The Truth of the mater is that you only need one tool for butchering and that is a single knife. People from many cultures around the world are able to kill and process an animal with nothing more than a single knife from a small rabbit or chicken (possible without even a knife) to a large cow (I will refuse to do a cow myself under such circumstances unless driven by extreme need and very strongly prefer to use other methods to put animals down in general).

In the case of a single knife for everything the knife needs a sharp point and a rigid blade to be able to stab in and pull back out of the jugular. I am less comfortable with this method but I realize that under certain circumstances or countries it is the only method available and that it does also give opportunities for reduced waste.

More normally the animal will be put down with either a captive bolt stun gun or a firearm. In these cases the animal is usually shot in the head in such a way to stun or kill the animal as humanely as possible. I am of the opinion that a firearm is generally better and have known people to butcher lots of animals with nothing more than a .22 lr. Whatever the gun you take the shot placement is critical to putting the animal down with the first shot. (Full Metal Jacket (FMJ) bullets will do the job but I recommend getting hollow point or self defense rounds to prevent over penetration).

If you are using a firearm be sure to always follow the rules of safe firearm handling.

By getting a hand bone saw you suddenly move up from chunking the meat and hacking at the bones to making foods that have better flavor and nutritional value. Soup bones just have a way of changing everything about the flavor and ribs are hard to beat. I wouldn’t hesitate to process a cow with a hand powered bone saw although adding a reciprocating saw of the sort used in construction sanitized and with a meat blade can really help to make short work of splitting the spine to make t-bone steaks but that is about the only thing I use it for. I have even taken to leaving the meat cutting band saw alone and either making tomahawk steaks, tomahawk pork chops or other similar cuts as opposed to going through the hassle of cleaning the meat saw which is big and has lots of small areas to clean for butchering one animal.

It is hard to imagine life without hamburgers, hotdogs, brats, ground sausage, Keilbasa…. whew that could be a long list… but anyway to make those a grinder is necessary.

The meat grinder HP or wattage is only part of the equation. While a 1/2 hp grinder is good (a little smaller would be fine) The more important part of the grinder is the bore size. A #12 bore isn’t really a good idea for anything bigger than a goat or sheep and then only one. A #22 bore should be good for just about all of a persons butchering needs from Large Bulls on down. With either of these grinders you will want a variety of plates to course grind, medium grind and fine grind your meat (meat that is cold grinds better) but keep in mind that you won’t usually go straight to a fine grind and may regularly grind with a course plate then regrind with the fine grind plate.

Brining hams or bacon can be done in the same bucket at the same time unless you want different flavors. depending on the size of the animal and how much of the animal we decided to smoke we will use a vacuum sealer, 5 gallon bucket (usually with food grade liners), a 20 gallon pot, (also with liners) but we haven’t had to use a 55 gallon barrel drum yet (600 lb animals or larger would require more than one 55 gallon drum and combination of the other options as needed.

Note: We use the 20 gallon pot instead of a 30 gallon drum only because it is convenient. I don’t think one is better than the other.

Meat mixers are handy and can really improve getting all of the seasonings properly mixed together (much more important if making cured sausages like summer sausage) but a KitchenAid mixer can work well for small batches and mixing by hand is doable as long as the people mixing the ground meat with the seasoning are patient and diligent.

Stuffing sausages can be done with a meat grinder if the meat is cool or with a sausage stuffer. Depending on the amount of meat being processed and how much is being turned into sausages we have taken to running a grinder and a sausage stuffer at the same time. That is as much because we want to get it done ASAP, we have the man power to operate both and we are occasionally too rushed to cool the meat as much as anything else though.

Canning meat

I have no experience with this. I will have to learn someday.

Vacuum sealing tends to do a better job all around of keeping the meat fresh and also comes in handy for marinading or curing cuts of meat. The easiest to find vacuum sealers are usually only 12” so if people want to package especially large packages of meat they may have to get a larger one (the last large one we got was at Cabelas). I don’t especially like paper myself but have used it in the past.

The ground meat bags are easy to handle and store well. they are also really fast to fill with a sausage stuffing attachment.

Aging meat (usually beef) requires a room of the proper temp and humidity. Most people won’t be able to buy something just for that but will see if I can eventually come up with some plans. At this point we are using a refrigerator truck and it doesn’t actually see that much use at this point.