(gentle music) (upbeat music) [Narrator] When people think of beef, Nebraska is often top of mind and rightfully so.

(cows mooing) [Weber] Agriculture's number one in Nebraska, that's what runs the whole state.

Small towns have been built and hopefully remain thriving, livestock is key to this area and definitely key for the growth of our state and population base.

Nebraska needs agriculture to thrive.

[Calkins] One in four steaks in the United States comes out of the state of Nebraska.

Our beef has a worldwide reputation for high quality and that's because we have the resources that are necessary to support an accelerated production system.

[Tiedeman] Nebraska's a hub for seed stock production.

It's a hub for feeder cattle coming off of these ranches.

It's a hub for feed yards and there's a large packing presence in the state of Nebraska as well.

[Narrator] The conditions are right for steaks coming out of Nebraska to be delicious.

How cattle are raised, harvested and cooked to give the best eating experience all factor into the equation.

So do years of research coming at the university and federal levels.

[Tiedeman] We've got a great corn and feed base.

We've got amazing sandhill grass and we've got a lot of really impressive ranchers that help to bring the system full circle.

[Narrator] Steak is something many people enjoy preparing and, of course, eating, but there's a lot of science that happens before it becomes a savory meal.

[Tiedeman] When you go to the marketplace and you're trying to identify that steak that you're gonna take home, there's been a lot of hands that have touched that from the rancher and me just before them in the seed stock industry, and we're all trying to do the same thing.

We're trying to provide a wholesome, high quality, predictable, consistent eating experience.

(steak sizzling) So my part of it, I'm trying to think about the marbling genetics and think about the ribeye size and think about the carcass weight and think about days on feed and average daily gain for the feeder.

And I'm trying to incorporate little nuggets along the way that will help everybody along the chain and ultimately, create an awesome steak at the end.

[Narrator] Let's see how it all comes together.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) [Narrator 2] These are Nebraska corn farmers.

They work in acres, not hours.

Over nine million acres to be exact.

Harvesting the energy and climate solutions the world needs, ear after ear, year after year.

We are proud to stand with you.

(upbeat music) (horse neighing) [Narrator] Before we see how far we've come, let's first look at how we got here.

When you think about meat, years and years and years and hundreds and thousands of years ago, we see a lot of cured meat, right?

Whether it was the Indians who did a lot of smoked to preserve meat or if you went more into areas where there was more salt, they would do a lot more salting to preserve meat.

(people chattering) [Narrator] Jordan Wicks grew up going to the butcher with her grandfather as a child and has been hooked on meat science since her 4H days.

Okay, so first thing is like there's that spot, right?

So we're gonna want to trim that down.

It's really all I've been doing ever since I was a kid.

I love it.

I can't imagine working in anything different than that.

[Narrator] She is an assistant professor and meat extension specialist at the University of Nebraska's Animal Science College.

Okay.

And then get one more spot right there.

But once we hit refrigeration, that really changed the game as how we think about meat.

When we were able to refrigerate rail cars, we could ship meat, right?

We did not have to localize it just to one spot.

So now we were gonna be able to get protein across the nation: to growing cities, to rural areas and then we started to expand that into what would be a lot of times referred to as like the locker.

So the locker comes up because you would have a storage, a refrigerated locker where you would store products that you needed refrigerated.

But as we move forward, we were able to start putting refrigeration into storefronts, and that was able to obviously expand the reach on who could have it and how long we could hold it, because we know that if we keep meat cold, we can keep it for longer while still having a fresh product.

And then of course, the freezing preserves it for so much longer and that allows us to keep a fresh product rather than a salted product or a smoked product.

While those are still great, it really changed how we could consume fresh beef products.

[Narrator] Chris Calkins made a career out of studying meat at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, where he spent over four decades honing his craft.

If we look at the history of the beef industry, we would take the animal to the packing house and the entire carcass would be shipped to the grocery store, and we relied on butchers in the grocery store to do the cutting.

Imagine what that does.

That grocery store then has to sell everything, all kinds of roast, all kinds of steaks and it has to be done in balance, depending on what proportions come from that beef carcass, that creates some real challenges.

(upbeat music) 50, 60, 70 years ago, the industry developed this notion that we could make primal cuts and now we can sell primal cuts rather than the whole carcass.

Transportation becomes cheaper and more efficient, and now a store can specialize in round cuts or steak cuts.

Evolution from there has been that now we often ship the meat by removing the bones, so it's just the muscle itself that is being shipped.

Again, more efficient, more user friendly for customers and consumers.

[Narrator] Calkins saw firsthand how steaks have changed over the past several decades.

[Calkins] Just 40 or 50 years ago, if you wanted to give your guests a wonderful beef experience, you served them a roast, it was slow cooked so it was soft and tender and you could be sure that was the best eating experience they could get.

(meat sizzling) Over the years, we've really shifted that focus to now focus on steaks, something that we can cook on the grill that gives us that great flavor and also is tender at the same time.

[Wicks] We've made a lot of advancements in how we produce cattle, how we manage our harvesting and our processing to ensure that we have tender cuts.

[Calkins] Part of the focus on steaks is because they are convenient.

