Honduran Production Systems and Dietary Impacts on Beef Carcass and Offal Yields and Value

Faculty from Texas Tech University worked alongside with Honduran cattle producers to develop feeding trials with specific diets for each producer. Feedstuffs in each diet were determined by local availability and price. A total of five new finishing programs were established with an additional grass finished program as control. The six treatments were: dried distillers grains (DDG), palm kernel meal (PKM), sugarcane (SC), soybean meal and corn (SBMC), sorghum (SORG), and grass fed (GF). Bos indicus crossbred cattle were utilized and harvest yield (n = 240) and carcass fabrication data (n = 142) were collected from each treatment at a local processing plant in Siguatepeque, Honduras. Carcass sides were fabricated according to IMPS, fresh beef products, 100 series. All subprimals were collected, with trim sorted according to normal processing standards, and bone weight also collected. All observations were evaluated by PROC GLIMMIX in SAS (version 9.3, SAS Inst. Inc., Cary, NC) to a significance level of (P < 0.05). Diet served as the fixed effect, while kill group was included in the model as a random effect. Results