Improvement of meat quality in commercial beef and pork production systems

Meat quality is becoming more important as consumers worldwide are increasingly demanding consistently higher quality meat. This article looks at the improvement of meat quality and also focuses on applied animal husbandry practices that can influence meat quality. Breeding technology for meat quality is still in its infancy, and will only accelerate with new developments in genetic markers, gene discovery and the in vitro measurement of meat quality. Slaughter and post-slaughter processing is known to influence meat quality. However the less known management practices that also influence meat quality is also described, with an indication of the role of the seed stock industry. _______________________________________________________________________________________