You don't necessarily have to take hours roasting a product.

[Speaker 1] Coming out.

[Narrator] Today, most steaks consumers buy are wet aged and it's often a treat to eat the more expensive dry aged product, but that's not how it started out.

Adam Siegfried owns the Coppermill Steakhouse in McCook.

They dry age steaks in house, but the majority of steaks they sell are wet aged.

Up until I think the early 1970s, everything would've been dry aged, or I guess just they call it hanging beef basically.

But then they invented something called cryovacing which kind of revolutionized the whole industry.

So along with came cryovacs became a lot easier to handle those bigger cuts of meat, you know, like your strip loins, your short loins, your ribeyes, your basic big primal cuts.

The wet age factor of it is basically it's aging inside the Cryovac, and it gives it a great tender mouth feel, and it's a great product.

On the dry age side, it sounds kind of weird because you're actually pulling moisture out of the meat.

You're imparting a more beef intense flavor to it.

It forms a nice pellicle as it's doing that, which it's a super tender steak.

The flavor wise profile is way different.

There's a lot of nuttiness in it, you can compare it to some cheeses as far as the peaks and valleys of that go.

[Narrator] The beef industry is ever changing.

It's not as simple as harvesting an animal, then eating it.

Research, trial and error and changing values all play a part in the steak's evolution.

In the fifties, the cattle were very small and moderate and compact.

And then what is termed the continental breeds came in, the Limousin and the Simmentals, some of the other breeds came in and there was a rush for a lot of frame, a lot of size, a lot of growth.

We've taken some of that size out of them, but we've increased the beef production in those animals now.

These cattle are much more carcass oriented, better eating experiences on the forefront of our mind.

So we're looking at traits like marbling and carcass weight and fat thickness and we're using a lot of prediction models and things that way.

[Wicks] Back in the nineties, we were very concerned about cholesterol and heart health and so we wanted really lean product, and so we started to see smaller portion sizes of meat.

We started to see leaner cuts of meat.

And now while some of that is still very much applicable, we are also starting to see those consumers who are willing to pay a premium for our higher quality finish.

When we think about a higher quality finish, we're really talking about marbling or fat, those little white dots in the steaks that's actually intramuscular fat, which obvious have a little bit more flavor and potentially a little bit more tender product as well.

[Tiedeman] As I look back throughout my life, steaks in the early 90s, you had a coin flip as to what your eating experience was gonna be.

Was it gonna be a juicy tender, outstanding steak or was it gonna be a little bit chewy, a little bit dry?

Obviously cooking practices go into that.

(meat sizzling) As genetics change, and as we've developed our tools that we used to identify and breed these animals, we've increased marbling significantly.

We've increased a lot of the consistency in the product.

There was a period of time in the late 90s where the value of the entire carcass was declining.

So I was part of a group who did a project called Muscle Profiling.

The goal was to create an encyclopedia of knowledge about all of the muscles in the shoulder and in the back leg of the animal.

Those were the parts of the carcass where value had declined the most over a five year period.

[Narrator] From that project, 15 different cuts of meat either got renamed or got rediscovered as a new type of steak.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Florida share credit for the development of the flat iron, the most purchased steak that came from that research.

[Calkins] We sell approximately 100 million pounds of those now in the U.S., before the project, none of them were sold as steaks.

They were roasts or they were ground beef.

So tremendous increase in value for producers and the industry, but the best part is a real great boost in value for consumers.

(upbeat music) When you go and buy a flat iron steak, you know what you're getting.

You know it's going to taste good.

It's the second most tender muscle in the carcass.

[Shackelford] That's a case where there's a muscle that had fairly limited value that has increased because of the identification of a cut with a inherent characteristics that were actually quite good.

But it also had one characteristic in the middle of it that was quite bad, and they changed the method that that cut gets fabricated in to make it into usable steaks.

A flat iron is actually the second most tender cut in the beef carcass.

It's high in marbling, it's high in tenderness, and so that's something that you can use to cut as a steak.

It'll be tender.

It's something that you can put on a steak salad 'cause it will bite with like the lettuce and it's a little bit more cost effective than buying a filet or a tenderloin steak.

We used to think that mussels in the round and the chuck were the ones that allowed the animals to move, and so they did a great deal of work while the animal was walking, but some of those muscles in the chuck just do this, and they don't work that hard.

Therefore, they're very tender.

And so now what we try to do is identify specific names for specific cuts so that a customer can recognize that name, know what that cut is going to be and then they will know how best to cook and make a great meal out of that piece of meat.

(machine beeping) [Wicks] So what you're starting to see now in steaks and how they've evolved is a lot more thicker, a lot more finish or fat content to them and a lot more types of steaks.

We saw a transition where we went from bone-in products to boneless products, and now when we're thinking about a really special steak, you're starting to see a lot more bones back in those.

Have a good day.

Thanks, you too.

(gentle music) [Speaker] The marbling scores have increased, carcass size and the amount of beef we're producing from these individual cows has increased, but the cow size has probably decreased, so that's a marker of efficiency.

The way the cattle are fed in the feed yards, we are using byproducts and co-products of ethanol production, distilling any of the distillers grains that cattle feeders can get their hands on.

