Gregg Rentfrow: 00:32

Don’t know why. That’s funny.

Colt Knight: 00:36

Welcome to the Maine Farmcast. I am your host, Dr. Colt Knight, associate extension professor and state livestock specialist for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. And today, we are rejoined by repeat guest, Dr. Greg Rentfrow, the meat scientist for the University of Kentucky. And he is here to tell us about a unique program going on in Kentucky right now called Cook Wild Kentucky that involves some wildlife preparation. And I thought that the program might actually be pretty applicable to Maine, not just for our wildlife Yeah.

Colt Knight: 01:11

But maybe it could be adapted somehow for our livestock production as well.

Gregg Rentfrow: 01:16

Yeah. It’s a it’s a really unique program. It started oh, okay. We’ll start all over again.

Colt Knight: 01:25

No. We’re not starting over. I mean, I don’t have to edit stuff, and that’s more work for me. And we I don’t see. We don’t do that editing stuff.

Colt Knight: 01:31

We don’t

Gregg Rentfrow: 01:32

do that editing. So alright.

Colt Knight: 01:33

There’s no trick photography or anything with this podcast. What you hear is what you get. We don’t run it through AI to cut out the ohms and the

Gregg Rentfrow: 01:41

sos. Yeah. I just push my little microphone foam down here. But yeah. No.

Gregg Rentfrow: 01:46

The Cook Wild Kentucky program. Unique program. I yeah. Part of it, I work with our nutritional education program. And essentially, in a nutshell, what we’re doing is developing recipes for the wildlife that people hunt and fish in Kentucky and things that are native to Kentucky.

Gregg Rentfrow: 02:10

And so it started out a few years ago. I do a lot of work with the Kentucky Fish and Wildlife. And I’m going back several years, but they had a program, they had a grant before they had a beginner’s hunt, beginning hunter program. And it involved everything from how to hunt, how to sight your gun, all that fun stuff. And then I would come in and talk about food safety after the hunt.

Gregg Rentfrow: 02:35

I’d talk about how to cut up a deer carcass and so on. So it was really kind of neat. Well, that evolved into the NEP people, the nutritional education program people saying, Hey, I wonder if we develop these recipes. And so we’ve been doing this for about five or six years now. And we’ve got, I think we’re on our fourth generation of recipe cards.

Gregg Rentfrow: 02:58

And so what ends up happening is they get a recipe, they edit the recipe down to meet nutritional standards from the government. So it’s kind of funny. When we first started, I had a grad student who was a hunter and she said, I’m going with it because they need to learn that you gotta cook dove with bacon, something like that. And that’s not what they’re out there. They’re after just making them very nutritional recipe cards.

Gregg Rentfrow: 03:28

And so not only have the recipe cards, we got calendars that go along with it as well. And so it’s really neat because the bulk of what we have right now is deer recipes because deer is the main wildlife that people hunt in Kentucky. But we’ve also got recipes for the various fish catfish, bass, crappie. We’ve also got it for turkey, squirrel, rabbit, and so on. And so we did try one year, we tried a recipe for raccoon and the old trash panda was no bueno.

Gregg Rentfrow: 04:04

We couldn’t make that work. Think this year we’re trying again. And then we’re also doing something kind of unique. I don’t know, Doctor. Knight, if you have a problem with these up here.

Gregg Rentfrow: 04:15

We have a tremendous problem with them. The Midwest has a problem with them, Asian carp.

Colt Knight: 04:21

No, they have not made their way up

Gregg Rentfrow: 04:22

to this No, hope you don’t have to deal with them. Folks that are listening may or may not know what Asian carp is. It’s a very, very fast growing invasive species that about twenty years, somehow there was a flood somewhere and they escaped and they got into our riverways and they grow so fast, they consume natural resources, they crowd out and kill the other fish there that are natural in those waterways.

Colt Knight: 04:49

And every viewer watched those TikTok videos or whatnot, the fish jumping out of the water, like giant schools and

Gregg Rentfrow: 04:54

knocking people out on the Yeah, they’re dangerous is contagious. Yeah, because, you know, to tell you how big they are, I made the comment that we wanted to experiment with him at the meats lab. We would put them in our pellet grill just to see how they taste because it’s Asian carp. And so one guy in Fish and Wildlife, he says, Well, got some, I’ll bring them by. And he brought me 10 of them And holy smokes, they’re about the size of a two year old.

