Butchering 529 pounds of Beef (in a day)

Dark and early on butchering day. We gotta go pick up E-Man. He's about an hour away at Vandell Farms. Shout out Vandell Farms. Josiah getting some night hours in for driver's— for his driver's license. We have these one-lane roads. This whole road was washed out from Hurricane Helene. I'm hoping we can get through. I think we just made it. Oh shoot. I was saying we made it through, but now I'm seeing this road is closed. Shoot. This is local traffic only. Maybe we can get through. Okay, there is a road that is closed, but it looks like we're still going to be able to make it there. It's a little smaller detour. That's better than going all the way around. Between 12 and 13. Yep. And when you break your rib off, you're going to want to be in between, uh, 5th and 6th. Why don't you count from the other end? This end down, but it's just harder to see.

Yeah.

All right, you got some good fat on him, didn't he?

Yes, sir.

That's what happens when they get older, doesn't it? When you wait a little longer, you go past 18 months. This road is brand new. It was up there. We're home. We're running around like a chicken with our head cut off. You got the tank? Where's the tank? Good deal. Hey boys. Hey girl, first things first, better process this milk. Matt, the man behind the curtain. This student comes with tools. Yeah, I didn't know what you guys had. I figured bringing a few knives might be helpful. Oh yeah, got the milk process here somehow. What do you use to sharpen knives?

A Harbor Freight diamond stone and a piece of leather with some polish compound.

Wow, is this a one-sided knife too?

So it's got a bevel on one side.

Okay.

And then the theory with these is you'd lay that flat.

Okay.

And so you're only— you're not really having to take material off this side.

Okay.

And then your chisel grind on that side is what you sharpen.

Okay.

How many passes do you do?

So I go— I chase a burr.

Okay.

And so when you're like this one, I can feel it. There's a burr on this side.

Yeah.

See how it's cutting on the backstroke? Yeah, that means the burr is rolled over to this side. And just from experience, I can tell that burr's too big. So if I were to— what I do after I get them sharp is I'll go to a leather strop. And as you drag back, see how it's scraping real hard? Yeah, that means the burr's too big. So just means time to go up to a finer grit. Okay, so the thinner you get that burr, eventually when you go to your leather strop That burr just pops right off. Yeah, see how it's scraping off polishing compound?

Okay, so if people want to wear gloves— they're not cut-free gloves, they're just rubber gloves. You want to turn the air down? We don't have to. You can.

It feels fine in here.

Okay, you look a little sweaty.

Maybe I'm a little sweaty.

Okay, well, if you want to turn it down, you can. The remote's right there. How you doing, man behind the curtain? Not bad, not bad. Okay, we're gonna get everybody down. Okay, every day is bring your kid to work day on the homestead. Hey, happy day! Morning! Good morning! Steve, Matt, Brandon, Brandon, Dutch, Dutch, Hans, Hans, Mark, Mark, Mark, 10 Acre Garden. Okay, cool.

The goal today is not be here till 9 or 10 o'clock tonight, so I'm gonna try to move pretty fast. A beef is a huge animal. And if you're doing it yourself, you can take your time. If you have a way to store it, it's, you know, cool, it's in an ice chest, you have a walk-in, you can take your time. You can do it over a week if you want to. Today we're going to do the whole beef.

And it's our—

Justin, as you guys all saw, Justin already killed it. It's been hanging for what, 2 weeks?

Yeah, 10 days.

10 days. Uh, that's ideal. That's enough time.

Holy moly, it's that way. Ah, that's just a quarter of it. They're in bags just to keep it clean on our way home. It's in the back of the truck. Oh, we're live! Good, we're live, huh? Yeah, that looks really good. It's working.

Closer you can stay to that bone, the less waste there is. Now, when I was learning how to do this, we were also learning all the ways we could get the most out of our animals. And so we discovered things like scrapple. Scrapple is kind of a Pennsylvania old German thing. And so what we would do is we would make stock out of all the bones that we're cleaning of meat. And a lot of people, you know, especially butchers, they're going to come in here and they're going to cut all this off and send this to the grind. Doing it myself, I didn't want to sit and peel off that off of every single bone. Takes forever, it's a pain in the butt, and it kind of makes for a not very fun day when you're sitting there whittling bones for little scraps of meat just to get more grind. And so what we started doing is we would throw all of the bones into a stock pot, a very large stock pot, and we would just boil it for about an hour. And actually make a stock, you know, carrots, celery, onions. When that meat was falling off the bone, we would pull it out, pull out the bones, and we would pull all that meat off. It's a lot easier to pull cooked meat off bones. And we'd set that aside and Meg would make scrapple out of it. Does that look like a big enough steak?

Yep.

Justin's about like me. Give me an inch thick. Inch plus. Now I can tell by how tough that is to cut through, we are going to want to clean that off the steak before that goes in a vacuum bag.

Somebody's a little tired from the ride this morning. People are going to be wondering what you're doing.

I'm just making chicken pot pie soup.

It's a good idea because We don't know exactly when we'll be done. Shoot, I'll tell you the truth, it was 11:30, we were not even done with one quarter. Were we done with one quarter? All right, we got buttermilk. Yes, yes, of course. What's my name, darling? I'm chopping up my garlic right now and I've made a big mess.

Basically what I'm trying to do here is just soften the carrots and onions and celery. So it's not there yet. Keep chopping the garlic and then, um, I'll add my garlic, get it nice and fragrant, add thyme, and then add in a thickener.