It's an awesome feed product and if we don't feed it to cattle, it would most likely be waste.

Cattle are able to utilize that in an efficient manner and being able to reach out into other industries and, you know, make those efficient strides is awesome.

Marbling across the board has increased significantly.

That's the linchpin to a great eating experience.

[Narrator] Jake Tiedeman was born into the cattle business.

He went to the University of Nebraska to become a lawyer, but ultimately decided to go back to the ranch and continue in the family business.

Today he, along with his wife and parents, continue the legacy started by his grandfather as seed stock cattle producers at Baldridge-Tiedeman Angus in North Platte.

[Tiedeman] Currently in today's marketplace, we have the lowest number of mama cows across the country that we've had since the 1940s, and we're still producing a record amount of beef, so we've tamed down the mature size of these animals to better fit our environment, be a more efficient producer, a more efficient factory, if you will.

And I think that's important for all of us.

She's doing all right.

(cows mooing) [Narrator] Imagine, researching and breeding animals based on traits and characteristics you want to achieve when you eat the final product.

That's what happens on a daily basis at the Baldridge-Tiedeman Ranch.

Science plays a role before the animals are even born.

A seed stock producer is a rancher at heart, but we raise the bulls, the heifers, the cows, the genetic side of things that goes out to the various ranches that we think of in the beef production cycle.

And so we're kind of the first step.

We identify some of the up and coming trends, some of the market conditions, but we try to develop an animal that will work in our customer's environments.

We try to focus on, we call them convenience traits.

You know, docility is huge for us.

We want cattle that are gentle.

Gentle cattle tend to gain better.

We want cattle that are problem free for our customer.

[Narrator] As technology develops, the ability to make predictions about the tenderness of a ribeye or what size it will be becomes less of a guessing game.

And the people out in the industry must be scientists themselves to keep up with that technology.

We're scanning cattle, we're collecting data.

We can always make decisions off of data.

We're chasing tenderness genes in cattle these days on selecting certain cattle that are naturally more tender than other ones.

[Tiedeman] When I was growing up, we had birth weight predictions, weaning weight predictions, yearling weight predictions, and then mid to late 90s we got some of these carcass trait predictions and so we were able to start focusing on the genetic component of marbling and of ribeye and tenderness, we don't have a number for tenderness yet.

There are a number of us that track tenderness as well.

We will try to keep our eye on as many of those traits and incorporate quality in each one of those traits as often as we can.

(object whirring) I'd say AI is one of the most tangible, widely adopted tools that pure bred breeders, seed stock breeders and commercial breeders use.

It's a great tool to get added pounds because you're calving in a tighter window.

Those calves are a similar age.

They're obviously gonna be a similar genetic makeup if you're using similar sires or the same sire across the cow herd or a group of females.

It's probably the most prominent proven technology that everybody latches onto right now.

(cows mooing) [Narrator] The Tiedemans have raised several kinds of cattle over the years, but today they focus solely on Black Angus.

The Angus Association is the biggest breed association.

They'll register well over 300,000 head every year.

All of the breeders across the country will turn in data points from birth weights to weaning weights, yearling weights, ultrasound data that will look at the marbling, look at the ribeye size through the hide at a year of age.

And all of that goes into these prediction models that we use as breeders that are incorporated into what we call numbers.

(upbeat music) [Narrator] The US Meat Animal Research Center is on the side of the Hastings Naval ammunition depot that produced 40% of the naval ammunition for World War II.

There, scientists like Steven Shackelford do research that impact all aspects of cattle production and benefits the entire beef industry.

Some cattle have a greater propensity to deposit marbling than others.

Some production systems result in greater deposition of marbling than others, and then some production practices that we apply to those cattle can affect marbling.

[Tiedeman] Instead of taking an individual bull and turning him out and collecting data on 15 to 20 to 25 of his calves in a year's time, we're able to get similar predictions by taking an ear snip or a few drops of blood on a card, sending that into the association and they will give us predictions based off of genomic scores for those each individual trait, and that will give us the same prediction value as having 15 to 25 calves out of that animal.

So it's a time saver, it's a confidence builder and it really has sped things up in terms of genetic prediction and mating some of these animals.

[Narrator] Tommy Wheeler leads the team of researchers at the US Meat Animal Research Center.

There's been a lot of selection pressure for higher quality cattle so that they get a bigger percentage of them qualifying for the higher grades, the prime and the choice that would bring them a higher price for the animal that they sold or the meat that they sold.

And we've also seen a increase in the tenderness of steaks over time, as well, as they select for higher quality.

[Announcer] Meat department.

[Tiedeman] Right now we're making a record amount of percent prime and percent choice.

It's an impressive change from where we once were and it benefits everybody, but we're running about 87% choice in prime currently.

(upbeat music) [Narrator] Even with today's technology and scientific advancements, there is still one thing that is out of human control.

[Speaker] We can look at all of the numbers, all the studies, all the predictions we want, but at the end of the day, these cattle still have to go out and take green grass and convert it to red meat.

So mother nature is ultimately our limiting factor.

