"Improving Our Lot" - Planned Holistic Grazing, for starters..

[Crofter64]

in an ideal world, our chickpea harvest happens just prior to Ramadan

All of our ( increasingly controversial ) live export trade of sheep & cattle goes to Islamic countries

I personally can see a great market for supplying / home killing sheep & goat for the domestic Halal market, only problems are I am too far from the population, I have zero butchery, marketing & people skills & I know nothing about sheep or goats . . .

but, I reckon it would be a great growth area

Australia has a LOOONG history of supplying Islamic countries / markets, even if we are populated by intolerant racist red neck right wing ignorant white "Christian" xenophobic kuunts

Just because people buy your lambs and goats doesn’t mean they like or respect you any more than the ‘redneck xenophobes’ like them. I think we are way too critical of ourselves( our families, our countries), and way too willing to give others the benefit of the doubt. Generous but not always wise.

 

[Crofter64]

Quite true. It's all about how you cook them.

It’s about knowing how to cook them to bring out the best in them.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Where can the rest of us( who live far from you) learn some of this stuff? I direct market all my beef, lamb and veal but I am sadly lacking in actual meat knowledge, I know a few things but not the details. As a result I don’t properly instruct the butchers on how to cut ( I just do the basic cuts) and don’t always give clients satisfactory answers. My Mum grew up in France before the war and there every housewife knew all her cuts of meat, from nose to tail, and how to prepare them. I missed out on that lesson

I really don't know the easiest way to upskill, to be honest.
My Dad always used to kill sheep for home and I got my best lessons from him, at an early age - and was interested to learn more, so started at the local feeezing works (where I work now) and just told them I wanted to learn all about it.
So I did a few seasons transferring around the departments - from the sticking pens to the slaughterboard and lambcuts, and the beefhouse and beef boning (currently in the beefhouse)
A good mate of mine offers a backyard beef service so I give him a hand at times, his mum and dad also help, and everyone has a trick somewhere to pick up.

It soon becomes quite an easy task, with practice, to find all the seams in the primals and separate the topside fom the siverside etc etc bit it does take practice to get the wasteage down - I shudder to think how many animals I have worked on but it will be a lot - 3500 lambs per shift or 400 cattle - you soon get told if you are cocking up the cuts!

Best meat on most animals are the cheeks, and fish are the same. So sweet.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

It’s about knowing how to cook them to bring out the best in them.

And aging the meat is very important indeed - this is where the processors miss a trick IMO.
It wants bled and skinned, gutted immediately but for the best flavour it wants hung at least a day before you do much else.

With beef, I hang them from the front end loader and touch them on the electric fence for 70-80 pulses - this relaxes the fibres of all the muscle and helps get the excess blood out, even if the animal is a little stressed at slaughter you would never know.
The same thing is done at work, but a much shorter and more rapid shocking, on the bleed table I operate - it is a computer controlled immobiliser which passes from the pusher-plate to the animals shoulder, makes it rigid for ten seconds for the Halal man then pulses for 20 seconds.
Lambs go on the "buzz bars' for the same reasons, tenderness.
I am going to make a proper table to do the same thing, two stainless tables with a plastic insulation strip in the middle which I can use as a cutting table.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Thinking about it more - there are probably youtube tutorials on how to butcher, I have seen a really great way of doing a beast on the ground and simply rolling it over with a helper, using its hide as a 'table' of sorts, it goes around Facebook at times.

 

[Jungle Bill]

Where can the rest of us( who live far from you) learn some of this stuff? I direct market all my beef, lamb and veal but I am sadly lacking in actual meat knowledge, I know a few things but not the details. As a result I don’t properly instruct the butchers on how to cut ( I just do the basic cuts) and don’t always give clients satisfactory answers. My Mum grew up in France before the war and there every housewife knew all her cuts of meat, from nose to tail, and how to prepare them. I missed out on that lesson

Www.qmscotland.co.uk/cutting-guide is a good place to start

 

[Kiwi Pete]

That is a cracking site - thank you

 

[holwellcourtfarm]

I really don't know the easiest way to upskill, to be honest.
My Dad always used to kill sheep for home and I got my best lessons from him, at an early age - and was interested to learn more, so started at the local feeezing works (where I work now) and just told them I wanted to learn all about it.
So I did a few seasons transferring around the departments - from the sticking pens to the slaughterboard and lambcuts, and the beefhouse and beef boning (currently in the beefhouse)
A good mate of mine offers a backyard beef service so I give him a hand at times, his mum and dad also help, and everyone has a trick somewhere to pick up.

