What Happens to a Cow When Friends Come Together?

Here on our homestead, every animal has to earn their keep. So what do you do with a heifer that won't give calves? We figured we had 3 options...We could a) Keep her as a pet and keep forking out the average $250 in winter feed b) start a petting zoo and charge admisison or c) send her to freezer camp as Luke @randomstuff would say. We chose the latter. But putting a 950 lb heifer in a chest freezer takes a lot of hard work and planning. So we planned today as the big day. Luke @randomstuff already put out a post on the details of preparing for this huge undertaking so I won't get into that, but we needed some skilled labor. Some fellow homessteading, meat-eating, steem it friends: Zac @mericanhomestead, Kevin @papa-pepper, and Nick and Tim @beatitudes8 traveled over 1 1/2 hours to brave the frigid arctic temperatures to come help us out! Here we are the night before strategizing and enjoying some homemade smokies and wine. (Nick and TIm missed all the fun) )

Now @mericanhomestead has been out several times to help butcher and we always enjoy working with him and appreciate his help. In fact one of his buchering videos here on the homestead got him in trouble with youtube (but Zac's not bitter at all)

And @beatitudes8 has been out here helping butcher before too. In fact between the 3 families, we have this butchering process down to 4 hours! (We'll walk you through that in the next post)

But this is the first time we've had @papa-pepper out to the homestead and we really enjoyed having him and listening to all his wildlife stories. He worked hard and we hope he'll come back out and visit again soon!

Stay tuned for all the gory details...