 As sheep producers, we are tasked to provide enjoyable eating experiences and meet palatability expectations for the dinner plate of American lamb consumers. This video, Retail Meat Yield, is the fifth in a five-part series emphasizing lamb quality and is funded by the American Lamb Board and Premier One Supplies. Retail Meat Yield is a combination of dressing percent and fabrication of premium American lamb cuts that can be sold directly or through retail and food service. Genetic selection for increased muscularity and extra attention to feeding management that provides a compositionally correct finish for young lambs resulted in increased industry productivity and consistent consumer-preferred lamb. Several factors impact lamb dressing percent. One of those is the difference between wool and shorn lambs. Lamb A and lamb B prior to shearing. The difference is now as you see these two shorn lambs, lamb A yielded 2.75 pounds and lamb B has 3.25 pounds originating from him. Now those only average to three pounds but think of it this way, when those go to market that's three pounds that we're paid for that aren't going to end up as hot carcass weight. Additionally, we know that fat thickness and muscularity has an impact on lamb dressing percent. Lamb A that weighed in at 115 pounds we know that he's trimmer and he doesn't have quite as much muscle and in fact we know he's probably not ready for market but when we talk about lamb B that one's one that weighs 130 pounds. We know that lamb B has enough muscle and enough fat that not only is he going to have the higher hot carcass weight but we're going to expect him to have the higher dressing percentage as well. Cutability is a term recognized to evaluate the percentage of boneless or bone in closely trimmed retail cuts from boneless shoulder, bone in rack and loin and semi boneless leg. Additionally, USDA yield grade designation can be uniformly applied by USDA agricultural marketing service personnel to appropriately distinguish trimness, retail meat yield and superior carcass merit. An appropriate fat thickness for a lamb and the subsequent carcass has an ideal range of .2 to .3 inches at the 12th rib interface or in the location that the carcass is split between the rack and loin. This is a very small range as lamb carcasses can range from less than .1 inch on excessively trimmed to over .5 inches on excessively fat carcasses. So today we cut up a lamb carcass into the larger wholesale cuts which are referred to as subprimals. Lambs have four major subprimals the shoulder, the rack, the loin and the legs. We know how to cut each of these based on a set of standards called institutional meat purchasing specifications which are developed by USDA and industry that tell us where we're supposed to cut all these things. For example, on the shoulder we know that we're supposed to separate between the fourth and fifth ribs. The rack separates from the loin between the 12th and 13th ribs and the loin separates from the leg at a point just in front of the hip bone or the wing of the pelvis. As we start at the front we've got the neck which is often cut into neck slices. You can see those in some retail stores. We have the breast or sometimes called the lamb brisket and we get four shanks. Lamb shanks are very commonly used to make soups and stews and in to make stocks. From that also we get the lower legs. These are called the trotters that come off the front leg. In addition to the rack then we get the ribs. We've got nice lamb ribs here that with a few more cuts we'll make into something called denver ribs. We have the flanks which are typically used for trimmings. And then the legs, there's lots of ways to make legs. We've got whole legs right now which is a common way for them to be traded or sold in the industry. And then we can do some additional things to those like remove bones, make them longer and shorter for different retail cuts. Strategies for improving our supply chain lean meat yield include genetic selection, feeding program and marketing compositionally correct lambs. By emphasizing lean meat growth in U.S. sheep we can make lambs with more muscle and less fat and improved yield and value. This will increase our commercial lamb industry competitiveness with imported lamb and other animal protein sources. Traditionally U.S. producers raise the breed that fits their system and operation goals. Still the preferred growth and muscle traits of terminally oriented rams should be used to improve lamb quality. Commercially Suffolk and Hampshire genetics crossed on whiteface use is the predominant crossbred market lamb of the western sheep industry. Additionally producers should consider identifying the top end use to create replacements and cross breeding the remainder for a terminal focus and improved carcass merit. The National Sheep Improvement Program or NSIP utilizes ultrasound technology to predict carcass traits and quantify loyni depth, an indicator of overall muscularity. Loyni depth and area are highly correlated so selecting for either one of these traits should increase muscle. Selection for heavier muscled sires positively affects dressing percent and results in more muscle to bone ratio in end products. Nutrition also plays a role. Lamb feeding requires adequate protein to allow maximum lean tissue growth. Feed costs and feed efficiency are more critical than ever. It costs money as we approach the end of the animal growth curve and our lambs become less efficient because fat gain requires more energy and feed to convert to pounds of live weight. Extending growth curves through forage based or limited energy diets are assumed to extend the growth curve slightly but efficient high energy diets have still worked in intensive management programs. Nutrition is truthfully secondary to both mature weight and genetics and managing target end point is most important regarding nutritional programs. A primary responsibility for a producer is to market lambs at a desirable yield grade category prior to loss of feed efficiency and the subsequent increase in fat trim waste. Colorado State University research indicated that as external fat and USDA yield grade increase the trimmed primals had decreased saleable meat yield. Remembering lamb growth composition as lamb frame size and muscle growth plateaus lean gain has slowed and the increase weight is mostly attributed to fat and the necessary fat trim results in decreased yield. You saw that I worked with my colleague Dr. Rob Matik on fabricating a lamb into retail meat cuts and we want to show you just a little bit of what we found on our retail meat yield from that particular carcass. So we initially had our neck and from those necks we just made two neck slices certainly not a common approach in terms of the retail store but we found some people want to lower and or entry point lamb product that allows good options for our stew meats as well. We cut the shoulder to have a blade at chop and arm chops and so depending on how you cut those but we took just one or two off of each corner of that shoulder and then boned out the rest of our shoulder that we did have. Still at the front side is that we had