New On-line Tool Available To Help Meat Producers

Beef, lamb, and veal producers now have resource to get real-time data on market grading, volume, and price discovery by USDA's recently introduces grading dashboard. Taylor Cox is AMS's Associate Deputy Administrators. He said data is gathered from plants and companies.

"We can aggregate the data in to the dashboard. So we've built a tool internally to track the plants, to ensure the grade lines are correct etcetera for our management teams to help their graders to work with the facilities and we've turned that in to a pubic-facing dashboard."

The dashboard breaks down current and historical quality, grade, and volume information  in a visual format. How might say beef producer utilize this tool?

"I may pull that data in and maybe I'm selling to a company or plant that I see that my cattle are historically grading 83 of 85%. So I may take that in to a contract negotiation."

Giving that individual producer more resources to use in getting a better price for their commodity.

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