I can't imagine what its like to be a butcher that handles over 1,000 a season!
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Yes, at that point it really does become a job. It is certainly understandable why many folks don't like venison. Starting from shot placement to poor field dressing and dragging techniques contamination and decomposition begins. I can recall when I lived in PA as a kid taking a deer to the butcher shop. They had a compressed season with a million hunters. "Just throw it in the pile and make sure the tag is attached" is what you heard from the butcher. The pile sat outside for days of freezing and thawing before they even skinned the deer. It was usually cool by Thanksgiving time but occasionally we would get a warm day. Chances of getting meat from your own deer were small. If we treated cows like that folks would hate steak.
That is why I like to process my own. I live in the northern VA suburbs and I've converted a lot of anti-hunters who hated venison. My wife would cook a dinner for them and they would rave about how good the "steak" was. "Where did you get it?...Oh, it was a deer my husband shot..." Before long they were on a list of folks who wanted venison. Over time they went from "How could anyone hunt?" to "When are you going hunting again". Over the years I've refined my butchering.
When I hunted public land, I kept a deer cart in my truck and would use that rather than field dressing and dragging. No dirt or creek water got near the meat. I would field dress it back at the truck and skin and quarter it at the game check station I used. I would put the quarters in a Rubbermaid bin and take them home. I originally had an old side-by-side refrigerator that I removed the shelves from and installed a bar to hand the quarters. After letting it hang for several days (depending on the size) I would butcher the quarters in the kitchen. I started by just using a knife. We started with ziplok freezer bags but soon got a vacuseal.
Now that we have private land, things are much easier and I've acquired better equipment over time. We have enough ATV trails and firebreaks on the farm, a deer is never too far from ATV access to drag without field dressing. I have a Great Day lift on the front of my ATV. It is much easier on my aging back. When I get it back to the barn, I've got an electric hoist making field dressing much easier with gravity's help. I skin and quarter it immediately. I have a sawsall with a demolition blade I use only for deer. This makes quartering much easier than a hand saw. I have a reach-in cooler at the barn as well where I hang the quarters. So, typically within 2 hours of pulling a trigger, I have a deer with a constant temperature around 35 degrees.
The deer stays there until I'm ready to head home. Again I use a Rubbermaid tub to transport the quarters and depending on temps, I add ice to the tub if needed for the trip home. I've got another reach-in cooler for hanging deer at home. The meat is cooled down quickly and never exposed to bacteria unless I make a bad shot and when that happens, any exposure is washed with clean water and any tainted meat removed.
Letting a deer hang at that 35 degrees allows the enzymes to breakdown and tenderize the meat without significant bacterial growth. Larger and older deer are hunger longer. I usually butcher within a week. I have bandsaw type meat saw now. I use it only to make ham stakes from the rear quarter. I still fillet the loins. We either cube or grind the rest. I got a very heavy duty Cabelaas grinder that really works great. We started looking at the cost of the channel bags needed for the vacuseal and decided to invest in a chamber vacuum sealer that uses low cost bags and can seal bags with liquid in them. An Excalibur dehydrator for jerky and a heavy duty Cabelas jerky shooter round out the equipment.
Around here butchers will charge $70 and up to butcher a deer, but I don't butcher my own to save the money. I do it because I know and control exactly what happens to the meat from trigger pull to table.
We finished up this morning. We decided not to make jerky from this batch. We ended up with about 75 lbs of meat (not counting soup bones and such). I know guys up north will get that much from a single deer. That is about 10 lbs per hour of butchering time (from cooler to freezer).
Thanks,
jack
