Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting Average amount of processed meat?

Ive cut all my own elk for 50 years I weigh the packaged meat most years. I get anywhere from 100# to 185# of meat from an elk depending on a if it's a yearling cow or a bigger 6 point bull. You can tell how much meat you are going to get the minute you start quartering your beast. When you walk up to a dead big bull you know you are going to be eating a lot of tough steaks for a long time.

40% of live weight if you don't have to do a lot of trimming. This also depends on bullet placement. I have seen front shoulders completely ruined by a rapidly expanding bullet hitting the major bones in the socket.

Now how do I weigh them alive, so I know how much yield to expect?

Like I posted earlier, I've processed all of my own meat except for my Buffalo. Around here all processors are different. One might not take an animal that has been skinned in the field, one might not take meat that was bonned in the field, etc, etc.

Processors do not spend the time to trim "everything white" off of the meat, especially the meat that will be ground into burger.

The amount of meat lost due to where it was shot has a lot of variables: how many bullets hit it?; did the bullet hit a bone?; how fast was the bullet going when it hit the animal?
For many years I shot my elk with 180 gr Nosler Partition bullets shot from my .30 Gibbs, hitting them behind their shoulders. Many hits resulted in about a 1 foot diameter area of bloodshot meat around the bullet hole.

The first elk that I shot with my .300 Weatherby was a 5x5 bull that I killed with one shot behind his shoulder at about 100 yards with a 168 gr Barnes TSX bullet. I was amazed at the very small amount of bloodshot meat, probably less than 1/2 pound.

The next elk that I shot with that rifle was also a 5x5 bull that I also killed with one shot, but he was standing quartering to me when I shot, and the 168 gr TTSX bullet hit his upper front leg bone, just below the knuckle with his shoulder blade, and made mush of about half of that shoulder.

One year, one of the guys in our group of pronghorn antelope hunters said that he didn't like antelope meat, and he proceeded to drop his buck with a shot with his .300 Win through the hams that dropped the antelope, then he killed it with a shot through his front shoulders. About the only meat that wasn't ruined was the backstraps and the small tenderloins.

The best fomula I've seen for determining live weight has been the one from (I believe) Wyomong Fish and Game. Gutted weight with everything else still attached and mutilpy by 1.42 to get live weight. The last three guided hunts I've been on provided for weighing gutted carcasses before skinning. I presume some others do the same and, as I recall, processors also weigh them (or they used to). As for estimating meat loss with bloodshot or bullet-damaged meat, someone already mentioned it, Barnes TSX bullets cause very little bloodshot meat idamage wth a bullet placed behinds a shoulder. I've never hit bone with a Barnes, so don't know about that. I've found Nosler Partitions perform similarly to a Barnes TSX or TTSX and also cause little bloodshot meat or damage with behind-the-shoulder shots.

I believe the comment on 36% of live weight with boned-out, packaged meat is pretty accurate.

This was a smallish 5x5 bull. I am no expert in guessing the live weight of such an animal. The lady at the processing facility guessed it at 500 lbs

I've only weighed the total yield on one elk - a good sized 5x5. I processed it myself and really picked over the carcass. 1 shot behind the shoulder killed it, but I gave it a 2nd on the point of the shoulder. 150 lbs...

With deer, I'm usually between 45 and 65 lbs total yield.

Pick em clean. This one was smallish bull, I'd guess 120-130 lbs processed and cut clean.

I've taken a number of smaller builds to the processor over the years. Quartered with ribs boned typically weighed 220#-240# . That's what i paid for. The final product was less.

Hard to say if the amount you mention seems right without more info. hanging weight, was it whole, quartered and did you scrap all the rib meat and skirts steak,
What you call a "5x5 smallish bull" the weight could vary a lot, smallish antlers don't always mean smallish body, so weight is needed.
I live in pretty good elk country, have them in my pasture and yard almost every night and many times during the day, the rut drives me crazy as the bulls destroy a lot of small trees so i fence the better ones. I used to use a processor but finally built a walk-in cooler and started doing my own.

You’ve got some small elk there.

Hunting partner killed a nice fat 5x5 buil in Co 2 weeks ago. The bull had the courtesy to die right on the end of a short ATV trai. First time in over 20 years hunting elk we could drive the Polaris right to it. Hauled in my 3rd whole carcass to the butcher in about 30 elk taken in our group so more typical of a ranch hunt instead of our public land canyons & ridges.

He was good sized & fat pushing 700 lbs live weight. I’ve killed a couple larger but this was a nice bull. And the maximum yield possible - he got 5 milk crates full to the top of meat from the bull. At about 50 lbs per box I thought the meat yield was fantastic.

Your description of yield sounds like some we’ve gotten from animals killed near dark in steep terrain where field butchering is challenging & you don’t get all the meat off the animal.

Some of the Roosevelt elk on the coast are a LOT bigger than Rocky Mountain elk. Just like the people who mean whitetail when they say "deer", most folks mean Rocky Mountain elk when they say elk.

Our big Roosevelt bulls on a scale are big enough that I don't post actual weights anymore because the Colorado boys call me a liar. They are close to the weights of
2 and some three year old moose from southern BC. I will say that on my grandson's huge 5x5 Pope and Young Roosevelt bull, we boned him out and packed within a few ounces of 300 pounds up to the vehicle: scale weight. And that bull was not our biggest one, by quite a bit.

The weights posted to start this thread sound about right for similar Rocky Mountain bulls I have killed and processed, smaller than a big mature Rocky Mountain bull.

This was taken in whole, not field dressed so no losses there.

Many of the numbers posted are VERY light when compared to a large Roosevelt

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I would have deboned it and weigh it before dropping it off. Never drop off the back straps !
After getting shorted couple times, I started doing it myself.

It wasn’t a dig as my brother brought a 4 point from Colorado back that wasn’t a lot bigger than my biggest mule deer.