Pasture to Plate: Defining Quality, Yield and Flavor Benchmarks to Strengthen Market Opportunities and U.S. Goat Producer Profitability

Commodities

• Animals: goats
• Animal Products: meat

Practices

• Animal Production: feed/forage, meat processing, meat product quality/safety

The University of Wyoming (UW) is collaborating with meat goat producers in the intermountain west region to evaluate optimal animal size, feeding and management strategies for harvest goats. This collaborative research and education project will utilize producer goats in four management groups to better understand the optimal harvest animal guidelines for Meat Goat producers utilizing dam, sire and goat information, live animal performance and ultrasound data, carcass characteristics and sensory performance information to develop best management practices for goat producers to implement. Since limited information is currently available for producers to reference, this project will provide live animal and carcass data back to producers to use to enhance their animal and product marketing programs in addition to developing prediction and economic tools to better assist producers with estimating optimal goat harvest endpoints more precisely based on sire, dam and goat performance records. Current goat producers will collaborate with researchers at UW to receive performance records for producer owned goats participating in this work along with engaging in field-demonstrations and workshops to demonstrate tools and materials developed for goat producers to implement into their operations. Materials, workshops, demonstrations will be evaluated during planned educational events and at 12-month follow-up surveys to assess implementation of targeted feeding and management strategies.

Research Objectives

1) evaluate the impact of type and duration of diet on live animal growth performance, carcass characteristics and sensory outcomes among goats from participating producers;

2) utilize goat performance data along with dam and sire information to develop prediction equations and evaluation tools to determine optimal harvest weights for goat producers;

3) evaluate impact producer information and study produced data to develop prediction classification for carcass quality, red meat yield and sensory (i.e., flavor) benchmark standards;

4) utilize research results from this project with producer management and perception survey findings in hosted field day and/or additional workshops to more effectively coordinate adoption of precision management tools and economic calculators for Goat producers.

Educational Objectives

The overall educational goal of this project are to:

1) provide producers with complete performance data of their goats in order for each to implement new management strategies best tailored for their operation;

2) evaluate current management and marketing strategies used by producers in the west region;

3) provide effective education utilizing interactive management tools developed through this project; and

4) pre-and-post assessment of knowledge gained including gauging use and perception of management tools developed.