[Narrator] In the United States, roughly 95% of beef cattle are finished on corn at feedlots like Weber Feedyards near Dorchester.

We're a very typical Nebraska farming and feeding operation and we farm a couple thousand irrigated acres and have capacity right at 9,000 head.

The cattle that are here are obviously weaned off their mama cow and they're brought here weighing anywhere from 450 pounds on up to 1,000 pounds, depends on the conditions of where they're coming from.

Once they're born and they spend their first part of their life at the ranch with mama and then they're weaned and either backgrounded or brought to a finishing facilities or kicked back out on grass depending on the operation, they're here for approximately 180 to 250 days to eat a corn-based ration.

And that corn helps them deposit the marbling that gives us the tenderness and flavor.

In total, a typical animal is approximately 21 months at the time that we convert it to steaks and roasts.

[Speaker] Really every breed is represented here.

Everything from Wagyu on down to Hereford.

A lot of what you're seeing out here is Angus based genetics.

So whether it be a Hereford cross with an Angus for a black Baldy, whether it be a Simmental Angus, the Angus breed is real prevalent in a lot of the breeding in today's cattle.

[Narrator] Joel Weber is the fourth generation of his family to run his family owned operation.

Today, the technology he uses is not what his great-grandfather had, but that technology allows him and his team to know what's going on with each animal every day and feed each one according to its needs.

[Joel] Every morning we'll run every feed bunk and look at the previous day's ration, any trends that we've seen the last seven days averages where they're at in the feeding cycle, what rations they need to be on, if we'd had any sick cattle or any problems with each pen, what we needed to be changing about the feed for that particular day.

So when we're putting our eyes on every single bunk and every single pen, making sure there's no problems.

If something needs to be looked at as far as maintenance wise, come back to the office, generate the loads and then load it onto smart keys and give it to the feeders.

They plug it into their trucks and away they go.

Everything that I raise is irrigated corn except for rye that we put up ahead of planted corn and that is used for silage as a roughage.

Also, we're using corn silage, we're using alfalfa hay.

A lot of our ration in this area is based off distillers market.

The ethanol industry is grinding corn, so that is still corn-based diet.

(vehicle engine whirring) In 2012 when we did a modification of this feedyard, we decided that we wanted to invest in having a shade structure.

The engineers that we work with along with my father, came up with this design that you see out here and they do lower the temperature between 25 and 35 degrees on a really bad day.

In this location, we have more humidity than they do west of us a little ways.

So this is definitely a purchase that we continue to make and an investment in our operation.

Every year, the United States produces about 25 million head of corn fed beef cattle.

In Nebraska, six million of those animals come through our pastures and our processing plants.

So one in four steaks comes from our state, but Nebraska is a low population state, only about two million people.

So we are net exporters of product out of the state and our beef goes not only around the United States, but, in fact, it's recognized around the world as high quality beef.

We feed a lot of specific cattle for the higher end markets on the coast, whether it be California and New York, up and down the seaboards of both coasts.

And we do feed quite a few that are gonna be exported back to Japan.

So basically all over the world.

[Calkins] Once the animal goes to the slaughterhouse, then we create the beef carcass.

After that, we cut it into primal cuts and sub primal cuts that are placed in vacuum bags.

Subsequently, those packages are shipped to grocery stores and processors who will make steaks and roasts out of them.

All of the harvest process is inspected by the Food Safety Inspection Service.

All the meat products that you would see in the retail case have been USDA inspected and passed as being produced under safe conditions.

After that, it's up to the consumer to handle it safely further.

[Speaker] Together.

[Speaker] Yeah.

[Narrator] Ace VanDeWalle, along with his wife, Jessica, and sister, Ida, own and operate the Ord Meat Locker.

In 2020, they opened their state-of-the-art 9,000 square foot processing facility on the edge of town.

In a lot of our lockers, if you're getting a beef processed from a locker or if you're getting a meat bundle from a rancher or a farmer that's selling them through a USDA facility, our carcasses hang in an open air environment, we're dry aging.

The Calpains or natural enzymes in the meat that are breaking down connected tissue, making the product more tender.

During dry aging though, we're also losing moisture.

Moisture is evaporating outta this carcass concentrating flavors versus wet aging, if it comes in a vacuum sealed bag when they're in the big plants like the Tysons and the Cargills, that meat is cut and it's in boxes within 48 hours and that is wet aging.

So the same Calpains are breaking down the connective tissue, enzymes are doing their thing, making it more tender, but we're not losing any water.

No water's evaporating outta vacuum sealed bags.

[Narrator] Ace is well schooled on meats.

He has an associate's degree in agribusiness from Northeast Community College, bachelor's and master's degrees in animal science from UNL and he studied a year and a half at South Dakota State in pursuit of a PhD before deciding to return home and buy the local meat locker.

Cutting meat, I always like to say it's an art, we eat with our eyes.

We want it to look pretty.

We wanna make sure that we take a big thing like this and we turn in nice individual portion size steaks, we want it to look good.

[Narrator] While not every butcher cuts meat the same way, there are some practices that each follows to keep products steady.

[Calkins] If we are selling in the wholesale trade and you wanna buy a rib, then you wanna know exactly which muscles and which bones you're getting when you buy the rib.

