Pork

[cowman]

The cows are mad, the chickens have the flu, the fish are polluted, the sheep have scrapies. I guess all we need now is some swine flu and all the animals will be sick? You would think the hog farmer should be doing well but they are all bailing as fast as they can.
I'm starting to think this whole meat business is just not working?
You work hard all your life trying to build up a herd of cattle, sheep, hogs. You are out in crappy weather and you toil away in the sun haying and fixing fence. And the one day they find a sick cow and the whole thing goes down the drain? Suddenly an asset becomes a liability. You see everything you worked for melt away while others reap a virtual goldmine from your product. I think valuechain is right. It is time to take back control of our product.
I'm not going to give away my old cows. I'll beef them and peddle them around. I know enough people that will buy jerky and sausage and hamburger. I'm just not too sure how I'll find the time but I have this young butcher lined up to give me a hand.

[bombay_43]

A problem that exists in our area, is that our local butcher shop is booked solid until May. They are doing a booming business, and have had to increase their price per pound for older animals that are being made into ground beef. Some of us might be able to peddle our culls, but most people we talked to are talking about selling minimum pakages of 50 pounds of meat. We better all have a lot of deep freeze space! Time will be a big factor in this scheme.

[rodb]

We know of several people that have butchered cows and made them into lean hamburger. But as Bombay_43 says you need a lot of freezer space.

I guess my only concern with this is if people start butchering on their own farms and selling it, they are breaking the law. You can do it for you self but I don't believe you can sell uninspected meat in Alberta. I hate to rain on anybodies parade given todays economic conditions but maybe check out all the angles before you get to far down the path.

[ivbinconned]

Rodb; Oh comeon now. Government regulation in many cases is only in place to regulate and drive up the cost of competition.
Protect the big operators and make the government look like they are doing something useful.
I have already taken a side of beef as part of an equipment deal and if I had 10 culls this year as was the case in the past...I would be deboneing them out all this winter and selling them to my city friends.

And besides...I've been in trouble before.

[pandiana]

I guess the only problem I have with this is that government inspection is there for a purpose. What about TB, salmonella, other not so nice things that may be present in a relatively healthy animal. What if you had passed something on to an unsuspecting consumer. The s..t would hit the fan!

[ivbinconned]

I guess what I am trying to say here is that we can't live in fear.
For decades I, my grandfather, great grandfather, uncles, neibors etc have been butchering our own steers, cows, pigs, deer, elk, buffalo, moose,etc without the government looking over our shoulders and have sold lots of burger and sausage.
And have yet to hear of one person who has been sick from eating meat right off the farm.

[cowman]

It is very true that selling uninspected meat is against the law. And yet I know of quite a few doing it! I suppose you need to consider the man selling it to you? I believe a lot of the dirty meat infected with E.coli, salmonella etc. is a direct result of the modern packing plant and not the animal. The line speeds are too fast to do a really proper job. And the worker sanitation is maybe not the best? If you go to a modern packing plant you will see that the majority of the workers are immigrants and they come from cultures where sanitation was not a big deal. Packing house employees are given a TB test every year and I know from experience that one nationality tests positive almost every time! That doesn't mean they have it but they've been exposed to it.
Go to one plant and the vet is tough and condemns everthing. Go to another and the vet lets everything in. This situation sets up the possibility of corruption and consider what kind of companies we have running the plants? Talk to some of the inspectors at IBP if you want to get the lowdown!

[rodb]

The main reason for raising this issue is I believe it is a sword that cuts two ways and provides a bit of protection for the seller as well as the buyer. In this day and age where people want to keep the legal profession in a style that most of us can't even imagine, it may be a step that keeps us from making a buck but not losing the whole farm. You might come back and say well I only sell to people I know but sooner or latter you will sell to a friend of a friend and they end up with a mystery disease. Next thing you know, your in court fighting for the very livelyhood that you were trying to preserve in the first place.

I am just saying be careful and go in to this with your eyes open.

[cowman]

When I thought this over I can see the wisdom in what you say, Rod. I wonder what it would cost to just get the animal killed in a inspected plant? I suspect the plant would not be too keen on this idea, so the price could be steep. I wonder if they get a cow plant up and running if you could get them custom killed? They used to do this all the time at Canada Packers...if you knew the right people!
I believe that once the animal is killed at an inspected plant then you can process the meat and sell it? And in reality the money is made in the processing and marketing end.

