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Author Topic: What next?!  (Read 242354 times)

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Offline glenn57

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I don't understand the big deal with Mayo. I'd choose the U of M 100% of the time.
2015 deer slayer!!!!!!!!!!

Online LPS

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They get all of the tax money and don't give back to the small communities. 

I do a lot of shopping local but we do go out of town to get better deals and just for something to do.  We do have a nice grocery store for a town of 1,100.  The same owner owns the one in Warroad too.  That may help.  Also lots of people from Canada come over here to shop too.  So our population draw is higher. 

Offline Rebel SS

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Online mike89

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been following that, so sad
a bad day of fishing is still better than a good day at work!!

Offline glenn57

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Wow, pearl lake is like maybe 15 miles from my house. Crazy. Sure sucks to hear this.
2015 deer slayer!!!!!!!!!!

Online LPS

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Ya how sad...   

Online Gunner55

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Just seen a prompt about an active shooter on a base in Pensacola, Fla. :crazy: :thumbs: :sad:
Life............. what happens while your making other plans. John Lennon

Online mike89

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just heard that too Gunner, said the shooter is dead... 
a bad day of fishing is still better than a good day at work!!

Offline glenn57

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Just seen a prompt about an active shooter on a base in Pensacola, Fla. :crazy: :thumbs: :sad:
seen that too!!!!!!!! :doofus: :pouty:
2015 deer slayer!!!!!!!!!!

Offline Rebel SS

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Offline Rebel SS

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 NEWS MINNESOTA


DNR investigating meat processor's venison sales


CIRCLE PINES, Minn. — A prominent Twin Cities meat processor is under investigation, suspected of illegally selling the venison from deer that hunters have killed.

Circle Pines Sausage Haus is the target of an investigation by the Department of Natural Resources that has lasted more than a year and reached into the lives of hundreds of local hunters, according to officials and documents.

While the case doesn’t appear to involve anything resembling a statewide black market, it touches on gray areas of the law of wild game processing likely not well understood by some of the state’s nearly half a million deer hunters.

An attorney for Sausage Haus’ owner said his client never intended to break any laws and believed he had been law-abiding for the past year.

No charges have been filed against Sausage Haus or its owner, and DNR officials were reluctant to discuss details, noting the investigation is ongoing. The probe has included purchases by conservation officers posing as customers, involved interviews with more than 400 people, and featured officers seizing records and building a database of more than 3,000 Sausage Haus deer-processing transactions dating back to 2017.

“It started as a complaint that a processor was selling wild deer meat, which is illegal,” Lt. Col. Greg Salo said in an interview, adding later, “It was established there was selling of wild deer meat occurring.”

Processors can charge fees for butchering a hunter’s deer, and preparing products like sausage can cost extra. But a hunter shouldn’t be sold more meat than his deer can yield, and hunter-killed deer meat can’t be sold to walk-in customers who tagged no deer themselves.

Over the course of the past two years, the Sausage Haus did both those things, a DNR investigator alleges in court papers filed last month.

Salo said DNR officers are likely to turn the investigation over to county prosecutors for consideration of charges in the coming weeks or months. Penalties for potential crimes being investigated can rise to the level of gross misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and a $10,000 fine.

Some hunters who brought their deer to Sausage Haus have found their kills under scrutiny from the DNR. Salo said the vast majority have been legal, but some citations have been issued to hunters when investigators discovered, for example, that a deer was never properly registered with the agency.

'Not for sale'
At its core, the investigation is about the fact that meat from wild animals can’t be sold in America.

That’s been the law since around 1900, when hunters seeking profit from their quarry had ravaged wildlife populations to the point where some waterfowl were near extinction. A series of laws, capstoned by the federal Lacey Act, strictly prohibited the selling of the meat from wild fish or game. Wild game can be given as a gift, donated to programs for the hungry and served at charitable functions under some circumstances. But not sold.

