Pork

[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?

[rodb]

Cowman

Getting much snow we have over 6 inches on the level as I write.

It seems that primary agriculture is the only business where you have to spread major capital purchases over a life time to repay (live poor/ die rich), everyone else seems to think that if you can't have a pay back in 3-5 years then it shouldn't happen.

Weknow some people that have butchered a couple of cows and basically grounds it all into lean hamburger. It was costing them a $1.00 a pound by the time they got the packages out of the door at the processing plant. You need about $2.00 a pound to break even. If they had taken the steaks and aged them and sold it,it would have made the price of the burger a lot less but one is going to have to treat it differently and cultivate the market place. I'm rambling now but we had some tenderloins last week that my inlaws had butchered and they were every bit as tasty as the steaks that we had from one of our own animals. Maybe we are going to have to rethink how we do things but I think there is a way to market this cow beef and it doesn't have to be as hamburger and jerky.

[ValueChainFX]

Cowman you are right in the cost of processing, do I think this is high, well I know the costs and the costs are a lot less than that to process and vac pac a carcass! Since BSE I have to admit I am a little shy about some of the by-product returns, although the stuff like hides, cheeks, hanging tenders and such are pretty standard! The inspection process is somewhat blurry in some areas, as inspection is required to sell but to cut and wrap an inspected animal the rules hover around a provincially (or federally) approved facility. Now we both know that many people kill, cut and sell their own product direct but there is a big risk and the rules are enforced if someone tells on you! (oh my) I believe the last time I heard a person charged it cost him $5000.00!

We are trying to see if there is anyway to work inside the rules and service some of these needs but so far the process is slow! As we all know the plants are plugged and getting kills is tough!

[cowman]

I knew a vet who used to go up in the Northwest Territories every year for the big Cariboo slaughter. The natives just used to shoot the cariboo and drag them into the butchering area. White workers, for the most part, butchered them in tents, due to the cold weather and then shipped them down to Alberta to have them cut up. They were sold at the co-op I believe. Anyway he said it was fairly crude and the sanitation left something to be desired!
So maybe that is what we need? A big field out at Hanna. Ram about six thousand cows in there get a bunch of cowboys with guns and blast away! Hoist them up with a front end loader and beef them! Federally inspected right? Just like those Cariboo were?
Now this might sound silly but what I was trying to point out is if the government has the will there is always a way. And all the little rules about whether you have a stainless steel wall or a concrete one are just drivel! The rules can change real fast if the government decides they can!

[ValueChainFX]

Cowman you are right again. But even the rules are changed as we get deeper into the swamp! Government will is a key without a doubt but my observations have been that government spends a lot of time saying no and than justifying why they said no!

It really doesn't matter what the regs are when it comes to the bottom line we need to do what we can to organize and get on the field. At the moment we are not even players in our own game. The producer seems to be such an insignificant part of the thought process. They try to tell us we have industry reps at the table! Do we really? They try to tell us they are putting money into the ag business! Does that money really reach the primary producer? They try to tell us the rural communities are important! Are they really?

Just questions from a simple thinker, I was wondering?

[bombay_43]

We had an ag rep salesman visit us the other day, and the latest he had heard in his travels across the province, is there are 3,(yes three), plants sheduled to be built that will process cows.

Anyone else heard this rumour?

[cowman]

I have heard Sunterra is very interested! And maybe Centennial Meats. The local Alta. Ag vet tells me he has heard nothing definite. Lots of interest but nothing very concrete. Something is happening at the old Red Deer CP plant but no one knows what. It could just be it is being refitted for a warehouse.

[ValueChainFX]

bombay_43 I have heard there is as many as 5 that are possible, however, of the five there is 2 that may go ahead. The building is one thing finding the solution goes beyond the building.