Saturday, October 18, 2025

Is Your Wild-Sport Processor Shorting You on Venison?


Should you’re a meat hunter, as many deer hunters throughout America are, you’re going to be way more all in favour of kilos of venison than inches of antler. So it’s pure for brand new hunters, and even skilled ones, to surprise what number of kilos of venison they’ll harvest from any given deer.

When you’ll see a bunch of various figures thrown round there on the net, the Nationwide Affiliation simply revealed an important video breaking down the info. In accordance with the NDA, you must anticipate to get about 48% of the deer’s discipline dressed weight in boneless venison. So for straightforward math, if a doe weighs 100 kilos, you’ll find yourself with about 48 kilos of boneless meat. That is assuming that the center have been eliminated however the conceal and head are nonetheless on. That is additionally not together with organ meat.

This isn’t simply opinion. The NDA cites a research from the Ohio Division of Pure Assets which assessed 115 field-dressed weight white-tailed deer that weighed 12,370 whole kilos earlier than processing. In accordance with the research, “After processing, the 115 white-tailed deer yielded a complete of 6,001.8 kilos of venison. The common deer weighed 107.56 kilos discipline dressed and yielded 52.19 kilos of venison, or a 48.52% meat yield. Under are the common yields for one deer in response to Antlered (bucks), Antlerless (does and button bucks), and Mixed (bucks, does, and button bucks).”

Ohio DNR

This, after all, is assuming you do a very good job of butchering your deer, which implies slicing off all of the accessible neck and scrap meat. 

There are two different key components in how a lot meat you harvest from a deer: shot placement and discipline dressing care. When you have meat harm from a bullet that blasted by means of the shoulder, you must anticipate the proportion of harvested meat to go down considerably. Additionally in case you herald a carcass that has not been cared for correctly (it’s soiled or hasn’t been cooled nicely) you’ll possible lose much more meat. 

However even when your deer was completely shot and correctly tended to within the discipline, there’s an opportunity you may not be getting as a lot meat again from the processor as you anticipated. A part of it is because most hunters are usually not nice at estimating the load of a discipline dressed deer. However it’s additionally as a result of busy processors within the coronary heart of deer season generally prioritize velocity and effectivity over most venison yield. That’s kinda a part of the deal. However if you wish to know the way good of a job your butcher is doing, you possibly can merely weigh your deer earlier than dropping it off with them.

Should you’re actually involved about harvesting the entire attainable venison from a deer, it’s finest to simply do the butchering your self. Take your time, save all of the scrap meat that you may, and weigh your outcomes to see how you probably did.



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