You don't want me to sell you a chuck and call it a rib, for example.

So those anatomical places where we make those cuts are very specific and they're very well defined.

One, two, three, four, five, between the fifth and sixth rib is right here.

There's your rib eye section, but that little section right there is the only spot your ribeye steaks come from and this becomes your short loin.

And so your short loin is where your T-bone steaks come from or if we take the tenderloin out, you can get New York strips.

Right in here is your sirloin section where your sirloin steaks come from and then you got your round, you can get round steaks, eye round, top round steaks come out of as well.

[Narrator] Knowing which part of the animal the steak comes out of helps the consumer know how tender it may be and how it should be prepared.

So when we think about steak and you ask somebody, what's your favorite steak?

Usually they say something like a ribeye or a filet, maybe a New York strip, a T-bone.

Those come from the back.

And if you think about your middle region, that's usually where you put on a little weight and that's usually where you don't have as much muscular right there, and so those are usually a little bit more tender.

A beef naturally has 13 ribs, to grade one and to split this carcass, we have to rib it between the 12th and 13th rib.

So Jeff here is gonna come in and rib this carcass.

He's actually gonna count down seven and a half vertebrae, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and he's gonna rib it right there.

If we're grading beef, we can't be separating some between the 12th, 10th and 11th.

It has to be the same on every one so that it's a standard of identity.

Once we cut a large primal cut, we would place it on a hook and let it hang in a cooler so that it could tenderize over time.

And so it makes sense that you would separate between the 12th and 13th rib so you have a bone to serve as a handle when you put the meat on the hook.

[VanDeWalle] We have eight to 10 people generally in the cut room and depending how big he is and how fat he is.

But we're anywhere from 30, 40 minutes to 45, 50 on a typical beef from when it comes out, we break it down, it's packaged and it goes in the freezer for the consumer.

(object whirring) (upbeat music) You have your ribeye muscle.

And then we have this piece of meat on the outside called the spinalis, which is my favorite piece of the entire ribeye.

So this right here is where we cut the rib away from the T-bones.

His neighbor would be a New York strip.

As we go towards the head of the animal, this rib eye muscle changes as we go down and my spinalis starts to get bigger.

This is my neighbor to the chuck eye and this is my neighbor to the New York Strip.

If you notice the difference in my muscles, personally my favorite, I like this end, a cut towards the chuck end better because I love the flavor that this spinalis gives you out here.

(machine whirring) The round is the back end of him where your round steaks come from, your tenderloin, the highest dollar cut in here, the most tender muscle in the entire carcass, it's the smallest percentage of the total carcass weight.

That's why it costs you so much when you go to buy it.

We also have flank steaks.

There's only one per half.

And then we also have one of my favorites, skirt steak, which is part of the diaphragm muscle.

We can't see it, but if you ever eat a flat iron steak, it comes out of the chuck, the flat iron in infraspinatus muscle lays right across the top of the shoulder blade.

[Narrator] Owning a meat locker was never in Ace's plans, but now that life took him down the path, he wouldn't have it any other way.

I enjoy the full circle and the process and the customer service and talking to that family on the phone that brings us, they may bring me one beef a year, but every year they come to you and it's that relationship you build and you're talking to them and then they call you back and go, that was a great eatin' steer.

You did good.

And at the same time I go, no, you did good too.

You still had to feed it, you brought the right one in.

I'm only half the equation.

It still takes a good one to make a good one.

(object whirring) (upbeat music) [Narrator] Ace's facility processes 24 to 30 head a week.

At larger facilities, some of the processes the carcass goes through are a bit different.

[Calkins] All of the meat is processed under USDA inspection to ensure that every product that goes to consumers is wholesome.

Beef is graded in the big plants by a camera grating system or USDA official graders and it describes how good the product is, the quality and what to expect.

Carcasses are all price based on that.

Yield grade is how much product we expect to get out of this carcass in the grand scheme of things, we got five yield grades.

The higher up we go, the fatter that carcass is getting, which means we're gonna trim more fat away, the less meat and actual product we're gonna get out of this carcass.

So average in industry is probably around a three.

You really don't want yield grade fours and fives because that means we're starting to trim off a lot of extra fat.

Quality grading refers to the palatability of the meat.

So it's primarily within young grain fed cattle is directly related to marbling score.

So there certainly are antagonisms between quality and yield.

Most of the cattle that tend to produce higher levels of marbling also produce more trimmable fat, but it's a fight that we have to fight to get the quality that our industry, our consumers demand.

The USDA grader will grade it on how much marbling is in this ribeye.

We start on young beef under 24 months.

We start with standard, then we go select, then we go low choice, average choice, high choice, low prime, average prime, high prime.

The further up that we go, the more marbling is in that meat, which relates to eating quality.

Fat is flavor, more marbling in that the juicier the steak, the more flavorful steak.

All the grading in the big plants used to be done by visual inspection.

A USDA grader, blue hat standing there, carcasses are coming down a line and they had literally seconds to look this entire carcass over, look at the ribeye and then they would stamp it, they'd stamp it yield grade, and then they'd stamp it quality grade, they all did that within seconds.

