Morphological assessment of beef cattle according to carcass value

In this paper we present an assessment function devised for bulls of a beef breed according to the specific market requirements of their carcasses. The procedure is completely repeatable since it is based on the measurements in centimeters of only 3 lengths of live animals plus an estimation of the curvature of the round profile. To derive this assessment, we used Artificial Intelligence tools based on Support Vector Machines (SVM). They allowed us to learn the estimations of the experts of the Association of Breeders (ASEAVA) about the value of carcasses of the animals in the sense that the score returned by the assessment function (on a scale 0–100) is higher for bulls with more valuable carcasses. Additionally, we studied the growth of bulls in order to adjust the assessments to a constant age of 365 days.