Key distinction: Deer meat is served at retail operations and served at restaurants, but those deer were born and raised on captive farms, which are federally regulated like cattle and pork operations. Wild game processing is essentially unregulated — a private transaction between the hunter and the processor.

Wild deer products are stamped with the words “NOT FOR SALE.”

How it works
In Minnesota and across America’s deer hunting landscape, many hunters who successfully shoot a whitetail don’t butcher the animals themselves. And many who do still find themselves with piles of “trimmings” — extra scraps of the high-protein meat that begs to be cured as jerky or ground and processed into summer sausages, snack sticks, breakfast links or the like.

Enter the local meat processor, who offers these services. No figures were readily available for what proportion of the roughly 150,000 to 200,000 deer killed annually in Minnesota are brought to processors. Circle Pines Sausage Haus receives about 2,500 wild venison processing orders each fall, said John Price, attorney for Sausage Haus owner Matt Sand. Sand was described in court papers as a “main suspect” in the investigation.

Many processors, including Sausage Haus, accept whole deer, charging a fee — $110 in this case. The large cuts of meat — tenderloins, steaks, chops and roasts — are returned to the hunter at no extra charge. They charge extra for sausages and other meats, but those prices are supposed to cover the labor of the work and the costs of seasonings, fat and pork or beef that are usually mixed in with the lean venison, Salo said.

Some ballpark rules of thumb: An adult deer might yield between 50 and 70 pounds of raw meat; a pound of deer meat will roughly yield two pounds of sausage.

Sausage Haus processes commercial meat for many Von Hanson meat markets in the metro. It doesn’t appear any Von Hanson locations are implicated in the DNR investigation. A Von Hanson official declined to comment Wednesday.

The 'gray area'
Some processors promise hunters that the only deer meat they’ll get back will be from the deer they killed and brought in.

But others, including Sausage Haus, don’t make that pledge. Customers are told that the large cuts will be from their deer, but trimmings from many hunters get mixed together in the sausage-making.

“You get into a gray area there,” Salo said. But he clarified that the mixing of meat from different hunters isn’t the focus of their enforcement. “What we don’t like is to see someone with 20 pounds of trim buy 300 pounds of sausage.” At that point, they’re illegally selling wild game meat, he said.

According to a search warrant application filed by DNR Conservation Officer Christopher Tetrault, two investigators were able to leverage 12 pounds of venison trimmings into 130 pounds of sausage, with Sand himself at one point offering “If you want more, just let me know.”

The allegations
Sand should have known better, Tetrault alleges in the warrant application, which was signed by an Anoka County judge.

In November 2018, DNR officer had begun building a database of Sausage Haus’ records, which included invoices with a box to check if customers wanted “extra venison sausage.” Of 103 such invoices, 96 “indicated that the customer did not bring a deer or venison meat for processing,” Tetrault alleges in the document.

Officers at the time told Sand to stop the practice of allowing anyone to order “extra” venison, the document states.

According to attorney Price, the issue was that Sausage Haus often found itself with extra venison.

“The machines they have process these in batches of 300 pounds,” Price said of Sand’s operation. “Not more, not less. He has to wait until they get enough meat to make all that, and sometimes there’s extra after it’s all mixed in with. It’s called production overrun. ... Over the years word had gotten out, and some people would come by the business. But he stopped selling extra venison to people off the street (in 2018).”

‘Learning from this’
Price said Sand, whose father used to run the business, is an upstanding business owner cooperating with investigators.

“Matt runs a Class A organization up there,” he said. “What they thought they could do is ask people (hunters bringing in deer) if they want extra. It’s illegal to do that apparently. ... If the DNR comes back and says you can’t do that, then maybe they’ll just have to increase the prices. They’re learning from this. My client certainly didn’t think anything they were doing was illegal.”

Salo said that processors with extra wild game meat have a few options: Eat the meat themselves, donate it or throw it away.

It’s unclear how widespread it is for processors to allow hunters to pay for more venison than their deer will yield.

