Peter Moloney

The unique small size and early maturity pattern of Lowlines enable tender, small cuts of well marbled beef to be produced off grass and without feedlotting. The smaller cuts of beef are better suited to the modern, health conscious palate.

Lowline, in recent comparisons, score favourably in the efficiency of primal cut production when considering eye muscle to body weight ratio, producing nearly twice as much eye muscle as the other breeds. At the 2005 Royal Melbourne Show Victorian producer, Linda Senger-Whitehead showed the Grand Champion Carcase. This was a Lowline cross steer whose dressed carcase weight was 211kg with a massive eye muscle area of 90cm!

A significant attribute of the breed for the commercial beef market is the high ratio of saleable meat (once bone and fat are removed), commonly referred to as ‘meat yield’ that pure bred and cross bred Lowlines provide. This is very important for a butcher because when they buy a carcase they purchase the whole carcase so the higher the meat yield the greater the profit for the butcher. Figures provided by one butcher, who has been in the business for some 43 years, gave meat yield figures of 76.13% and 74.21% for pure-bred Lowline steers.

This is well above average for any breed. His rationale for this percentage is due to the smaller bone content – most evident in the amount of chuck that the carcases produced. The steers were pure bred Lowlines, grass fed with a little supplementary grain and killed at 25 months of age with 6-8mm fat depth.