Deer Processing costs

Vermont, That is cool stuff! I never got to try a stone tool. I did shoot a "summer bunny" once and i had a cousin over and I told him we were gonna eat it "right here and now" but forgot mt knife. So I lifted the skin at the belly and had him shoot a round thru it. I then skinned it bare handed and opened the gut with a shot. Walked it to the creek to wash while he got the fire started. He had just returned from military service and said "DEEEAMMMM many soldiers woulda gone hungry or ate hair before figuring that out..."
Brent
 
$55.00 a deer. i get the backstraps butterflied into steaks, the tenderloins are left alone and the rest is cubed. whatever can't be cubed is mixed with a little wild hawg fat and ground into burger. all the meat is individually packaged and marked for freezer storage.

i would do my own but i can't afford the equipment right now. i usually harvest 4-6 deer a year so it can get expensive.
 
I go to a lot of pains to produce good meat from a kill. I used to take it to a local processing plant, he'd say come back in a couple weeks and I'll have your meat ready.....I sez to myself, "Self. What kind of flipping deal is this?". I already hung this sucker 3 days. Why two more weeks?

I said, you got quite a few, huh? He just motioned, and I went over and looked thru the door and there was a pile of carcasses probably six feet high and 20 feet long. My God, the stench. There was no identity to those carcasses. What he did was wait until the weekend, and then they would process the whole bunch at one time. All the meat went together, clean, dirty, spoiled---101# of $$$$.

I said, no thanks. I took it home and had it done in a couple hours. The guy I was hunting with left his there. I tasted some of his meat and it was like road kill. Figured that I made a good move there.

Once in a while I would take my rear quarters to a processor that did a lot of hogs and have him put the two hams in with a batch of his hog hams and make venison ham. He charged me like $20 each to do that. I thought that was expensive and quit that. It is good though. They come out cooked, smoked, and cured. I could have purchased ham at that time for that price.
 
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