Small-scale meat preservation for animal feed

[Andy Carson]

Having Chickens (and soon hogs) to feed has brought to my attention the great value of animal protein for feed. It has very high levels of protein that are of the highest quality and palatibility. Still, I am very resistant to feeding tankage or meat meal because I do not know the story behind this “stuff”, and just generally don’t trust it. I am tryign to stay away from bulk soybeans too and have had a tough time finding a high quality protein supplement that I know the story behind. So that leaves me with harvesting/making my own protein supplement, and in a perfect world, there would be a meat component to it. I have all sorts of pests in my field that persistantly bring in protein (in the form of themselves) in both large and small packages, so the meat could be largely free if I can figure out how to use it. The challenge is mostly how to use it efficiently. The “large packages” are too large to use at one time with the number of animals that I have (or plan to have) and the “small packages” are alot of work to process. I think it is best to focus on the large packages and figure out how to store the meat efficiently so that the protein can be metered out at the animals require. So, I have been thinking of easy ways to preserve fairly large amounts of meat. I have looked into various smoking, drying, pickling, and canning methods to see what is easy and effective. My favorite method so far (at least in theory) is to grind the meat in large chunks (bones and all), acidify it with vinegar (pH<4.5), add enough water to make is "soupy," pour it into 5 gallon carboys, and boiling water can it. Depending on how much water is needed to make this stuff "soupy" you could store up to 40 lbs of meat per bottle. Of course, I could just get an extra freezer, but eventually I think I might run out of space and who wants to pay the extra electrical bill when there are other methods? I am curious if anyone has ideas or experiences with other methods that are easy, effective, and "scalable". Again, these methods don't have to produce the most palatable food in the world (it's animal food) so it opens up options that might not normally be considered (IE adding vineger to meat to allow for hot water canning rather than pressure canning).

Also, it is legal in PA to pick up road kill. Just the hind quarters on the deer I see every day would keep the animals in alot of meat for a long time. This doesn’t sound “gross” to me, as it gets cooked in the canning process… I also wouldn’t take if it was very old. Sure, it won’t feed everything in itself, but it would be a heck of a protein supplement if the storage “issue” can be addressed.

[Andy Carson]

After some more reading, I think that frying the meat to dryness and vacuum packing it would be just as cheap/easy and easier to move around (as it’s a dry product). This way, I get “cracklin’s” similar to dry rendering.

[near horse]

Hi Andy,

As I’m sure you’ve thought of, run a small test batch first to make sure it’s palatable in the end. That would be a lot of work to go through to have them reject it.

Also, have you looked at DDG (distiller’s dry grains). Crude protein in the mid 20’s, good palatability, easy to store ….. Unfortunately it’s pretty popular with cattle feeders too so there might be some competition.

I’d investigate any local microbreweries for their spent grains (brewers grains) and, if you’ve got an ethanol plant nearby, see if they’ll sell you some DDG.

Any fish farms near you? Another possible source of cull protein.

I should add that back in my graduate student days in wildlife nutrition I had to feed black bears and grizzlies various diets, one of them being squirrels. I trapped ground squirrels and then to make the diets homogenous, I had to homogenize them by chopping them up and putting them through a blender. There is no blender short of industrial capability that can handle blending chopped squirrels AND even hungry bears didn’t want to eat the nasty looking squirrel glop – probably too much info 😮

[tsigmon]

Isn’t some form of that practice is how mad cow disease is spread?

[dlskidmore]

@tsigmon 30682 wrote:

Isn’t some form of that practice is how mad cow disease is spread?

Feeding an animal parts from the same type of animal always seems like a bad idea to me. I also don’t like feeding herbivores animal parts, but chickens and hogs are naturally omnivores and should have some animal protien.

As for chickens, I’d look at insect sources. There are several systems for culturing insect larvae from compost products.

The frying thing sounds like confit? Historically they used a bath of fat to exclude oxygen and moisture from the resulting fried meat. Sun dried tomatoes work on the same principle, get rid of the water, immerse in oil…

[near horse]

@dlskidmore 30722 wrote:

As for chickens, I’d look at insect sources. There are several systems for culturing insect larvae from compost products.

.

Don’t even ask about the maggot growth and collection system that was developed to try to use in a bear feeding trial!:eek:

[Anonymous]

That’s how Mad Cow Disease started in the UK, feeding meat and bone meal made from scrapie infected sheep to cows where it mutated into Mad Cow Disease. Beef cattle aren’t usually fed protein supplements so that’s why Mad Cow was largely limited to dairy herds.

[Farnorthfarmer]

Ah the big can of worms…

no pun intended. We do feed some animal protein to our chickens and pigs. At this time it is the frozen meats that aren’t any good anymore. (ie freezer burn or getting up there in storage years) They also get the left over milk we cant use as a protein boast. I know my wife has talked about this on her chicken forums which have turned into pretty heated debates between the give protein and the they only need plants groups. we are looking into adding some milking goats to our farm to serve the purpose of extra milk for the animals and meat for our dogs to help cut back the dog food bills and some meat for us. We have some pretty step areas here on our farm that my milk cows cant get to but a goat certainly would. we are also looking at stocking our ponds with fish which will be used to make fertilizer and be dried for use as animal protein once we get them going I can let you know how that works out for use.

I agree with raising your own, since one never knows how the animal was raised. As for mad cow it came from feeding sheep brains and spinal bits to cattle, not the meat its self since these were the leftovers from processing. Not sure if it is just me but when I see a kill our in the bush here all I generally see left is the head and the spine so I don’t think nature intended those bits to be eaten… could just be me though????

[Eli]

Could you compost the animals and any thing else you can get and use it for fertilizer to grow soy beans? 40 bushels of beans from one acre is a lot of protein. And no social stigma. Just a thought. the bones don’t rot to fast but the rest is done in a few months. Good luck. Eli

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