Genotype comparisons for meat and eating quality traits

The National Genetic Evaluation Program (NGEP), a project coordinated by the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) with geneticists and commercial producers in America, provided good evidence for significant differences between terminal sire lines in progeny performance for production, carcase, meat and eating quality traits. The project identified “differences among sire lines for many muscle quality traits that are directly related to eating quality and consumer acceptability of pork” (National Hog Farmer, 1995, pg 19). Moreover, considerable re-ranking of sire lines for commercial profit of producers was evident when differences in meat quality traits were considered. A subset of results from this study is shown in Table 1.