Filling the Deep Freeze With Meat

In our post ON DECEMBER 20, 2020 we talked about bring our two bulls to be processed at Elliot's Slaughterhouse in Morse, Louisiana.  After being slaughtered the meat is dry-aged and then cut/processed according to the instructions we shared in the post from December.  They package, label, and freeze the meat and then call us to go pick it up.  My wifey made the short drive in the pickup truck and brought it home.

She actually made a couple of trips, first filling the deep freeze at our house and then filling the one at Russ' house.  Here are photos of the meat picked up and brought to our house prior to fitting it into our freezers.  The bags are huge!  It doesn't look like much meat, but it is.  Here is the ground meat, steaks, roasts, ribs, etc.:

Here is a big bag of bones:

Here is a big bag of fat.  (More on this bag tomorrow)

So, it is a shame that we don't have a scale to weigh the animals prior to slaughter.  That would really tell the story.  But what we have is interesting nonetheless.  

Clarabull, we estimate, weighed 725 pounds.  He yielded 284 pounds hanging weight after shrinkage from dry aging.  Processing cost $0.49 per pound.  The charge for butchering him was $75 and debris (liver, heart, tongue, ox tail) was $12.

Aussie, we estimate, weighed 775 pounds. He yielded 310 pounds hanging weight after shrinkage from dry aging. Processing cost $0.49 per pound.  The charge from butchering him was $75 and the debris (liver, heart, tongue, ox tail) was $12.

Total cost + tax was $486.35.  Taking the cost of processing divided by pounds of retail cuts of meat gives us an average cost of $1.14 per pound.

For comparative purposes, the cost of butchering back in 2017 was $25 and $0.43 per pound of hanging weight.  The cost of butchering this year (2020) was $75 and $0.49 per pound.

Now that we have almost 600 pounds of beef in the freezer from our bulls and 47 Cornish Cross Meat Birds in the freezer, we are seriously considering investing in a generator.  It would be a tragedy to have a power outage and lose that meat!  We have an addendum to this post tomorrow.  Stay tuned!

Picking Up the Meat

Several weeks ago we brought one of our bulls to the slaughterhouse in a neighboring town.  They butchered the bull and then dry-aged him for two weeks before cutting him up.  We don't have a scale, so we don't know his "on the hoof" weight, but we have a pretty good idea based on the receipt.  The receipt below shows a 284 pound hanging weight.  The difference between live weight and hanging weight is the blood, hide, hoofs, internal organs, lungs and heart.  A good rule of thumb is that the hanging weight is 40% of the live weight.  So this tells us that the live weight must have been in the neighborhood of 710 pounds.

You'll see there is a $0.45 per pound charge, plus a $50 butcher feel, plus a $12 fee to process the debris.  $189.80 plus taxes of $16.50, results in a total charge of $206.51.  That's a lot of money, but then again, it's a lot of meat.

After the bull was butchered, they packaged it and asked us to wait a couple days for it to get frozen solid.  Tricia arrived and there were about six wire baskets of meat ready for her.

The meat was all in a big walk in freezer along with everyone else's meat.  It was labeled and organized.

The ground meat, steaks, briskets, ribs, roasts, liver, tongue, fat, bones, and debris were individually wrapped and also put in big heavy-duty plastic bags.  They filled the trunk of the car.

The meat was moved inside by loading into a big ice chest.  Tricia weighed the individual cuts to determine how much of each we got.

Then it was all loaded into the deep freeze.  We're still in hurricane season, so we always worry a little bit about losing power, but if the worst case scenario happens and we lost power, we'd figure out a way to save it.

In separating out the different cuts and weighing everything, we got 249 pounds total for $206.31.  That's about $0.83 per pound.

This will keep our family stocked with meat for the foreseeable future.  We do have two additional bulls growing out in the pasture as well once this is gone.  While we'd rather have heifers, bulls provide much needed meat.  We enjoy the tenderness and flavor of our grass-fed bulls that have never been off the property and are free of antibiotics and medicines.

Astro's Final Stop

When Jersey cows calve, you ALWAYS want them to give you heifers.  Heifers will, a couple years later once bred, give you more calves and fresh milk. Heifers also bring more money once you sell them.  Many people want nurse cows for calves on their farm.  Others want to buy them to show them as dairy cows in livestock shows.  Many want a family cow that will become a part of the family.

Jersey bulls are not in demand.  Jersey bulls kill more farmers than any other breed, which is odd because Jersey cows are so docile.  Jersey bulls are good for pretty much one thing - meat.  Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you want to look at it, we've had six bulls in a row!  Astro is our Jersey bull that we've had for a couple years.  He was named Astro because he was born on the night that the Houston Astros won Game 6 of the World Series.