It soon becomes quite an easy task, with practice, to find all the seams in the primals and separate the topside fom the siverside etc etc bit it does take practice to get the wasteage down - I shudder to think how many animals I have worked on but it will be a lot - 3500 lambs per shift or 400 cattle - you soon get told if you are cocking up the cuts!

Best meat on most animals are the cheeks, and fish are the same. So sweet.

Tongue and heart are hugely overlooked as well. It seems the more a muscle moves in life the better it's likely to be to eat.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Tongue and heart are hugely overlooked as well. It seems the more a muscle moves in life the better it's likely to be to eat.

I shouldn't really get into what I eat most of - but you're right
I may know a chap who eats at least 3 lamb's hearts per day when he gets the chance - wrapped in foil, in the pie-warmer for an hour 30
just have to let the meat inspector see them before they vanish or the chain stops sweetbreads are the current snack of choice - the easiest morsel to get a hold of when they still have a coat on

I better hope nobody thinks this chap is me.....

You would be surprised, probably, just how much everything has a market or a use - this is probably one of the advantages of our large scale processing plants over here.
Even spleens, for an example, are boxed up and sent to the middle east. Some of the casings are sent "green" to China, but most are processed and sent to France, I believe.

The profit from the Casings dept (where I spent 5 seasons?) is sufficient to pay the wages of ALL the employees (1300 at peak) so it gives an idea that the company is making some serious money.
Luckily, we own them, and get a fairly good divvy above the lamb price.

As you would have found on your trip south, we aren't ashamed to do stuff our own way, for our own benefit

 

[Henarar]

And aging the meat is very important indeed - this is where the processors miss a trick IMO.

this
there is more to meat after it leaves the farm than before, the job needs doing right

 

[Henarar]

I am no expert in meat cuts but there was a line of meat down one side of a shoulder of lamb [one of our own] we had back along, never tasted anything so good

 

[Kiwi Pete]

this
there is more to meat after it leaves the farm than before, the job needs doing right

Red meat should be an experience

I guess that is what I try to sell more of - probably exactly what you do, add value with experience as it is cheap to do?

Customer connection, is what the 'experts' want to call it - which is why there are good breeders and great ones

Not wishing to remind you of that other thread about the calving scars - but that was my synposis: some will produce and hope someone will buy it, others ask the customer what they want, and make it.

 

[Henarar]

I guess that is what I try to sell more of - probably exactly what you do, add value with experience as it is cheap to do?

we don't do to much with the beef but we are trying to sell all the lamb we can direct, we have had good feedback up to now a lot of it is down to the place we get them done as they are very good
I never use to like lamb till we started having our own done now I am just as happy eating it as beef

 

[Crofter64]

KiwiPete said: Best meat on most animals are the cheeks, and fish are the same. So sweet.[/QUOTE]



I agree, but it still makes me a bit queasy when I eat them. I have my great Aunt’s recipe for udder soup, but I’ll not be making that one in a hurry either.

 

[Henarar]

My aunt use to stuff the heart but we made a stew of it and that was good

 

[Crofter64]

My aunt use to stuff the heart but we made a stew of it and that was good

i make some cheap and hearty dog food with all the bits we fussy North Americans won’t eat

 

[Farmer Roy]

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10155039841391316

 

[Kiwi Pete]

No like for that one Roy me boy

incredible the lengths humans will go to, to IMPROVE on what is good enough

 

[CornishTone]

I can never get my head round the vegan desire to eat burgers and sausages and bacon made of plants. If you want to eat plants, eat plants. If you want to eat bacon, eat bacon. What ever you eat, eat it for what it is and stop kidding yourself!

 

[Henarar]

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10155039841391316

bloke seems to talk sense