Quality management is an indispensable component of meat production. Just in the pig production new scandal messages shakes the confidence of the consumers in the production ways and the methods of meat production for some years. An aspect of quality management, which gains therefore ever more significance, is the crisis management. Crisis management must be operated with large circumspection and gradate-spreading, in order to be able to unfold its effectiveness for de-escalating. Agricultural engineers of the feed industry, veterinarians within the range of agricultural production and food technologist in slaughtering and processing must find efficient solution methods for crisis situations together with the food retail trade - in the sense of the consumer protection and the production location Europe.

We hope, Q-PorkChains will show us some practical solutions and supports our farmers for example by new training- and teaching methods.

The aspect of process quality is very important in effective operating pork chains, like mentioned above.

But another outstanding objective of Q-PorkChains is to improve the product quality.

In this regard animal health is one focus of the project activities. Swine diseases have a direct influence on pork quality and thus the benefit obtained for a pig. But usually there is only little information about the prevalence of diseases obtained routinely in pig production, which could be used to determine the health status of livestock units. This will be improved step by step in strong cooperation with business partners.

A further interesting aspect is meat quality. The constant movement of production to more convenient pork products brings the meat industry to give higher priority to meat quality. New effective measurement methods will be developed which can be used to make especially the primary production and processing more meat quality oriented.

E.g. the current classification and payment of finishers is carcass quality (flesh percentage, yield of primal cuts) and not meat quality (drip loss, hygiene) oriented. It is expected that this method will also be reassessed during the project runtime.

No doubt that training and development are fundamental points especially in Hungary where the pig / pork sector still works mainly with traditional methods, obsolete and expensive technologies (wastewater management vs. strict environmental protection). Collecting, systematizing and processing latest experiences from several countries, Q-PorkChains project is expected to provide a not too long but easily understandable manual or curriculum to be used as a guideline for practitioners (farmers, processors, engineers, teachers) to learn most up-to-date methodologies and how to apply them.