Home Forums Miscellaneous Topics Rural Living Remember Rendering Plants?

Things have changed over the years. The rendering truck used to go by every day, even when it did not stop at ours.

How is getting rid of dead stock where you are?

Down here they only go to packing companies on a schedule.

Everyone else I know has a "bonepile" they drag the dead animals to.

Not sure what they do with road killed stuff, but some landfills have an area they you can dump them. (Different classification of hazard for landfill purposes)

A few things happen where I live.

Dead stock is frequently just moved off to a remote area of the property and allowed to decay.

Road kill (mostly whitetail deer) is picked up by a truck and hauled to the dump or, if it is fresh, to a local wild animal place for the benefit of big cats and bears. I don't know if that is true as of today but it was a few years ago.

We have a law here that is probably everywhere that if the cattle can't walk up the ramp to the slaughter house they cannot be slaughtered. Same at the sale yard, if they are not mobile you cannot sell them.

We still have a rendering plant here in town. Most of the roadkill ends up there.

Six miles as crow flies ( nine as the house flies) due east of us was the Swiftex rendering plant. On a good windy summer day you were always good for a wiff!

Saw a gut wagon truck up in the panhandle that was funny...

Can't remember the name but the trucks had a picture of an upside down cow and a slogan that said "Your Friendly Used Cow Dealer"

Years back, they picked up free.
Then for a while in the 70's, they charged, then free again.
Now it's $25., and much more for a horse, I'm told.
No sheep, and no bovines over 18 months of age.

In season, we do have turkey vultures.

The turkey barns compost, and I hear some cattle feeders compost in a large pile, of corn stalks.

We had a bad chicken/turkey gut truck spill in downtown Llano Texas about 20 years ago. Truck was going too fast thru Town and had to stop quick to avoid hitting a car stopped at signal right in front of Court house. Open bed, open barrels all sloshed out over cab and bed into street. Summertime. Stunk like hell. People coming out of stores/business puking like that poor Bastid in the stinky woman thread!

What a mess!!

Kaywoody, as you said, not pretty.

Another case of some parts of meat production not being tidy.

Unlike our liberal friends, we know that meat does not grow on the supermarket shelf.

Better question would be who doesn't remember the rendering truck driver, small town café at noon

Knock on wood we have only lost one critter in the last 3-4 months.


If it's cold drag 'em down into the trees and let the coyotes and magpies chow down. Or bury in the summer to avoid the stink.


Luckily most everything is out in big enough summer pastures that you don't have to worry about dealing with a death loss in the warm stinky months.

When the turkey barns were killing off all the barn full of birds with the bird flu a few years back, they were burying them in large trenches.
I heard some of those were blowing the dirt cover.

Nasty.

If yall had a rendering plant, yall was uptown folks.

I never heard of a rendering plant until Conagra built a chicken processing plant in El Dorado, Ar. They had a rendering plant down the hill from the processing plant. All the chicken byproducts went to the rendering plant. There it was cooked and made into a grainule. Then it was hauled to the feed plant where it was sprayed with a chemical solution that had all the nutrients, vitamins, etc. that a chicken needed. Then hauled back to the chicken houses for feed.

That is the only rendering plant I've ever heard of.

Oh yeah, that rendering plant stunk... very, very bad!

Warm months, I call a neighbor with a backhoe.

Cold months, the cattle are hauled out to a field for coyote bait.

Here, dig a hole

There is a rendering place in our area. Don't know if they charge for a pickup or not. Trouble is around here it's shale, not easy to dig big hole unless you have big equipment. Not uncommon to see a truck going down the road with cow hooves sticking up out the top of the truck!

Composted up in a large manure pile.

Some of the high tech pork producers here I using Dutch composters. The more high tech ones have noting recognizable in 12hrs for hogs. One guy I visited with said it took almost 24hrs for the horse to go away and the only thing left was the skull. Said it would roll around the knives.