Assessment of a probe to measure fat depth of lamb carcases

Despite the research to ensure Australian prime lamb carcases remain a premium meat, there are no objective carcase assessment tools which enable economic incentives to be translated to producers of high meat yielding lambs. Consequently, a probe developed in Iceland, the Icemeat probe, was investigated as a tool for measuring the tissue depth at the Greville (GR) site. To this end, 1087 lambs were measured at two abattoirs over a period of 4 months using the device and a GR knife on every lamb. Agreement was assessed by linear regression and by graphical analysis for systematic patterns of disagreement. Overall, these results highlighted increasing variability of the Icemeat probe measurements with increasing GR tissue depth. Therefore, further developments are required prior to industry adoption.