[Wheeler] We did start to develop in working closely with industry to develop instrumentation that could more consistently conduct the grading process for them.

And it's taking a picture of this ribeye and taking all the other information like hot carcass weight and it's doing its measurements on fat and it's figuring out how much marbling is in there and it's assigning a grade to it.

[Shackelford] How it's used in the grading process varies from plant to plant, but in general that image is collected, it's presented downstream to the grader and then the grader in most cases will agree with a camera and the grade is applied to the carcass.

But the graders do have oversight over the system to override the camera if they so choose.

[Narrator] By 2009, the camera began making its way to USDA inspected facilities, and the researchers at Clay Center continued their work to keep the beef products being produced across the country at the high level consumers expect.

(upbeat music) [Narrator] Once the steak leaves the processing plant, it heads to the grocery store.

Consumer's preferences continue to impact research that is done before that steak goes home and is enjoyed.

When we think about beef, we think about bright cherry red.

That's the technical term for the color of beef that we as meat scientists and the beef industry as a whole are trying to achieve.

Now, generating bright cherry red beef can be challenging at times.

The color development of beef can be altered through a lot of different ways.

It could be altered through feeding regimes or different environmental factors.

And so sometimes we don't always get bright cherry red beef.

So what we are seeing now, especially when there's like heat events, stress, or big rainfalls in like a lot of weather type conditions, but we start to see what we call dark cutting beef.

We're trying to understand how that changes the muscle, the physiology of that and how we can kind of mitigate it on the processing and on the live side of it.

[Narrator] The color of the meat is so important to the consumer that it is a large part of research at the university and the US Meat Animal Research Center, One of the primary things we spend a lot of time on is to study the animal to animal variation and why the steaks from one animal turn brown in a retail case faster than others and what the mechanisms are going on there, how we might be able to extend that or why one animal produces an unfavorable tenderness experience and what we can do to improve that.

[Wicks] We're also working on some things more on the early side of the harvesting to help ensure that we kind of can eliminate some of this discoloration in beef from the start.

And so we're looking at differences in chilling rates, differences in timing, aging and how that can impact some of that as well.

So we're monitoring animal behavior and animal health to help indicate how that will translate into meat quality.

[King] When a consumer will walk up to a retail case, the primary factor that they're gonna use to evaluate a cut of meat and make that purchase decision is the color of the product.

So they will associate a bright cherry red color with wholesomeness, with nutritiousness and with safety.

And so trying to make sure that that product meets those expectations is really important for that initial purchase decision.

[Speaker] All right, thank you, you have a great day.

[Narrator] Andy King works with Tommy Wheeler and Steven Shackelford at the US Meat Animal Research Center.

A lot of King's research focuses on meat's color.

[King] And myoglobin has a binding site that will bind oxygen and when it is binding that oxygen that gives you the bright cherry red color and then that protein can oxidize, which is what causes the browning color.

And that happens way faster in some animals than it does in others.

Consumers tend to say, well that steak turned brown, it's not safe.

And that's really almost always not true.

The color of the meat is not a determinant of spoilage.

It is true that if you have spoilage levels of microorganisms it will change colors.

But that's very rarely the case in a retail case.

It's just aesthetically not pleasing to the consumer, and they will typically turn away from it.

[Calkins] The three characteristics most people look for when they evaluate their steaks is what does it taste like?

How tender is it?

And how juicy is that piece of meat?

When I was a young child, steak wasn't always as tender.

I remember my grandmother used to tell me, chew that thing 20 times before you swallow it.

That's not the case anymore.

So there's two ways that we measure tenderness.

One is a trained sensory panel and the other way is just strictly a tenderness measurement, which is called shear force.

You cook the steak and then you take a sample out of it and you measure the amount of force required to shear through or cut through that sample.

And that's directly related to the tenderness of the steak.

(upbeat music) And so one of the ways that we study tenderness and try to better understand differences in tenderness is by looking at this protein called Desmond.

That's one of the structural proteins in the muscle that's gets degraded over time, if it's a steak, that's gonna become more tender.

And so we use this instrument to look at the degradation of the protein Desmond in meat to see whether it would predict that that steak's gonna be tender or tough.

Our goal as producers is to make sure we build the highest quality possible into the meat that you get.

And the goal of the person selling you that meat is to help you select the right cut for the use that you are trying to satisfy.

[Speaker 6] Thank you.

Thank you.

Once that hide comes off that carcass, whether it comes off a red and white Hereford or it comes off a black Angus or a Red Angus or a black Simmental, we don't know what it is while it's hanging.

Some breeds naturally marble a little better than others so you can get a flavor difference between certain breeds of cattle just on how much marbling there is.

But if I have a Hereford a Red Angus, a black Angus and a Simmental, I could do a blind taste test and no one's gonna be like, that's the black Angus guaranteed.

I truly believe they're not going to.

You know, the differences in breeds will bring out some colorful conversations.

If you ask what's the best breed, it's gonna end up being kind of a Ford versus Dodge versus Chevy kind of a conversation.

[VanDeWalle] Now as breed associations, it's marketing.

