LEVERAGING lamb carcase data is essential to maintaining the product’s global competitiveness, reducing resource waste and optimising processing efficiency, according to MEQ chief executive officer Remo Carbone.

Australian agtech company, MEQ, and Gundagai Lamb this week unveiled a groundbreaking new digital platform that puts data at the fingertips of farmers and livestock agents, helping them to transform their processes.

Mr Carbone said with strong global demand for Australian lamb, local producers have more opportunity to deliver high quality meat.

“The Gundagai Lamb Producer Portal enables producers and agents to identify management factors that improve livestock management at a mob and individual carcase level.

“The platform we have partnered with Gundagai Lamb on is bespoke to their particular needs, but we are excited about future opportunities made possible by the data collected from our devices and can see the potential for similar platforms to be used by other processor clients,” he said.

Gundagai Lamb’s producer portal was first launched in 2021 and the new interactive carcase feedback platform gives producers previously unimagined access to data and trends around the eating quality traits of mobs. An interactive dashboard enables producers to delve deeper into the yield and quality of their animals. It will power their analysis on a mob and carcase level, helping them to make smarter decisions around quality improvement, MEQ said.

Using data collected from MEQ Probes, producers can view their mob in comparison to benchmarked averages and thresholds, and assess how their animals rank against other producers along metrics such as health, disease and carcase grades. Mob data is populated into a dashboard with four widgets, four main charts and a grid report.

MEQ said the portal’s feedback charts are interactive and traits can be applied to each axis to re-arrange the data points. Traits visualised against carcase points include intramuscular fat (IMF) percentage, lean meat yield percentage (LMY), hot standard carcase weight and GLQ Score (Gundagai Lamb Quality Score).

Gundagai Meat Processors CEO Will Barton said the new Gundagai Lamb Producer Portal enables accurate comparison of performance variations between mobs, including the best genetic combinations.

“The GLQ Score, which is calculated using a proprietary algorithm based on the IMF, LMY, and number of diseases and defects has made it much easier for us to actively advertise the quality of our lamb on a global scale.

“MEQ’s solutions and data science and AI capability have been critical to achieving this,” he said.

The IMF percentage captured in the portal is determined using MEQ Probe’s technology, which uses AI spectral analysis to determine the eating quality of meat on a hot carcase. MEQ Probe technology is commercially accredited by the Australian Meat Industry Language and Standards committee for its accurate measurement of lamb IMF. It is the world’s first industry-accredited hot measure technology for lamb IMF.

In May 2024, more than 36,000 tonnes of Australian lamb were exported globally – the highest lamb export on record in a single month. The United States is the largest market for Australian lamb, followed by China and the Middle East.