“I have a feeling a lot of butchers are going to be reading this article and learning about this,” he said.

But Salo said the DNR and the Department of Agriculture hold workshops with processors, and processors attending seem to understand the premise of one-deer-in, one-deer’s-meat-out.

But he wasn’t so sure about the hunting public. “It’s hard to gauge that, but I think it might be an eye-opener for some folks".


                                        :deer: :deer: :deer:

Online mike89

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all I can say on my.........   bad boo boo....  if true....
a bad day of fishing is still better than a good day at work!!

Offline Rebel SS

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I always thought ya could buy it...guess just not here?  :confused:


https://www.steaksandgame.com/venison/

Offline deadeye

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I never took a deer into a processor that mixes the trimmings from other deer.  I thought when they did this they weighed "your" trim and then you got products equal to what it yielded.  Apparently that's not so.  Looks like they just through it in a pile, make a pile of stuff and sell you whatever you want.  I think it should be a warning if you bring in a 50 pound fawn and get back 130 pounds of meat.   :confused:
***I started out with nothing, and I still have most of it.***

Offline Rebel SS

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I never took a deer into a processor that mixes the trimmings from other deer.  I thought when they did this they weighed "your" trim and then you got products equal to what it yielded.  Apparently that's not so.  Looks like they just through it in a pile, make a pile of stuff and sell you whatever you want.  I think it should be a warning if you bring in a 50 pound fawn and get back 130 pounds of meat.   :confused:

I know there's a couple processors down here that will do that.....fact. From experience. Will grind and hold all their meat, then make the sausage, etc when they get around to it. You don't know who's deer is in yer sausage/meat. PO'd off a couple of my buddies so much they spread the word to get people to stop going there. Don't know if they still do it or not....

Online mike89

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I always thought ya could buy it...guess just not here?  :confused:


https://www.steaksandgame.com/venison/

yes you can as long as it's been inspected the USDA or Minn Dept of Ag.    and all the lockers I was in weighted the meat from each carcass or package that came in and the people got amount back, plus the pork that was added of course..   
a bad day of fishing is still better than a good day at work!!

Offline deadeye

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mike89, yes that would make sense.  So how do they justify how much venison product a person can get from their deer.  :confused:
***I started out with nothing, and I still have most of it.***

Offline Reinhard

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I processed deer for 10 years out of my garage.  At the time i didn't make sausage but did grind the meat if asked.  those folks got all of their meat back from their deer.  now i only did 70 or so deer a year.  All boneless ect.  Now larger operations if they were honest would tell you up front that the trimmings would go into other hunters trimmings for the purpose of sausage.  The reason for this is something I could understand.

When you make sausage you have to make it in larger batches if you have a large operation.  But you should weigh the trimmings per hunter as processed and then figure out the weight of the venison vs pork or beef added.  This way the hunter gets the full cuts back from his deer and a approximate amount of sausage back or just ground venison per the deer he brought back.  That makes sense.  If you bring in a large buck you will get more and so on.  If you bring a deer to a place that does a lot of deer and you expect to get all of "just your deer back" you are dreaming.  Main cuts yes but sausage and ground venison not so much.  good luck.

Offline delcecchi

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So, if the guy that brings the deer in doesn't want sausage from the trim, I guess the legal requirement is that it is thrown away.  Processor isn't going to go to expense of making sausage out of it if they can't sell it.   

Seems sort of silly, but that's the law, I guess.   A solution is to increase the price and tell people "you get x pounds of sausage with this deer."   Or have it ground into the burger.   

Online roony

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One of the problems is you might take care of your meat and it will get mixed up with someone else's who let it get too warm or waited too long to find their deer. The last few deer I have shot I have done it all so I know who's deer I'm getting. Plus it saves money.

