Harvesting Of Animal Products

By viewing these production systems, you should have noticed that production is time-dependent, so if you need products available at all times, you should have a large variety of animals at different stages of their life.

You should also have the infrastructure/holding capacity available to make such production possible.

For sustainable matters the following factors should be considered:

• Time of harvesting.
• Harvesting methods.
• Infrastructures to enable products to be harvested.

The supply shortage of livestock products is a consequence of the traditional marketing systems, where fresh, unprocessed meat is sold at meat markets a few hours after slaughter. To provide consumers with adequate quantities of quality meat and meat products, the processing of products has become very important. Appropriate processing techniques offer the opportunity of overcoming the two main constraints to a better supply of livestock products - availability and price.

Using specific processing techniques, it is possible to produce shelf-stable meat products that can be stored under ambient temperatures. In the traditional system, the consumption of livestock products was within a very short period.

Due to the factors above-mentioned above, meat was not available all the time. But as time passes new techniques/methods were used to maintain availability and product quality. Here are some techniques and methods:

• Extend the shelf-life of meat by the replacement water (product's microbiological stability increases when less water is present for microbiological growth.)
• Salting, curing or smoking; suitable preservatives.
• Boiling, cooking or roasting.
• Sterilization.
• Drying of unsalted pieces of meat.

Due to the wide variety you will mainly focus on meat as animal product, but this is not limited to meat only.