Thursday, October 15, 2009 8:44 PM CDT
Game to go: Mobile butcher processes hunter harvests
By ROB CHANEY, Lee News Service
OVANDO, Mont. — Nick Bennett only got in two days of hunting last year, but he’s been over his head in venison nevertheless.
His single deer had to be squeezed into a schedule filled with other people’s meat, from all over Montana. His Montana Mobile Meats Ltd. rig has attracted a small but growing crowd of hunters who appreciate his skills turning big hairy carcasses into neat white packages.
“It’s a great idea,” said client Curt Piganowski of Florence, who was picking up a box of already-frozen deer from Bennett at the Lake Upsata Outfitters lodge near Ovando. “Our party had a bull elk killed on the first day of our hunt. It was packed out Thursday and he was here on Friday. When we came out of the woods on Monday, the elk was done, boxed and in the freezer waiting for us. It was amazing.”
Pulling out his cell phone, Piganowski showed Bennett a text message he’d just received that morning from a hunting partner in Kentucky: “Had elk sausage for breakfast this a.m. – they were excellent.”
Traveling butchers have come and gone around Montana for years. Like hunting, the business depends on a mix of skill and luck. The hunters need to find game and bring it home. Bennett needs to find hunters so he can use his prodigious knife skills on their game.
Bennett asks just two things: Have the carcass hanging and supply electricity.
“I’m set up for a one-day turnaround,” Bennett said. “Everything I do is right here.”
Here is a 12-foot trailer rigged as a mobile butcher shop. Five minutes after he turns off the ignition, Bennett is ready to bone and trim. The trailer has special food-safe plastic paneling and nonporous tabletops, for sanitary prep conditions and easy cleanup.
One traveling trick Bennett likes is his blowtorch. Nothing’s faster or more reliable for getting rid of stray hair, which can boost the gamy taste of venison. He passes the flame over the flesh, and the hollow hairs vaporize without damaging the meat.
Bennett grew up in Mount Vernon, Ohio, hunting “corn-fed whitetails with big bodies and big horns” in tiny spaces. He moved west to attend Montana State University and finished his business degree last year.
To pay tuition, he got a job skinning animals for a meat processor in Bozeman. After a couple of seasons doing that at Gallatin Meats in Four Corners, the owner started training him in butchery.
“When I started, I didn’t know how to cut efficiently,” he said. “Now what I can do in two hours takes other people two days.”
With that skill in hand and a young man’s low-maintenance lifestyle, Bennett looked for a way to meld his interests and abilities. Like any good marketing analyst, he started by hunting for a problem to solve. With hunters, he found several.
One is the unfounded but common assumption that the meat taken into a game processor’s shop may not be the same as the meat that comes out. While game processors work hard to keep everyone’s order separate, any gathering of hunters will eventually come around to horror stories about clean-killed cow elk that came back tasting like gut-shot skunk.
Bennett’s one-at-a-time, while-you-watch setup guarantees that won’t happen. It also addresses a second problem – the lag time between delivery and pickup. Even the best brick-and-mortar shops get backed up when hunters are dropping off 20 to 40 animals a weekend. Sometimes, meat delivered toward the end of November won’t be ready until almost Christmas.
“With my business, it’s in the freezer the same day,” he said. It’s also priced as advertised, with no extra fees for skinning, rush orders, or cleaning. Bennett charges $75 for an antelope, $100 for a deer and $200 for an elk.
Then there’s the travel problem. Unless you live close to a meat processor, finding someone who can handle wild game is a time-consuming hassle. Bennett’s curbside operation scratches that itch, too.
Of course, that’s a major problem on Bennett’s side. Montana holds a lot of hunting territory. As a new business, trying to build name recognition and customer base, it means a lot of miles on the truck-and-trailer rig traveling from outfitter to outfitter.
“In Bozeman, I usually put in about 25 miles a day and cut five to six animals,” Bennett said. “Coming out here is a 200-mile trip. I don’t charge mileage now, but I might have to at some point.”
The speedy turnaround also limits some of the products he can market. The one-day deal means no time for smoking sausage or curing jerky. While he can add sausage spices to ground meat, it will be delivered fresh, not cased or pre-cooked.
There’s little state or federal inspection of wild-game processors. As long as Bennett doesn’t sell meat or process domestic livestock, he has minimal permitting requirements to meet. Even so, he said he sought out meat inspectors to learn best practices for cleaning, equipment handling and sanitation.
Now in his second season, Bennett figures the meat-cutting gig will make half his annual income. The rest he brings in through ranch work, guide packing and other outdoors jobs.
“I’m not sure what I’m going to do this summer,” he said. “I just enjoy being self-employed.”
Add your comments
Not already registered?
Then click Here.
Comment policy:
JG-TC.com encourages readers to engage in civil conversation with their neighbors. Comments that are submitted are not posted to the site immediately. They go into a queue to be moderated and may take several hours to be reviewed. Comments posted on Saturday may not be reviewed until Sunday afternoon.
In order to keep the page a set width, long lines (mostly long links) will be chopped. Try putting spaces in your links or consider using tinyurl.com to make a smaller link that you can include.
We will never edit or alter your comments, but we do reserve the right to remove comments that violate our code of conduct.
No comment may contain:
* Potentially libelous statements; such as accusing somebody of a crime, defamation of character, or statements that can harm somebody's reputation.
* Obscene, explicit, or racist language.
* Personal attacks, insults, threats, harassment or inciting violence.
* Commercial product promotions.
If you have any questions, please contact our moderator.
|
|
|
|
|
