Years of Knowledge and Experience.

Classic Livestock Management Services is a company that currently has thirteen shareholders who have a range of experiences and skills in animal production and associated business.

Some of our shareholders have been grading livestock and selecting for meat quality for around fifteen plus years and looking for traits that can be identified as being consistently required to produce a quality, consistent product.

Research into a range of other selection methods and grading systems, along with our own experience over many years has led to the system we have developed today that is capable of delivering in excess of a 97% success rate for cattle with a high meat quality. Whilst it is primarily a subjective system, the company is continually working to support it with objective methods.

Consumer feedback and taste tests has given us the confidence in the system we have developed.

Consumer feedback and taste tests has given us the confidence in the system we have developed to know that it will provide us with the product that is most desired by the consumer. The majority of our work has been done with cattle, but we are confident that the same traits carry a similar influence in all cloven hoofed animals.

We have identified 19 traits that can be visually and kinaesthetically assessed and scored by trained evaluators. These traits concentrate on selecting for breeding purposes and for meat quality.

The major advantage of our system is that it can select animals on the hoof in a matter of minutes or less, as compared with other meat grading systems that only grade after slaughter.

This ensures, for example, that high scoring breeding animals are not slaughtered, but used to breed from, thus increasing the herd etc. percentage of the gene pool necessary for increasing the production of these quality animals.

We have found that the required traits can be found in all breeds, although some of the older, less popular breeds are tending to have a higher percentage of better grading animals. We think that the popular breeds have been more genetically manipulated in recent years to produce highly only in one or two areas e.g. growth rates, milk quantity. Five of our shareholders, who live in the state of Victoria, have recently bought their own abattoir and retail outlet and

so are now in a position to do more research into the promotion and marketing of meat graded with the CLMS system.

It is proposed to continue to do more scientifically based research to support our mainly subjective work and to link this in with a healthy food strategy. The other area that we are investing time in is finding an electronic or similar scanner or probe that can be used to take some of the human error out of our subjective evaluations.

This will allow us to broaden our base of evaluators and grade more animals.