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Originally Posted by saddlesore
I have yet in my long years of elk hunting seen a cow that weighs 500+ pounds and I have killed a lot of them and I have yet to get more than 150 pound of meat out of one.

Butchering beef ( of which I have done more than a few) is different than butchery elk. Completely different yields.
The biggest cow I ever shot weighed 330 on the hook...dressed and hide, head, and legs off. That was the last time I had a processor do one for me. I don't remember how much meat I got back, or even if I had them bone it or not.


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CFT, did you use a processor in the Atlanta area? You are playing in my backyard there....


We eat organic in our house, we just have to shoot and gut it first.....
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Well Saddlesore makes a good point, and the 41% rule may be for beef only. I don't honestly know. Maybe the % will be a lot less on elk or deer then it will be on beef. Cows sure are chunker than deer so that probably is the case.

I always do my own butchering, but I don't weigh the meat. I cut and wrap for size not weight. (so it fits as I want it to in my freezers)

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I have killed and cut/wrapped over 20 cow elk in my life. I have scaled some of them. I have seen one go 475 with hide and hooves and it was much bigger than average. Most will hang hide on hooves on @ 400-450 on my scale. I cut and wrap my own and do not include any bones in my meat. I average 120ish pounds of meat. I'm not afraid to toss any bloodshot, hairy, or silver tissue rich meat. I would guess my scrap box of meat and tissue runs 20lbs +/-.

At 116 pounds I'd say your numbers are right on for a picky wrapper.


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Originally Posted by SSB
CFT, did you use a processor in the Atlanta area? You are playing in my backyard there....


Bay City. My buddy is from Merrill, but lives in the Walled Lake area now. He's the one that got the tag.


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Originally Posted by szihn
Well Saddlesore makes a good point, and the 41% rule may be for beef only. I don't honestly know. Maybe the % will be a lot less on elk or deer then it will be on beef. Cows sure are chunker than deer so that probably is the case.

I always do my own butchering, but I don't weigh the meat. I cut and wrap for size not weight. (so it fits as I want it to in my freezers)


The last beef we butchered weighed 1250 pounds. Scale weight live. Three of us split it and each got 165 pounds. + or- a bit. That is 445 pounds total. That was 35% or so of the live weight, bone in.


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Well heck....it seems my friend told me wrong. He said 41% cut clean.
So if you got 35%, and that was WITH the bones, then 41% is WAY off.
So what would you guess?
Maybe 30%-32%% cut clean?

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I picked up my cow from the huttes this November. Pretty sure the bill was $165 for processing and $25 to skin. I counted the burger packages at 33 which was pretty close to my 29 from the cow that I did last year on my own. Though I was pretty fussy and had more trimmings.
It always seems like ya should get more...

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Originally Posted by saddlesore
I have yet in my long years of elk hunting seen a cow that weighs 500+ pounds and I have killed a lot of them and I have yet to get more than 150 pound of meat out of one.

Butchering beef ( of which I have done more than a few) is different than butchery elk. Completely different yields.


This exactly. If you get 150 pounds of meat from a cow elk on a regular basis, you are keeping a lot of fat and other junk in the meat to add pounds.

Some of the Arizona and New Mexico cows are pretty big, because they do not have as rough of winters in many spots. However, there are not a lot of them that will produce 150+ pounds of well-trimmed, processed meat.


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If I paid $400 to pick up a little over 100lbs of meat with no specialty sausage etc. I would be beyond pissed off. Many folks are being polite and giving the butcher the benefit of the doubt. He only deals with Michigan Elk hunters once in a lifetime.......doesn't care for repeat business.

We usually end up packing out boned meat and do the butchering when we get home. If I can get my buddy Dave to help / takeover it looks like the buzzards have already been on the carcass a few days when he is done, I do my best to get all the meat but I'm not as skilled. This year the boned out meat from a large cow filled a 165 qt cooler and weighs at least 150 lbs. that was with a little off side shoulder damage. Final butchering had less than 10% additional waste..........cost about $30 for vacuum bags.

