From pasture to plate, a new University of Nebraska program gives students a true taste of the state’s No. 1 industry.
The University of Nebraska at Kearney, Nebraska’s College of Technical Agriculture and University of Nebraska-Lincoln are partnering to launch University Beef, an initiative that combines hands-on learning with dining.
The University Beef program starts in southwest Nebraska, where NCTA students raise and manage about 60 head of cattle at the Curtis campus and a 2,100-acre ranch located west of town. Those animals are cared for at an NCTA livestock working facility and finished at a small feedlot on campus. The final product was the only missing piece. Previously, NCTA sold its cattle to a large company such as Tyson when it was time for them to be processed. That’s no longer the case.
Now, the University Beef partnership brings those cattle to Lincoln, where UNL students harvest and process the meat at the Department of Animal Science’s Loeffel Meat Lab, a U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected facility.
From there, the packaged beef is transported to Kearney and transformed into dishes prepared by Sodexo, the dining services provider at UNK.
