Piggie #1 - 35 lbs (dressed)
Piggie #2 - 50 lbs (dressed)
Only the second day of homeschool, and we've fallen off the wagon. Yesterday was a great day of schoolwork, we sat at desks and everything. Today was more of a field trip type of day. We stopped and picked up pieces of cotton that blew off the cotton trucks near the cotton fields, and we drove to the near by meat market to check on processing guidelines and prices. A friend called me and told me she had 2 little piggies (wild hogs) in one of her trap and was I interested in coming to get them. I surely was! Well, it wasn't really me, it was PH. I had to wait until he got off of work, then he headed over to my friend's ranch and they quickly dispatched the two...or as my friend told me they say in Virginia (rendered them your personal property). Ha! Ha!
PH butchered/quartered the smaller one, which I brought home and promptly washed and packaged for the freezer. The larger one we took to the small town near us and dropped at the meat market. They have an after hours freezer in the back where you leave your "harvested" animal. They will contact me tomorrow to ask me how we want him processed (yes it was a boy). I am thinking ground meat, but PH suggested sausage, so I guess I'm going with sausage...
It costs .55 cents a lb to process, so it will be about $27.50 with tax. That's pretty could for 50 lbs of meat..at least to me it is..plus the little one brings the total to 85 lbs for the freezer. I already have one of the goat bucklings in there, ground beef, and a few chickens (that is next on my list to learn to butcher).
I'll tell you what, you have taken off like a rocket. Maybe that God feller was listening to all those prayers.
ReplyDeleteFor butchering goggle meat cutting. I found some great pics for breaking down primals at the Beef growers and pork growers websites. Just work at seperating different muscles, (You can tell by the silver skin between them)and don't freak out if you screw up. That's how you learn and get hamburger and sausage.