Today I butchers my first beef

I have had a cow, that I purchased with my first stimulus bribe, and I named him Food, as everyone was buying food with their bribe. A short while later I realized he was a Cowvid not a Food so I changed his name. Cowvid was scheduled for recycling in November but was a little underweight and a friend told me I could use his facility if I wished when I wished. Canceled the slaughter date.

So 19 days ago Cowvid had an accident, he walked in front of my gun. On to the friends facility. My friend/mentor has taken a shipping container 20 footer I think and turned it into a butcher shop. Cowvid spent 19 days hanging around there and then we arrived this morning. The container has the back end insulated as a cold room using an AC unit and a temp deceiver. Track is on the ceiling and the Mentor used a receiver hitch welded to the ceiling to hold the track extension allowing the cart to come to the cool room door. The track and stinger are removed to close the door. Quarters are lifted by a 120 v winch mounted to the wall and a hook to allow a pulley to hang from the receiver mount.

He has saw and grinder as well as a stainless steel table, Water is from a hose attached to the unit but there is a small tankless water heater for cleaning. Cowvid had a 680 or so hanging weight and we processed him in 6 hours, I will be doing a similar set up once I settle, The only improvement I could think of was cement floor and floor drain for easy cleaning.

 

Might wanna epoxy seal that floor with a couple of serious coats, sure makes hygiene super easy! You DO NOT want to get any renderings mashed into concrete, it never comes out and you will be fighting all sorts of issues from there on! You can mix course sand into the final coat to give traction, but be careful of that soaps you use, make sure they don't etch epoxy flooring!

 

SC you are not allowed to butcher your own beef however you can butcher a pig, a chicken, clean your own fish. Don't ask me why makes no sense to me, slaughter houses are far and few between and they charge a fortune. Government BS

 

Without the 5 to 7 hundred plus cost of the butcher my meat cost about 2 bucks a pound after factoring hay over last winter and grain.

 

Here in Cen. FL, I am often surprised by postings on FB and Craigslist by people who are giving away pigs.

Or several pigs. Or a dozen or more pigs.

Some are pot-bellied pigs--probably pets that grew to an inconvenient size. Many are supposed to go "to a good home."

(Yeah. Right.)

Pot-bellied pigs are a breed designed to thrive in a small space and on minimal food until they can be eaten at an early date.

Some of the free pigs were full-size porkers weighing a couple hundred pounds.

If I needed free food, that's a source I wouldn't turn down..

All it takes is some transportation and a little initiative.

For those that don't know how to butcher a pig (or a cow, horse, moose, or elephant) YouTube can almost certainly show the way.

But it's not necessary to know how to butcher a pig to butcher a pig.

The phrase "to butcher" has more than one meaning.

It is entirely possible to hang a pig, skin it, drop the guts--and then to simply hack it into pieces small enough to cook or freeze.

Pork chops? We don't need no es-tinkin' pork chops! Here--have an oddly-shaped hunk of pig, instead.

Pork chops are....sissy-pretty.

I have seen semi-desperate people turn down a live pig because (they said) they didn't know how to butcher it properly.

Ten pounds of tragically mangled free pig has the same food value as ten pounds of perfectly packaged pork--and costs a whole lot less.

I guess some people just don't have the mental fortitude to get their hands dirty even when they are (allegedly) hungry.

Beats me.

 

Wish I had a free supply of pigs not hard to butcher a pig (cut it up). Do have a supply of feral (wild hogs)

 

Way less fat unless they've found a steady supply of corn or if you trap a few,Feed em corn for a couple of weeks.

 

I 'butchered' my first deer a long time ago. If it looked like meat, it was cut and wrapped, if it was small, it got ground. but it mostly turned into stew meat, stirfry meat, fajita meat and some medallions cause i knew what the back straps were. It was delicious.

 

I've cleaned squirrels, rabbits , dove, turtles, fish, helped shoot, scald,scrape, gut, 6 hogs whenIwas around10 yrs old. ,, when I shot my 1st deer ,, I knew the basic anatomy of living animal's,,, like said earlier,, I might not make a pork chop ,,, but I'll be making supper ..