[ValueChainFX]

Cowman you can get the animal killed on a custom kill basis. The last I heard it was somewhere in the price range of $100.00 to $150.00 to do this and the packer got the hide and some of the tid bits! You get the kill and chill and than you need to get the product cut at an approved facility, especially if you are going to do an export! Anything over the kill and chill(such as vac pak) you pay for, I think it was about $.60 pound

[bombay_43]

The thing that I find really ironic, is that anyone who goes out and shoots a wild animal during hunting season, can cut and wrap their own meat in their garage! I don't think it is illegal to distribute that meat to family and friends. Is wild meat not also susceptible to disease?

Looks like a bit of a double standard here. Maybe I'm wrong.

[cowman]

Value chain: Maybe I'm way out of date but I thought you could sell meat after it had been inspected at slaughter? I know lots of guys who used to cut and wrap meat in their basements or garages? Am I way behind the times? Now I'm not talking export or even inter-provincial.

[cakadu]

Bombay - giving the meat away is one thing - selling it is another.

Cowman, if an abbatoir kills and processes the animal for you, you can legally sell it to whomever will pay you for it. It is the inspection that the regulators want.

Of course, along with selling that meat comes proper handling of it by you i.e. if it is frozen, not letting it thaw or deciding that the back of the truck is a safe place to store it for a couple of days.

Rod is quite correct - selling/giving to friends is one thing, but if one of them gets sick or god forbid even worse, then who is to say what someone will do under those circumstances? It certainly wouldn't be the first time a friend has sued a friend over something.

It all comes down to risk and how much of it you are willing to take. As it stands right now, the only way to legally kill an animal on your farm is if it is for your immediate family's consumption. Anything else is illegal and you do it at your own peril.

[cowman]

Valuechain: Lets see: $100-150 for kill and chill. 60 cents for processing the 600 lb. carcass? Do you mean to tell me it costs close to $500 to get a beef cut and wrapped?
I had a guy tell me the abbatoir charged him $1.75/lb. to make his deer into sausage. I think they mixed some pork fat in too but he paid $1.75 for the finished sausage! Do you think this is a reasonable price?

[cowman]

You know valuechain I remember back to my packing house days when we had 5 guys deboning cows. All the cuts were taken out of these cows and found a home at Bonanza, Subway, Mr. Mikes, Beef King Jerky etc. Things like flank steaks were shipped to Safeway/IGA for minute steak. The remaining meat went into one ton combo bins for hamburger at Wendys and Macdonalds.
The total labor costs still worked out to less than
$10/cow and that is including the two guys who cryo-vacced and boxed the cuts and pulled the combo bins off the scale! And the amazing thing is we were all making big bucks! We were on a piece work deal, which worked just fine until the union got it stopped. Which is when I quit and why I don't like unions!
Now I assume the company made some money on the cow on the slaughter line as they had already removed the hide, the blood had been centrifuged and sent onto Campbells Soup. The liver, heart, kidneys, tongue, cheek meat, hanging tenders, pancreas, pituatary gland, sweet breads, tripe, tallow etc. Even the spinal cords were saved and sent to Jamaica! The bones guts etc were hauled to CP Lethbridge for rendering.
We used to trim up the diaphrams into strips and sell those to Japan for $12/lb. and remember this was back in the early eighties!
I have absolutely no doubt someone is still making a killing on these old cows. The packers like to say that the waste in an animal is really bad when in fact there is no waste. And most people do not realize just how much money is made on this "waste".
As near as I can remember a hide was worth about $60-80, blood was worth 60 cents, tripe about the same, with the honeycomb tripe worth about three times that. I think pancreas were in that $150/lb range and pituatary glands over $300! They even used to suck the blood out of unborn calves and sell that for cancer research. I believe the price was close to $70 a liter and a big near term calf could produce close to 2 liters!
The old manager told me that the plant had paid for itself in three years. Now this was a state of the art plant in its day and no expenses were spared in building it. I wonder if the same kind of profits are there today?