REDUCING WASTE AND REUSING EVERYTHING WE CAN

This seemed like the right thing to do, and it appears to be working.

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For meat eaters on the homestead, butchering animals can come with the territory. Unfortunately, many homesteaders and hunters don't use all that they can when they harvest an animal. Around here, while I may choose to kill an animal, I try to make the most out of it by using all that I can.

Everything that we can either obtain or grow ourselves, or reuse is basically one more thing that we can essentially get for free. "Free" fits into our budget and financial goals a lot better than the alternative!

SALT?

Part of using all that we can includes the animal hides. There are many uses for skins, pelts, rawhide, and leather, so I'm learning how to tan the hides. When we recently helped a neighbor harvest three of his goats, he sent me home with the skins. Then I helped @bluerthangreen harvest one of his goats, and got another skin. Next, the neighbor shot a deer and didn't want the hide, and then I shot a deer too.

As you can tell, animal hides are not exactly rare around here, nor are they hard to come by. Rather than having them just be discarded and wasted, I figured I'd see what I can do. Since I have a lot that I'm up to at the moment, I wanted to scrape and preserve them for now, and then start the tanning process in the near future. As far as I can tell, I can re-hydrate these later when I need to, so salting them at the moment is just to keep them preserved until then.

When I originally scraped and salted the first goat skins, I bought a lot of salt to do so. Eventually, it dries, as does the skin. At this point, I'm not sure what people would normally do with it, but I had an idea.

The dried salt was already breaking up in some large pieces and detaching from the hide. I figured that if I collected it I could possibly reuse it. I chose a plastic five gallon bucket to collect it in for two reasons. First, the salt would encourage metal to rust. I've driven enough vehicles up on the winter roads of Wisconsin to know what salt can do to metal. They salt the roads to melt the ice, and then the salt accelerates the deterioration of the metal vehicles. Secondly, the five gallon bucket seemed big enough to hold it all.

MORE HELP = MORE TIME TOGETHER

I got my right hand man Monster Truck a wooden dowel and let him have some fun busting the salt up. After a while with him smashing it, the large hard pieces were reduced to their original granules. I think that it is excellent to be able to have a job for a four year old where hitting things with a stick and breaking them is a good thing. He gets to enjoy something that is pure pleasure to a young boy and he gets to actually accomplish a real job in the process.

Once the salt was removed from the first hides, collected and pulverized, it was ready to be used on the next batch of skins. I think that I'll try brain tanning first and see how that goes, but if anyone has any advice, tips, or processes that they like, please let me know. My goal will be to keep the hair on, so we will see how it goes.

In the end, it was great to spend some quality time "working" with my son again and I'm glad that I didn't have to go purchase more salt. Between skull mounts, meat, tanned hides, bone broths, and animals like like to eat the innards, any harvested animal around here should be pretty much used up!

As always, I'm @papa-pepper and here's the proof:

proof-of-saving-salt

Until next time…

Don’t waste your time online, invest it with steemit.com

GIF provided by @orelmely

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