Pretty simple question I guess. I was reading the other thread about butchering other people's deer for money and it got me thinking. Either I am SUPER slow or some of the folks on that thread are super fast or somewhere in between.

Butchered my deer last night. I already had it quartered out in coolers and I made steaks, jerky and hamburger. Start to finish including grinding, vaccumm sealing and clean up was 6 hours. My wife helped me put the burger in the vaccumm bags and clean up which saved me at least an hour.

If I'm cutting roasts and stew meat it doesn't take as long and if I'm not making jerky it doesn't take as long, and on a standard sized whitetail it doesn't take as long, but I would guess on average it takes me 4 hours start to finishing including clean up.

I spend a lot of time cutting each muscle group apart in the hind quarters and taking most of the sinew off. This deer was a fat pig and had nearly 2" of fat on it's backside so that took some extra time. I generally end up quartering the deer in the field so I spend a little time picking hair, etc. off the meat but this deer was pretty clean so not much time on that.

My grinder isn't huge, but it chugs along pretty good. It says it's rated for like 4.4lbs per minute, but it typically takes me about 30 minutes to grind 30lbs of meat, maybe a little lesss.

Jerky is time consuming. I don't do ground jerky, I take the less desirable steaks (ends of the backstrap, some of the medium sized muscle groups in the hind quarters) and slice them thinly across the grain of the muscle. It's not difficult but it is time consuming.

I had 1 blown up shoulder on this deer and I spent some time messing with that. The end result was not much meat salvaged off of it and probably 30 minutes spent messing with it, but I hate to waste good meat.

My guess on the deer was 250lbs on the hoof, I ended up with 32lbs of ground meet that I mixed with 20lbs of 80/20 hamburger to end up with 52lbs of burger, 15lbs of wafer sliced steak strips curing for jerky, and 10lbs of really nice steaks, for a total of 57lbs of boneless meat off of him. I didn't save much off of the one shoulder so that seems about right to me. He was such a fat pig that I ended up with close to 10lbs of fat and scraps off him! I usually make more roasts and stew meat, but we still have some roasts in the freezer from last year and we are almost out of burger so I went heavy on the burger this time.

Oh well, this turned into a long rambling post, but I'm curious how far out of line I am with my time that it takes and how much boneless meat you end up with off an average deer. I don't butcher my own deer because I can't afford to hire someone else to do it, and I don't butcher it because I enjoy it, but I do it because I would like to think I spend more time and effort making sure that the end product is going to be the best that it can be when my family and I sit down to eat it. I'm curious if I'm that far out of line on the time spent though, one guy posted that it takes him less than and hour to butcher a deer and it takes me 6 times that long!

Thanks in advance for any input.

Nathan