Offline Rebel SS

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« Last Edit: December 12/06/19, 06:38:37 PM by Rebel SS »

Online mike89

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mike89, yes that would make sense.  So how do they justify how much venison product a person can get from their deer.  :confused:

say they add 30% pork so say about 20 pounds you would get 26 pounds,  and good question..   it depends on the percentage of pork or beef they want..  some less and some more..  and Rooney you are very right...  and Del you get back what ya brought in.. very simple..
a bad day of fishing is still better than a good day at work!!

Online LPS

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The places I went to gave your own meat back to you, except for sausage and if you had burger mixed with pork or beef.  Too much of a pain to mix your 6 or 9 or whatever lbs of trim and try to make a batch of sausage with that.  You got all of your steaks chops roasts from your deer.  So the bigger the deer the bigger those pieces were.  If you shot up a shoulder it showed up with a little less meat.  When you asked for sausage or burger that always took a few more weeks to make.  So if 40 guys brought deer in and only 32 wanted to pay extra for sausage they divided up the trim to those 32 guys and made sausage out of all of it.  Same with deer sticks etc.  They just split it between the guys that wanted it.  They did use it all up cuz they make money by the pound. 

Offline delcecchi

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The places I went to gave your own meat back to you, except for sausage and if you had burger mixed with pork or beef.  Too much of a pain to mix your 6 or 9 or whatever lbs of trim and try to make a batch of sausage with that.  You got all of your steaks chops roasts from your deer.  So the bigger the deer the bigger those pieces were.  If you shot up a shoulder it showed up with a little less meat.  When you asked for sausage or burger that always took a few more weeks to make.  So if 40 guys brought deer in and only 32 wanted to pay extra for sausage they divided up the trim to those 32 guys and made sausage out of all of it.  Same with deer sticks etc.  They just split it between the guys that wanted it.  They did use it all up cuz they make money by the pound.

And the DNR has now said that is not legal, and neither is selling the overage to joe blow off the street.   That is my take from the story.   They processed a whole bunch of deer and would end up with a bunch of excess sausage.   So they sold it.  DNR says that is a no-no.

Offline Reinhard

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I agree with Roony that it saves money and you keep what you had from harvest to the end process.  One thing I would encourage guys to do is to get into sausage making yourself.  If you don't want to process the deer yourself or can't because of health reasons going somewhere to have it done is the way to go.  Save the money on the sausage end at home.

A good grinder will cost around $300 or less.  A 5 pound vertical stuffer around $100 and the tubes for stuffing comes with that.  In just one season how many will spend that much for processing and sausage?  Help is right here for how too's.  Or a lot of information on the puter.  I'm at the stage right now that I will not process my deer anymore but will make my own sausage.  Since I hunt around Duluth my nephew found a good place to bring a deer so that is where I'll bring it.  good luck.

Offline Rebel SS

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Now this can't be good.....cleaning out the big entertainment center of all the VHS tapes. Looked up what to do with them, found out they are extremely hard to recycle because of the magnetic tape, no one will take them. And I have probably 150 of them....so, I looked it up in the CAWchester waste-to-energy guideline book, what they will or won't take.
Here's what it says" VHS Tapes:  Put in garbage.   Not in the #1 city! Shame!   :tut:
« Last Edit: December 12/07/19, 11:31:55 AM by Rebel SS »

Offline delcecchi

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Keep them and watch them.    Debbie never gets old.... or miss jones.

Offline Rebel SS

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Sell ya the whole batch. Hours of fun for ya.
« Last Edit: December 12/07/19, 06:01:04 PM by Rebel SS »

Online Steve-o

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Keep them and watch them.    Debbie never gets old.... or miss jones.

Debbie Reynolds...   :confused:


Offline Rebel SS

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I think with a lawyer, the guys got a good chance. I mean, Snow White wearing her low cut , provocative, bosom-pushing bodice, and she goes home every nite and lives with with 7 little goofy midgets? C'mon now, who's the deviant one here? Huh?  :evil:


https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/florida-man-arrested-disney-allegedly-groping-employee-dressed-princess-n1077291?icid=related