The Black Angus Association has done a really good job of marketing so well that you stick the word it's Angus beef or black Angus beef on it, they're good beef, they really are.

Could I put a good Hereford steak in that and eat just as well?

Yes you could.

[Narrator] Americans lead busy lifestyles and often don't have hours to prepare meals, that's on the radar of researchers who work on ways make steaks that fit into whatever life consumers lead.

[Wicks] No two consumers are the same, no two lifestyles are the same.

And so how do we get into everyone's diet is challenging 'cause some of these cuts, they need time to cook and marinate and all that and other things, you know, you're going, I don't have time for this.

And so we've really worked as an industry to make it more accessible for on-the-go type.

[VanDeWalle] You know, we can't all afford eat ribeyes every night.

We can't, maybe we're celebrating a special birthday.

Go buy the most best steak you can afford to purchase.

Whether that's a ribeye, filet mignon.

You know, if you're eating steaks on a Wednesday night or need something for fajitas and stir fry, buy a sirloin, buy something for kebab meat.

[Wicks] We have a market that is safe, is tender and has the quality and the versatility that consumers want.

Nobody wants to eat the same cut every night.

And so because the beef carcass has so many options, you know, we don't just have to have a steak and potato.

We can have this in a lot of different ways.

We can add it with our pastas, with our salads, with our breakfast even.

[Narrator] Once the consumer finds the perfect steak and brings it home, how the steak is prepared and cooked continues to impact the eating experience.

(meat sizzling) And how the steak is prepared depends on which cut it is.

What we generally call the middle meats, so the ribeye and the New York strip and the top sirloin steaks are generally higher quality, generally more tender, cost more, have higher value.

Some of the other muscles are lower in quality.

They either have more connective tissue or they're inherently less tender because they have shorter fibers or whatever.

Different cuts have different characteristics, different qualities and you cook them differently and utilize them differently to take advantage of those and get the most value from each one.

Definitely pull out your steak early so it can get up to almost room temperature.

It depends if you wanna do like reverse sears and stuff like that.

But if you're just looking just to do a nice grilled steak, you know, season it up really nice, let that seasoning set on there so it can adhere to the meat.

So just doesn't just fall off.

You can use a binder, whether it's olive oil or you know, you can use beef tallow as well.

If you pull a steak off the grill immediately and go to cut it, you're gonna lose a lot of those juices.

You gotta let that meat kind of relax again, and those juices will kind of redistribute it back again.

So where you cut your steak, all that moisture and stuff inside is gonna kind of stay in there.

So I would say the biggest thing for amateur grillers is definitely let your steak rest at least five to 10 minutes before you cut it up and start eating on it.

[King] And depending on what cooking method you use, whether you're using a direct heat or a moist heat or whatever, will drastically affect the compounds that are being given off during the eating experience, that will affect flavor.

[Narrator] For safety, the USDA recommends consumers cook all raw beef steaks and roast to a minimum internal temperature of 145 degrees.

At medium rare, everything starts breaking down so your inner muscular fat starts breaking down better.

So therefore it's a little less chewy, it's a better mouth feel.

So I'd say medium rare is about the best you can get, as you keep on going up, you're pushing out more and more moisture out that steak.

So you know, we always hate to see, you know, a dry aged steak for $65 that gets ordered well done.

It kind of breaks our heart a little bit, but you know, if that's what you want it, we'll cook it the way you want.

Honestly we think cooking a steak to that degree of doneness is sinful, you know, but some consumers want it cooked medium, some call want it cooked well.

And that's part of the value of these higher quality grades is to get at a product that consumers can abuse and still result in a palatable product.

(meat sizzling) Now if you're somebody who likes a more well done steak, you probably want to think about something more in the back or in the mid region.

So ribeyes, New York strips, T-bones, filets, sirloins, something that can withstand a little bit more heat, still produce a tender product.

[Narrator] Most of the steaks being cooked are wet aged, but for those cooking a dry aged steak, there are tips to keeping it delicious.

[Siegfried] Only 1% of cattle that are harvested in the whole entire world go to a dry age program.

It takes a lot of space, a lot of time and a little bit of science and kinda know what you're doing to do the dry age thing, especially well.

You take the same meat and say they're both 21 days, the wet age versus dry age.

That dry age steak is naturally gonna have less moisture in it.

[Speaker] The wet age steak has more moisture in it, so it actually takes a little longer to cook but the dry age steak will cook a little faster 'cause it has a little less moisture in it.

We actually pull those off at different temperatures.

This steak's at 120 degrees, but it's gonna go up quicker because it has less moisture in it.

So customer wants have a medium rare, so I'll pull it off at 117 instead of my normal 120 or 122 for a med rare steak.

So there's a little bit of science that goes into the boys back there, and it takes a little bit of technique of cooking it.

Not just your average steak slinger can, you know, cook the perfect steak the first time.

It takes a little bit of a science to it.

(upbeat music) (door creaking) [Narrator] Sometimes steaks are one of those things people prefer to eat out rather than prepare themselves at home.

Over the years, steakhouses have changed, and in recent years some staples in communities, even in Nebraska, have gone out of business.

Adam has modernized his restaurant's look and menu to keep customers craving what he has to offer.

