We present a current state of development of an ontology of beef production and consumption developed within the interdisciplinary project ProOptiBeef, which focuses on increasing the level of innovation of beef sector in Poland. The ontology is intended to improve communication between specialists from different disciplines and expressing the results of the project in an unambiguous and machine readable way. We present the methodology applied to creating the ontology and several specific problems that occurred during its development. The ontology has been used as a component of semantic search engine, Oxpecker, which is described in the paper.