Conservation of water for washing beef heads at harvest

The objective of this research was to develop methods to conserve water necessary to cleanse beef heads prior to USDA-FSIS inspection. This was to be accomplished by establishing a baseline for the minimum amount of water necessary to adequately wash a head and application of image analysis to provide an objective measure of head cleaning. Twenty-one beef heads were manually washed during the harvest process. An average 18.75 L (2.49 SD) and a maximum of 23.88 L were required to cleanse the heads to USDA-FSIS standards. Digital images were captured before and after manual washing then evaluated for percentage red saturation using commercially available image analysis software. A decaying exponential curve extracted from these data indicated that as wash water increased beyond 20 L the impact on red saturation decreased. At 4 sigma from the mean of 18.75 L, red saturation is 16.0 percent, at which logistic regression analysis indicates 99.994 percent of heads would be accepted for inspection, or less than 1 head in 15,000 would be rejected. Reducing to 3 sigma would increase red saturation to 27.6 percent, for which 99.730 percent of heads likely would be accepted (less than 1 in 370 would be rejected).