Why is carcass and meat quality important?
The industry produces only one product and pork meat. Making sure this product is of good quality is essential to preserve or extend markets for Canadian pork. In addition, the development of value-added products is key to the future of the industry. In order to produce specialized, ready to market products that seek premium prices in Canada or abroad, we must be able to control product quality. Meat and carcass quality can be controlled or improved in several ways: they are affected by genetics, management and feeding, health, transportation and handling, packing and processing. In this paper, we will focus primarily on genetic improvement and the monitoring of its impact in breeding herds, commercial herds, and slaughtering plants. There is a good reason for paying special attention to the genetic improvement of meat and carcass quality: it responds well to selection. Table 1 shows that the heritabilities of most carcass traits are in the 30% to 50% range, i.e. between one-third and
