re: Best deer processing

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That’s exactly why I don’t trust bringing my deer to a butcher. I want my deer and only my deer back. I rather do it myself.

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I always do it myself. I butcher my own steers when I want beef so I have good knives and grinders.

The only thing I need to do now that I'm getting a little older is get a taller table. The one I have is just short enough that when I'm standing in one place for a long time cutting and trimming, it plays hell on my back.

My family has been butchering by hand for generations. I used to leave school for 2 weeks in January to go to all of my families' farms in Western Illinois and butcher hogs and cattle for 2 weeks straight back in the mid 80s.

I worked for a processor in college, much smaller than most of the ones mentioned in here.

Deboning an entire deer is a 5 minute deal for a processor, so you’re either losing a good bit of meat, or those leaves and sticks that are stuck to the bloody bone fragmented shoulder jelly are going in with any silver skin, tendons, adrenal glands. If you don’t want anything in your finished meat, you should take care of that before you drop it off.

I don’t know any place that advertises that they go big batches between customers, but I’m sure there are some. Even if they make an effort to keep the customers’ deer separated unless they are keeping the tailings out of the grinder/stuffer for themselves, there’s always going to be some cross contamination between batches or customers. Some use it as samples for people to try before ordering, another processor used to call this “x blend” and would smoke it and either give it away or keep it for himself (smoked jalapeño cheddar pineapple breakfast sausage was pretty damn good)

In reality it’s rarely a big deal, but could be the difference between your batch being some of the best you’ve ever had, and never using a processor again. If any of this is alarming you might want to try bringing it outside of the seasonal rush, being more involved in the deboning process cleaning process, or doing it all yourself.