We're almost there, bud. Are we gonna, um, bag this half or we're gonna wait to— we're gonna—

I was gonna go stick it in the ice over there. Okay, get it covered up. I brought lids for these meatloaves, so cool.

All right, well, I think we're gonna wrap it then.

Yeah, want to say anything? Yeah, who am I talking—

I hope you learned something.

I hope everybody who's watching this live I learned something.

Uh, is anybody still here?

Yeah, is anybody still here? Was that too quiet?

I, I know that I heard you say you would, you would have clicked off a long time ago.

I would have clicked off a long time ago. It's like, this dude's not talking, this dude's not doing anything.

All right, we finished. Y'all just sped it up on that next quarter, man. You afraid we're going to be here at 9:00, weren't you?

Actually, I might have jinxed us. I'm going to try to get us out of here before 9 o'clock.

Okay, here it is, 2 o'clock.

Uh-oh, uh-oh, only halfway done.

We're gonna feed the hollers for all this help. Beck, your, your cornbread looks amazing.

It does. It kind of sucks to the bottom of the pan, but the chicken soup— yeah, I figured everybody could use the health boost with the chicken soup.

There's a good bulk meal and it's easy to keep warm till you're You don't want to time your meal on this kind of day because you never know when you're going to be able to eat it.

I'm glad that you guys were on time. It was like 11 o'clock.

Is your coffee cooled off enough?

It's still steaming.

It's still too hot to drink.

Lunch is over. Let's see if we can't get this latter half knocked out. All hands on deck this time.

Justin, what do you think?

I think you've taught them well. I come down here and they're all working.

Well, the idea of leaving at 9 o'clock must scare them because they're like, yeah, they've got dates tonight.

How many people did you leave behind? You got a family? I do. What are they?

Wife and daughter and son.

Okay, how old are the kids?

Uh, my daughter's 20 and my son's 15.

Oh wow. Okay, you don't look old enough to have a 20-year-old. Thank you. You're doing good. Second time I've heard that today. I like this. Yeah, 20-year-old. I do.

She's in college right now.

What's the secret? Start early. What's what? Start early. Start early and you end early.

Unless you start over and you're nearly 40 and you're having—

yeah, this is the North Carolina midlife crisis. Mark, how many Who are you leaving behind?

Uh, 22-year-olds and 7-year-old.

Wow.

And the mother-in-law lives with us as well.

Oh, you got a mother-in-law on the farm?

I do.

Okay, what are you opting out of?

Uh, education, food, health.

Okay. I brought one for you. Oh, you did? Okay, I'm down. I'm down.

You don't have to opt out.

Yeah, right. Well, it usually starts with one, and then you— yeah, you question one, Norman, buddy, you're off to the races.

Exactly.

What's the norm you're questioning lately?

Uh, that's a good question. Um, I mean, I feel like you're always kind of reevaluating all of them, right?

Yeah, layers, definitely.

Um, so, you know, chickens are the gateway to conspiracy, right?

Yes.

I wonder why those eggs are so much better than the grocery store. Yeah, I wonder who's lying to you. And you start thinking about your doctor, your—

well, one thing you're definitely starting to think about opting out of is bought meat. Yeah, bought beef. You got beef at home? Not yet.

Hopefully next spring.

Okay, good. Mean to leave us the handle like that?

Actually, you made that cut if you split the cow.

Oh yeah, okay. Did you use the hacksaw by hand? Let me Yeah, that's a lot of cutting by hand. It is. You guys split the whole cow down the middle with it? Yeah.

Wow.

Is that video? Did you do a video of that? Well, I gave you a few seconds.

Okay.

4:20 and we're down to the last quarter.

Uh-oh, too much gristle. This is the problem we've had with this dual grind, is if you, uh, give it too much gristle, too big of pieces, it bogs it down. So as you can see, that's what clogged it up. That's what we're gonna have to watch out for. Okay, that long piece I put in there was too much.

Yeah, yeah, this needs to be cut off, doesn't it? Yep, that's too tough. We got the bagging crew. Yeah, we got the cutting crew. We got the grinding crew. Everybody's getting hungry for supper, I guess. They're speeding up, wrapping it up. When you're on vacuum sealing time, Meg's on vacuum seal duty. We have a new freezer. Our old one went This one is, uh, 69.6. It was on and loaded, but it was empty, so it does not retain its temperature well. And now we're sticking more meat in it, so I'm spreading the love where I can to the other freezers. And we're going to keep watching that. Wouldn't that be terrible to lose your harvest freezer day? It's not cooling. Our brand new freezer It's not cool. There's no way this isn't working. Hear this one running? I distributed it between that freezer, that freezer, and that freezer. I can't believe I had that room. It's probably about 340 pounds meat. I better get this vlog to Austin to edit. Getting kind of late, I'll call it, because there's always something to do. Look at this, 2 buckets of scrap meat. Hey, that— we wouldn't have gotten that sent back to the butcher. They would have just discarded that themselves. And now we have pig food for 2-3 days. Well, we got our night lights on. We have a lot of cleaning to do. We got to get this footage to Austin. I think it's a win. We saved 100 $700 from not having to outsource our butchering. Ooh, we got some bones in the oven. We're gonna go ahead and deal with those. Lots and lots of broth frozen. We sold a workshop. Wonderful people that we met today. Thank you to you all for coming and helping. Thanks for those who got the Abundance Plus live. The replay is up there on Abundance Plus if anybody's interested. Happy day. We love you guys. Thank you, thank you, thank you for watching. We so appreciate this community. Love ya. Happy day.