Sunday, October 5, 2008

Butchering - 3 cows in 1 day!

Erik, Mitch, Ronnie (Erik's friend), Austin and Brenden tackled the task of slaughtering 2 young bulls and a heifer in one day! It went better than I thought it would. The first one took about 2 hours and once they knew what to do the second one took an hour and the third a little less than an hour....next week we will cut and wrap!

Here we (they) go....this should be an interesting day.


Make sure we catch the blood so Dad can make blood sausage....not for me!

Inflate with air and begin...




Whew - why so big and round? They put air in them so that it would be easier to skin...I would have never thought.
The swimming pool worked out really well for catching all of the innards.




Number two...and Dad is still here to help!


Not so big and round anymore...deflated I guess you could say.

There's the tail.


Look, we still have daylight and it is almost 4:30pm :-)
It wasn't actually tooo cold - it was about 30 degrees or so (yes, above zero!)

Pappa brought the Peti bone over the other day so he could move a connex around and it really helped out with skinning and gutting the cows...guess who was our operator - yup AUSTIN.

Last one - almost done!

The extras...heart, liver etc.

Now to the shop to hang for a bit - next weekend we cut and wrap, stay tuned.

Austin's accumulation of Cows

We (Austin) has 8 cows...well now 5! 1 Baldy with a steer calf (# 47), 1 Galloway with a bull calf, 2 young bulls, 1 steer (#21) and a heifer. #42 and #21 are the start of Austin's Market steer projects for the 2009 fair. The 2 young bulls and the heifer are headed to the freezer today! Oh...notice the snow on the ground! Winter IS HERE!

Baldy - She is the BOSS!!!

Heifer on the left and #42 on the right.

This is project #42 (Baldy's calf)

This is project #21 - Austin thinks he should name him after his friend Chris...it seems like an odd name for a cow but I guesss.....?

This is Lump Jaw - we call her that because her jaw has a huge bubble, like she has the measles or something...actually it looks better now than it did. Austin thinks she has foxtail that embeded in her jaw and that made it swell.

This is Lump Jaw's calf - still tiny, he's cute.