 

Several States have made home butchering cattle illegal. The reason is BSE testing. Every one I take in for HACCP processing or Custom butchering for customers gets the $180 State Lab fee for tissue sample testing added onto the processing bill. Oddly IL is not one of the States that ban home butcher of cattle for personal use.

The slaughter houses being booked out 12-18 Months and many not even scheduling animals until they get the backlog cleared up is making a lot of problems for folks like myself. A Normal year I have 225-250 hogs processed HACCP and Custom and do 3-4 in my own parlor for personal use. 2021 I have managed to get exactly 3 HACCP Processed by getting dates that other people cancelled at the last minute. The plants also nearly doubled the processing cost over the last year. Those of us that have been around a while saw this coming and back in 2020 scheduled a lot for processing and cut our herds way back.

Seen this before, not quite at the Covid scale we are seeing now but pre 2014 there were only a handful of us raising small herds of pasture and woodlot hogs. Then 2014 everyone seemed to be raising *Hogs On Dirt* Guess they saw us making good money doing it and jumped into the game. 2014-2016 it was a real challenge to get hogs processed in the small number of plants that will do Inspected HACCP processing (Required for selling meat). I got caught in that one and didn't scale the herd down and ended up taking a whole lot more hogs than I care to think about to the auction barn and getting about 1/10th of money selling them as custom butcher hogs or 1/20th of the money as packaged pork, which was a whole lot better than giving them away on craigslist like a lot of people were doing. 95% of the people that hopped in to the game in 2014-2016 hopped back out and things got back to the normal organized flow of animals through the plants.

Became pretty clear fairly early on in 2020 that we were heading into the same deal but for different reasons. All of the sudden everyone was a Small farmer and raising 4-5 hogs or buying on the hoof butcher hogs from us. I sold around 120 on the hoof and have 114 HACCP processed between May and December of 2020 and put the boars in their own pens and stopped the breeding at the same time. Since then I have sold 4 of the 5 boars and 18 of the 20 sows in the breeding herd and have exactly 2 sows and 1 boar now. And a very controlled breeding program with 1 sow pregnant now due in October. Normally I would have 15 bred and due September and October and the other 5 bred in December and due in March. And be looking at buying 25-30 feeder pigs in to pick some replacement sows from and finish the rest to butcher.

So here we are in 2021 and I have 3 hogs on the hoof and 18,800 pound of Belly, loins, shoulder/picnics and whole hogs ground in the freezers and hope that is enough in the freezers to weather the next year or two on the commercial side. Half tempted to get my little parlor licensed and inspected and process 20-30 per year through it with a plant inspector present. But then we come to the shortage of plant inspectors and compliance officers. LOL I have not seen a compliance officer in 4 years now since the old one quit and none of the new ones seem to last more than a month or two......... Law says I am supposed to be inspected by the compliance officer 3X per year. LOL they did send one down from Northern IL a couple of years ago but I guess after a Month and before she even got to me... She went back North and refused to work with us Southern IL Heathens ever again

Anyway the orderly flow of things is broken and us small to mid size folks that didn't see the writing on the wall in 2020 are seriously backed up and many are not getting the hint and cutting production back and getting even more backed up and will be bankrupt in another 6 months to a year. It ain't cheap to feed even 50 finished hogs after they hit 300 pounds They eat more and grow less at that point and they will be 400 pounds by the time they might get in for butchering. After 300 pounds they don't put on much more meat but start packing on heavy fat. Can't compete with 1000s of people swarming the handful of packing plants, can't compete with all of the really cheap to free finished and feeder hogs on craigslist. And the folks that buy in their feed are already feeling the pain of grain prices that are going up fast and are expected to blow the roof off of price records before the next harvest. Hogs are cheap and abundant now, My crystal ball tells me in 2 years the opposite is going to be true.

What is going on now is just another sign IMO of the world of hurt high balling it down the tracks and headed straight for us. LOL as a friend used to say "Prepare for it now or die screaming later."

 

We're about out of freezer beef, so I'll be working up a large steer in the next few weeks. I have to cut mine in quarters to be able to handle and get in the cooler.


I do the initial work outside, the lay the halves on a table built just for this, out in the driveway. Cut halves into quarters, lay the 1/4 on a cart and roll to the cooler to hoist up to hang. Quarters will often run 200lbs on the size beef we kill.


Grinding:

 

Here you go