our front shanks and then also we have our rear shanks here at this part of the table we have in the middle an example of what can be marketed as Denver ribs. This comes from the bottom side of our rack and then you take the sternum off as well and this can be a great option for slow cookery and be able to provide just something that's really wholesome at home. Moving into our middle meats and probably our higher end cuts and our most valuable portion of our sheep and our lamb rib chops originating from our rack we cut those about an inch and a quarter and so you'll see that we leave just a little bit of the tail that actually has still that rib on it. Those are certainly ones that are grilled and as we move towards the summer celebrations and entertainment as well. If we move to the back and posterior portion of the carcass then we move from rack chops to loin chops and with this for an example on the loin chops we cut these to approximately a quarter of an inch of external fat around the edges but then you can see that here is the longissimus dorsi, the eye muscle and then also the sose major or the tenderloin muscle. So giving you that t-bone look that you may be accustomed from from other species but we have that here is our loin chops that can be put on your grill as well. We chose to use two boneless legs here and so what we did is we boned out all of those took the femur out all the related bones the hip bones as well and so we can be able to choose to have this as approximately a 3.5 pound roast which is going to be great for different dinners that you may have or celebrations as well for your family. Moving back throughout our carcass we have a pile of trim and so being important as we dig and kind of look at our primals of rack, loin, leg and also shoulder is that we're going to have some that we want to have for trim. This can commonly be used as ground lamb but also there's value as we look at it in our process meats world to make different sausages or make different opportunities and this trim can be used as you work with your butcher do this yourself on making that a high quality product. One of the more challenging things is we think about retail meat yield again is our end product that we have for saleable yield and this is where we have our pile of fat trim and so some of the times that gets a little bigger than maybe we prefer because that's not marketable and so as we think about it from retail meat yield and compositionally correct lambs we want to keep this pile a little smaller. There's going to be some as we continue to trim from those loin to a quarter of an inch and making a little differences on our external portion but we want to make that a little smaller. Additionally we have our trotters our front trotters and our rear trotters that come off of each of those legs that's going to be into our bone portion but then we've got our pile of bone as well and so when we think about it from fabrication of meat to bone and then meat and fat and put those in each of their piles we're going to have a pile of bones as well. This will have our sternum our scapula our femur some of the vertebral column and and certainly what pulls our carcass together and as we think about it of pulling those cuts together and making sure that we can have a high quality retail meat yield and a fabrication that works we're offering some of the best lamb that's possible and if we think about this at North Dakota State University we're just a small subsection of American lamb and with these retail cuts you too can feed your adventurous side. According to Hoffman and others in the 2015 national lamb quality audit American lamb has a competitive advantage of ribeye and loyneye size of retail marketed chops compared to australia and new zealand. American lamb chops had a mean of 3.03 square inch loyneye area compared to 2.6 square inches for australia and 2.25 square inches for new zealand. However australian loin chops were trimmer at 0.25 inches while us and new zealand were over 0.3 inches over the loyneye upon evaluating 565 retail loin chops. Increased rack and loin size provide hotel and restaurant trade the bonus of larger lamb rack and loin chops at the center of the plate. This is primarily due to increased lamb and carcass weight not just generalized muscularity over global competitors. Instrument or camera augmented USDA grading is being incorporated in limited large lamb processing facilities. The camera grading system determines and assigns a yield and quality grade as well as expected cut yields and overall cutability percentage. Ovine carcass cutability or OCC is an estimated percentage of closely trimmed retail cuts and considers muscularity and trimness of the carcass. OCC is the top right value and predicted lamb primal cutout yields are listed below on the producer portal image. Camera grading provides a consistent day-to-day USDA grading of lamb carcasses as well as access to relevant producer information. Augmented grading is our next step to information transfer as well as providing individual and lot performance data back to producers to make improvements at the farm level. With the information available to producers from superior farms producers can make appropriate changes benchmark progress and improve efficiency at producer and processor levels. Inevitably this will provide the ability to sell consistent size trimness and quality of retail cuts to satisfied customers. A lamb retail cutout demonstration was conducted to show the value comparison of low and high cutability lambs at the 2022 American Lamb Summit. Two lambs of similar weight were harvested and fabricated. An ideal finished 150 pound Hampshire U yielded an 87.5 pound carcass weight while the overfinished 152 pound polypay weather yielded an 88.5 pound carcass weight. One side of each carcass was fabricated to retail ready cuts. A fat trim difference of 3.6 pounds per side equals greater than 7 pounds of waste to the supply chain. The increase of salable lean meat yield between the USDA yield grade 2 and USDA yield grade 4 lambs resulted in an overall value difference of $32.52. Trim muscular lambs harvested at the appropriate time return value for the entire US sheep and lamb industry. Awareness of retail meat yield and the factors that impact dressing percent and lamb fabrication cutout provide an assurance of expectations for producers that market lambs and for consumers that purchase American lamb directly in grocery stores or at a restaurant. Beginning with the end in mind is the theme for this lamb quality video series. As we strive to produce lamb that results in profitable lean meat yield for commercial production we can provide profits and benefits for the whole supply chain that emphasize a more enjoyable eating experience. As progressive sheep producers it is in our best interest to create a protein product that consistently meets our consumers expectations and delights their taste buds with American lamb. Thank you to the North Dakota State University sheep unit and meat lamb. Double J lamb. Superior farms and our sponsors the American Lamb Board and Premier One supplies for their contributions to this video series.