The guy in Northern Colorado we use in years one comes out whole early is around $250 with some sausage included and gets a better yield than your guy in Michigan.

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Originally Posted by szihn
Well heck....it seems my friend told me wrong. He said 41% cut clean.
So if you got 35%, and that was WITH the bones, then 41% is WAY off.
So what would you guess?
Maybe 30%-32%% cut clean?


Pretty close


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Didn't weigh the net but this cow had a carcass weight of 365....no head, hide or lower legs

I'm betting this NM cow was very close to 500 but she was very old

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Guess we grow them big in AZ and it must be the genes because it ain't the feed. Our winters are easy compared to any real weather but the elk are lean. Big bulls can have some fat to speak of but calves and December cows that still have milk in their udders are lean critters. I'm gonna estimate live weight on a typical AZ cow elk at 400-450lbs.

Cartilage, large tendonous stuff and large fascia and connective tissue makes the scrap bucket. We hunt cows in flat land mostly and are able to drive to them and get the whole sh*tteree. We bone out the neck and the ribcage and we do a thorough job of it. Zero elk fat goes into the mix but like I said, there ain't much to cut. We don't grow the good grass here, takes rainfall to do that.

Dad got 155lbs yield off his cow this year which is about typical, nice mature cow, that includes the beef fat (mix our grind at about 10%) and few to no bones so a reasonably comparable figure to what you'd get back from a butcher. He does grind heavy, he prefers burgers to steaks or roasts.

For reference, my wife's bull this year yielded about 225lbs and it was a mature 6x6, not huge and not big bodied. I'd estimate ~600lbs on the hoof, maybe 650? As I recall Tedhorn's post from last year, his was a clearly bigger bodied bull than what we butchered this year.

To be clear, the total range of cows is more like 140-175lbs with 140 being the young yearling type cows and 175lbs being outlier whopper cows. We've got a couple over the years but we're not routinely getting 175lbs from cow elk. The mode is more like 145-155lbs for a typical, mature cow elk. Yearling spike bulls are generally right in there with mature cows, sometimes a tad heavier. 155lbs yield is a very typical mature AZ cow yield. I've not butchered one from any other state. YMMV.





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I have no way of verifying, nor have I weighed any elk, but I inquired about this several years ago at a meat processor in Craig, CO where I have had several bulls processed. I was told that bulls will yield 160-200 pounds packaged meat.




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Originally Posted by huntinaz
Guess we grow them big in AZ and it must be the genes because it ain't the feed. Our winters are easy compared to any real weather but the elk are lean. Big bulls can have some fat to speak of but calves and December cows that still have milk in their udders are lean critters. I'm gonna estimate live weight on a typical AZ cow elk at 400-450lbs.

Cartilage, large tendonous stuff and large fascia and connective tissue makes the scrap bucket. We hunt cows in flat land mostly and are able to drive to them and get the whole sh*tteree. We bone out the neck and the ribcage and we do a thorough job of it. Zero elk fat goes into the mix but like I said, there ain't much to cut. We don't grow the good grass here, takes rainfall to do that.

Dad got 155lbs yield off his cow this year which is about typical, nice mature cow, that includes the beef fat (mix our grind at about 10%) and few to no bones so a reasonably comparable figure to what you'd get back from a butcher. He does grind heavy, he prefers burgers to steaks or roasts.

For reference, my wife's bull this year yielded about 225lbs and it was a mature 6x6, not huge and not big bodied. I'd estimate ~600lbs on the hoof, maybe 650? As I recall Tedhorn's post from last year, his was a clearly bigger bodied bull than what we butchered this year.

To be clear, the total range of cows is more like 140-175lbs with 140 being the young yearling type cows and 175lbs being outlier whopper cows. We've got a couple over the years but we're not routinely getting 175lbs from cow elk. The mode is more like 145-155lbs for a typical, mature cow elk. Yearling spike bulls are generally right in there with mature cows, sometimes a tad heavier. 155lbs yield is a very typical mature AZ cow yield. I've not butchered one from any other state. YMMV.



