[Homestead] Scary as h*ll

Marie McHarry mmcharry at gmail.com
Fri Oct 17 01:06:29 EDT 2008


> From: "EarthNSky" <erthnsky at bellsouth.net>>
>>

>> A question for you Lynn...how many months can a person live off of one
>> beef cow, properly processed with no waste, i.e. soup bones used, blood
>> used, etc.>>I'm not Lynn but I grew up with a cow-calf operation (and then when my father finally decided that delivering calves at 3 am by tractor light was a real PIA, a finishing operation). We always had plenty of beef. When I was young and had only a baby sister, it took us a year to eat a thousand-pound (on the hoof) steer. I'm not sure how much of that went to grandparents who always helped with the butchering, but they butchered their own so maybe not much.

When we became a family of six with four children we consumed two
steers. And sometimes at the end of the 12-month after butchering
we'd, to my dad's utter disgust (it was the money), have to buy meat.
Plus, we ate lots of chicken (I might have trouble field dressing a
moose, but I can do a chicken blindfolded) and pork from the pigs that
we butchered as a family (my great uncle had a smoke house and he and
his brothers learned how to do it from their father who was a butcher
in Germany).

As if in a revelation it comes to me, we were carnivores of the first order.

Marie



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