It was time for Astro to go to the slaughterhouse.  We made an appointment this past Saturday.  I wish I had a way to weigh him.  I'm not very good at guessing weights, but I'll guess he weighs somewhere between 600 and 650 pounds.

Astro has been grass fed in our pasture in the "bull pen."  The quality of the grass will be dropping soon as the grass goes to seed.  We wanted to get him off while he is still in great condition.

We coaxed him into the cattle trailer with a bucket of sweet feed.  He jumped right in and it went easier than expected.

Now, I know what you may be thinking - How can you eat a pet?  Well, once Jersey bulls are born on our farm, from day 1 we know that they are not pets - they are food.  While it isn't easy to bring them to slaughter, we give them a good life, treat them with dignity, and take care of them.  It still isn't an easy thing to do, but let's be real.  It is foolish to raise him, sell him to someone else to butcher and then go buy meat at the store.  That makes no sense at all.  He's grass-fed.  No hormones.  No antibiotics.  No medicated feed.  All natural.

Once loaded up, we made a twenty minute drive to Morse, Louisiana.  Back in the old days, many communities had their own slaughterhouses.  They are few and far between now.  Elliott's Slaughterhouse is out in the middle of the country, surrounded by rice fields and crawfish ponds.

Elliott's does a really good job.  We've used them time and again.

We backed the trailer next to the gate.  The trailer is in bad need of a paint job.  It was my grandfather's trailer and is a 1978 model.  While it may not be aesthetically pleasing, it's still going strong.  I will try to prime and paint it once the weather gets more pleasant.

We got Astro unloaded and said goodbye.

Elliott's was jam packed with people on this Saturday morning.

It is a very small place and we actually had to wait until some customers left before we could fit inside.

We were the only ones dropping off a live animal.  Most customers inside were buying fresh cut steaks, ground meat in bulk, pork chops, smoked sausage, etc.  Meat doesn't get much fresher than this. 

We were given a cut sheet and began explaining what cuts we wanted.  We want half ground meat and the other half cut into steaks, roasts, brisket, ribs, tenderloin.

We'll get an assortment of T-bone, ribeyes, round and seven steaks.  We also want all of the 'debris,' except for kidney.  I don't do kidney.  We want the bones and the fat.  That's one thing you never think of, but when you bring an animal in for slaughter, you can get everything except the "moo."  They will dry age the meat for two weeks and then will package it all up and call us and we'll go pick it up.  Lots of fresh meat for the freezer...  And we have two more bulls growing in the pasture for next year's supply of meat.

A Very Lucky Snapping Turtle

Someone at work asked me if I ate snapping turtles last week.  I said, "sure."  He told me there was a big one in the ditch right outside the shop.  It has been raining non-stop for two weeks now, so all the ditches are flooded with water.  I walked outside and grabbed a big stick and walked to the ditch.  There was the old snapping turtle on the bottom of the ditch.  The clear rainwater made the snapper easy to see.

I used the stick to pry him off the bottom and slid him up and out of the water.  He was pretty mad and started snapping at the stick with his 'beak-like' mouth.  I was careful to keep my distance as old-timers say that if they bite you, they don't let go until it thunders or lightning strikes.  I wasn't going to test out that theory.

I remembered back when I was farming, I had lots of experience in catching snapping turtles.  Prior to planting rice we would water level all the rice fields.  The best way to describe this practice is to say that it involves dragging a big blade behind a big tractor in a flooded field.  The blade pulls the mud up and rolls it over, turning the mud into a slurry that is pulled round and round in the field.  You do your best to pull the high spots into the low.  Gravity levels the mud so that the portion of field you are in is level and would accept a flood with no high spots.  Kind of hard to explain.

Anyway, this would inevitably unearth big turtles.  You could see them swimming in the water and we would get out of the tractor, wade through the water and grab the turtles by the tail.  I'd bring them into the cab of the tractor and put them on the floor.  Man, would they stink!  Turtles have the ability to emit and nasty smell.  At the end of the day, we'd put them in the back of the truck and bring them to a cousin's house.  You could hear the turtles rustling underneath a bunch of Dr. Pepper cans.  We'd put them in an old freezer in the yard where they would wait until we had gathered enough turtles to eat.  A big turtle sauce piquante (turtle meat cooked in a spicy red gravy) would be cooked and we'd eat it for lunch.  Delicious!  It has been a while since I've eaten turtle sauce piquant.

I was thinking about bringing him home and cooking him, but this is no country turtle.  We work right near a bunch of big chemical plants and that is where this turtle was found.  These turtles can live to be 100 years old.  I have no idea what type of toxins are in his meat and didn't want to take the chance in eating him.  Besides, he's really stink up my car if I tried to take him home.  So, I used the stick to push the old fella back in the ditch instead of taking him home to eat.  He's a lucky turtle!