terms of their finish, with the Prime, YG’s averaging a mere 0.36 inches of backfat thickness. Readers may quickly recognize
that a backfat measures in commercial fed cattle today are more commonly or well above 0.50 inches. While these steers could have been fed longer in a commercial setting, we might argue that they were fed to their most feed-efficient endpoint in the hands of these junior Angus exhibitors. Our congratulations to this group of exhibitors for setting their sights on excellence and achieving it.
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