[Siegfried] The restaurant business is a hard business.

Most restaurants do not make it.

But you look back at like the 1980s to where my predecessor Kevin Ord owned it, when I see people wanting to experience, it was almost like it was a course deal.

Like if a party came out it was gonna be a three hour ordeal for it.

In 2010, people wanted to, you know, to take their time, kind of enjoy the experience and anymore people kind of just wanted to get kind of moving and shaking and get out here.

There's been two owners, Kevin Ord and myself, he opened up in 1982.

We really focus on really, really good quality aged beef, whether it's wet age beef or dry aged beef.

Trying to make that a kind of our staple that we kind of build around using really quality ingredients.

We're pretty much a 90 some percent scratch kitchen.

Cutting all of our own steaks here in house at least every day.

(machine whirring) (gentle music) [Narrator] When you eat at Adam's restaurant, you taste the love in the food, the love he found growing up in a family full of amazing cooks.

So both my grandmothers, my mother are just incredible cooks, and they all had had kind of their different styles.

One grandma was very much by the book and one grandma was very much a pincher and this and kind of whatever.

I kind of kind of blend both those styles a little bit.

I always remember going to like really nice restaurants, even at a very young age.

So I've always kind of appreciated, you know, nice cuts of beef and you know, oysters and stuff like that.

(people chattering) One of our most favorite cuts is called the Adam Cut.

We're taking a piece of prime rib that's been smoked, we then put it on the grill, put some grill marks on it so it gets a little bit of a char on it.

So you get the eating experience of having something that's been slow roasted.

Plus you also get the flavor of something that has a little bit of a char grill to it.

[Narrator] A self proclaimed foodie, Adam prides himself on serving beef at the Coppermill steakhouse that he buys locally.

He developed a signature appetizer on his menu that not only looks impressive, but uses part of the meat that would otherwise be thrown away.

[Siegfried] We've been making candles from animal fats for millennia.

So we decided to make one that was maybe actually just edible.

We do our our own bread here in house, as well.

So it just pairs incredibly well.

But probably the real, where kind of came from was if you go to a nice Italian restaurant, they'll do a bread course with olive oil, some nice fresh herbs and a nice balsamic vinegar.

So I thought to myself, you could do that with beef tallow.

Kind of do a little show showpiece and make it into a candle to where it's kinda a wow factor.

So we take all those trimmings from our dry age, we render it down into basically beef tallow and then we mix that up into a mixture of a little bit of butter, some fresh herbs along with the dry age tallow.

And then we make candles out of it.

And it's really cool because it's a appetizer that's not overly expensive, and you kind of get the essence of what a dry age steak would taste like and you can smell it and taste what dry age kind of is all about.

You know, 'cause those really beefy aromas and flavors really, really, really come through in that candle.

So it's one way of kind of paying homage of the cattle and then you know, using every last bit of it that we possibly can and showing that animal a lot of respect.

(upbeat music) [Narrator] Steak has come a long way since the days of salting and drying beef, but as consumers' preferences and lifestyles continue to change, so will the science of the steak and how it's produced.

[Wicks] Years ago it was how do we optimize the cuts on a beef carcass to make more manageable sizes, more palatable products?

Today we're struggling with different things.

Maybe it's sustainability.

How do we reduce plastics, and how do we reduce emissions through our meat processing?

Or how do we improve the quality?

There is so much data that we have to capture.

There is so much work that has to be done to really understand the problem, understand how we can make a solution to the problem or how we can optimize, how we can aid and improve.

Those things take a really long time.

But when it comes together and you see the impact that you make in people's lives, when we help our stakeholders and those in our community create a better tomorrow, as we continue to move agriculture and the meat industry forward, that makes it all worth it.

[VanDeWalle] The local food movement, knowing where your food comes from and finding a rancher and a processor that you can trust is not gonna go away.

People are continue to want to know where their food comes from and trust that person that's raising it.

And so I think it's just gonna continue to grow.

We as a family are eating the same meat that we raise, the same meat that we market, the same meat that is served in all the retail outlets and the restaurants.

We wanna put the best possible product on everyone's plate.

(people chattering) [Wicks] The meat industry.

Well, yes, every industry has to make money.

I genuinely think a lot of people in the meat industry are here to serve our global population.

We wanna feed the world, that is really what we want to do.

[Weber] As the generations come and go, you know, you develop a love for the land.

You know, my family's had this property for well over 100 years.

You wanna see my kids have an opportunity to come into it and enjoy the fruits of the labor from not just me, but my great-grandfather.

[Siegfried] Beef is such a perfect protein the way it is.

You don't have to do a lot to it to make it an amazing, amazing product.

[Calkins] I predict that in the future, we'll continue to want the convenience of steak type items, but you know, we're starting to eat smaller portions and so I think portion size will reduce.

(object whirring) It used to be the dream was a one inch thick steak.

Nowadays that might be half inch thick and in fact, maybe we cut it differently so that the shape and look of that cut doesn't look like what it used to.

[Speaker 3] But I think as we move forward as an industry, we're gonna keep continuing to build a better steak and a more versatile steak and a more consumer accessible steak.

(upbeat music)