Weird weather, shotguns and cull-deer

Weird weather

We had several inches of snow. Then freezing rain which compacted the snow. The temperature dropped and the ground was covered with about 1.25" of ice.

Cattle can paw through 8" of fluffy snow to get to forage but not through more than 1" of ice.

Sprite graciously changed over from the bucket on the front of her Kubota to a hay spear and delivered an 800 pound bale of hay.

Between that and some grain, the cattle should be set for the next week.

Windchills as low as -20F predicted over the next few days.

As of now, the possibility of a thaw in the next ten days is approximately zero.

Shotguns

Adjusted for inflation, that is about fifty cents a shell, which is not too far off from current price.

The utility of cull-deer

Last night, Mrs ERJ, Southern Belle and I were talking about our friend the farmer with the block-permits to shoot deer.

Mrs ERJ asked me "How much would it cost to have a butcher-shop process those deer?"

Rates vary somewhat, but most seem to be between $70 and $100 per deer when they are in-season. In round numbers, that works out to about $2 a pound for "free meat" in just the cost of the processing. Chicken thighs are cheaper than that when they are on-sale.

Is a half of a fish is better than no fish?

The ethic for most sportsmen is to fully utilize what they bring-to-bag.

That sentence contains far more variation that appears at first reading.

One fisherman might fillet out the prime cuts and barbecue them while tossing 65% of the fish's weight-as-caught into the trash dumpster.

Another sportsman might fillet out the prime cuts, boil the head, fins, tail and skeleton for fish stock. Feed the boiled heads, etc to the cat, chickens or hog and bury the guts and skins beneath the tomato vine with ZERO going into the trash.

If you asked each fisherman individually, they would say they had fully utilized their catch.

If the choice for how one must "handle" cull-deer is purely binary: Shoot the deer in the gut so it runs off and dies in the swamp -OR- harvest the deer and process according to the current ethos (consuming 5 manhours processing time), almost every farmer is going to decide to gut-shoot them. Economics can be a bitch.

I want to point out that there is a middle-ground that will piss off just about everybody but it might be the sweet-spot from an economics standpoint.

The hide can be "slipped" with water or air pressure. The skin can be cut high-up around the neck, a golf-ball inserted beneath the hide and a cable wrapped around beneath the ball and the other end hooked to a dead-weight on the ground.

A power winch can raise the deer and most of its body while the skin, anchored to the dead-weight, is peeled off of the deer. Or it can be done vice-versa.

While hanging, somewhere between 50% and 65% of the meat can be removed in about fifteen minutes. The loins, hams, shoulder roasts and the top-rear of the neck.

Another 10% of the less desirable meat can be yanked out in another 10 minutes. That would be the heart and liver.

The cuts could be tossed into coolers with ice (culling often happens in June and July) and the rest of the carcass could be composted. Using very round numbers, an man-hour invested and 65% of the usable meat harvested.

There are a dozen reasons why this cannot happen but it is a crying shame that we cannot have a discussion about it.