That sounds about right considering how you are processing one, adding 10% beef fat, taking rib meat,and neck.

I do the no gut method and don't take between the ribs.That is 50% fat anyway. I usually lose the flank meat, I don't add fat to the grind,and CPW reccomends not taking much of the neck as the lymp glands are there and CWD is prevalent in many units in Colorado


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Originally Posted by huntinaz
Guess we grow them big in AZ and it must be the genes because it ain't the feed. Our winters are easy compared to any real weather but the elk are lean. Big bulls can have some fat to speak of but calves and December cows that still have milk in their udders are lean critters. I'm gonna estimate live weight on a typical AZ cow elk at 400-450lbs.

Cartilage, large tendonous stuff and large fascia and connective tissue makes the scrap bucket. We hunt cows in flat land mostly and are able to drive to them and get the whole sh*tteree. We bone out the neck and the ribcage and we do a thorough job of it. Zero elk fat goes into the mix but like I said, there ain't much to cut. We don't grow the good grass here, takes rainfall to do that.

Dad got 155lbs yield off his cow this year which is about typical, nice mature cow, that includes the beef fat (mix our grind at about 10%) and few to no bones so a reasonably comparable figure to what you'd get back from a butcher. He does grind heavy, he prefers burgers to steaks or roasts.

For reference, my wife's bull this year yielded about 225lbs and it was a mature 6x6, not huge and not big bodied. I'd estimate ~600lbs on the hoof, maybe 650? As I recall Tedhorn's post from last year, his was a clearly bigger bodied bull than what we butchered this year.

To be clear, the total range of cows is more like 140-175lbs with 140 being the young yearling type cows and 175lbs being outlier whopper cows. We've got a couple over the years but we're not routinely getting 175lbs from cow elk. The mode is more like 145-155lbs for a typical, mature cow elk. Yearling spike bulls are generally right in there with mature cows, sometimes a tad heavier. 155lbs yield is a very typical mature AZ cow yield. I've not butchered one from any other state. YMMV.



If you are getting them out whole, vs packing out pieces, you are definitely getting more meat, also. I bring out quarters, tenderloins and back straps, with maybe a bit of other scrap thrown in. If you have it hanging there whole, you can work on it a bit better.



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Here's a very average cow in my area. 400 lbs hanging

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Remember beef has been bred for decades to yield more meat. Also many beef steak cuts will include bone, as in T bones, 7 bone chuck, and round steak.......and so on and on. Generally wild game is processed boneless due to CWD concerns, hunting harvest will often incur trim loss, as compared to captive bolt or "head shot" harvest in the beef industry. As a rule of thumb I figure half of a big game critters live weight is carcass, and half of the carcass weight is meat. So take live weight and multiply by 0.25. Example (450 x 0.25)= 112.5 pounds of meat. One can use this equation backwards to estimate live weight from meat harvest after butchering.

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I have never taken an animal to a processor.
In my personal experience I believe my final yield to be about right for a general rule I got from somewhere for large game.

Field dressed, you salvage 60% of live weight.
Processing for consumption you salvage 60% of field dressed weight.
Therefore you should normally get about 36% of live weight for consumption. That would mean that you salvaged all the meat using trimmings, rib, neck meat etc for things like burger or summer sausage plus your steaks, roasts, etc.

So, 500 pounds live should yield about 180 pounds of meat.
My experience with deer, speed goats and elk have approximated this less stuff lost to damage or just not saved by me.


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Based on the numbers I read here I killed a huge cow. The farmer who owned the land on which I hunted wanted his half in hamburger. The processor made 125 packages of one pound each. I received 125 pounds of steaks and a little hamburger. That means a cow running about 700 on the hoof. The processor told me it was the biggest cow he ever saw. I think the back to belly was 28" laying there before I gutted it.


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