Gregg Rentfrow: 05:20

They’re huge fish. But we’re definitely, you know, looking for recipes to Can I tell

Colt Knight: 05:27

you a story?

Gregg Rentfrow: 05:27

Go ahead. Yeah.

Colt Knight: 05:29

I got into bow fishing. Yeah.

Gregg Rentfrow: 05:32

That was a growing Growing up. And

Colt Knight: 05:33

this is before Asian carp had hit anywhere close. They weren’t in West Virginia for sure. But we had grass carp. Yeah. Yeah.

Colt Knight: 05:39

And I had heard my whole life that grass carp were not good to eat. Yeah. Even though they’re big ticket in Asian countries and England and whatnot. But I started bow hunting and you know, bow hunting is not a catch and release sport. And I said to myself, you know, I’m not doing this just to murder animals.

Colt Knight: 06:01

So if I’m going to do this, we’re going to eat them. And so I dug out all my old hunting and fishing books with the recipes in the back, or a couple for carp and this and that. And so I did, I did the thing, you know, I filleted it the certain way. I cut out what they called the mud vein. We brined it overnight.

Colt Knight: 06:22

I smoked it with pineapple and apple slices and me and my mother and my soon to be wife sat down and it looked beautiful. Yeah. And like you said, they’re huge fish. So those fillets were just big. And it tasted like rotten pork.

Colt Knight: 06:42

And I think we all took the first bite and we all spit it out. So I’d love to know if you’ve come up with a good way to prepare those things.

Gregg Rentfrow: 06:49

Yeah, they’re a little bit more different. And I’m probably getting well, I’m not probably, I’m getting a little bit far out of my wheelhouse on knowledge on this, but they’re called Asian carp, I don’t think they’re really the bottom dwelling type fish that you would think a regular carp.

Colt Knight: 07:07

They’re not like a grass carp. No. No. They’re definitely a different fish altogether.

Gregg Rentfrow: 07:12

Yeah. They’re different fish and the flesh is really white and really flaky as well. And I actually watched a TV show, one of those cooking shows one time, and they were talking about the Asian carp and they cooked it up and said it was pretty good. So, you know, but they they’re they’re all over. They’re an infestation.

Gregg Rentfrow: 07:31

They’re they’re moving everywhere. You know, I remember, twenty years ago when I was in grad school at Missouri, they were they were getting really bad in Missouri at that time. And they were looking for what can we do with those. They even thought about taking those fish and catching them or, you know, doing like you’re talking about with the bow hunting and figuring out how we could feed them to the animals at the St. Louis Zoo.

Gregg Rentfrow: 07:56

And that’s when I realized, boy, those animals at zoos, their nutrition, their diets are highly, highly controlled, you know? And so they were trying to figure out if we can incorporate that in there. And I ended up graduating and moving to Kentucky. So I didn’t really get a chance to see if that program had any legs to it or not. But no, the Cook Wild Kentucky, like I said, we’re introducing more and more species every year and it’s really, really popular.

Gregg Rentfrow: 08:23

And we’ve got now with the university, we’ve a really good working relationship with fish and wildlife, which is only benefiting everybody. And so what we have now happening and it’s really, really fun to go to them is the county extension agents are now having these where they highlight the recipes. And so you’ll have like the venison chili, they’ll have the oven fried catfish and so on. People come in and they’re just basically, hey, come eat, come learn about this program, come learn, you know, hunters come in and I’ll come in and either if I have a deer to cut up, I’ll show them how to cut up a deer carcass. Or we talk about food safety after the hump.

Gregg Rentfrow: 09:09

So it becomes a really big deal and there’s a lot of counties that are doing that.

Colt Knight: 09:12

And I think this is where parallels can work with our direct marketed livestock. Absolutely. And our heritage breeds. Yeah. That are not, maybe not prepared the same way as commercial livestock.

Colt Knight: 09:25

And I would really be curious to know if our listeners and producers in Maine would be interested in in learning more about how to educate their consumers on how to properly prepare their product. Maybe generating some resources, like you said, recipe cards, videos, on how they could do that. And then they could use that as a selling point when they offload their their product where wildlife, we can’t sell that.

Gregg Rentfrow: 09:52

No, we can’t

Colt Knight: 09:53

sell that. Just for personal consumption. I do think though that type of resource could be a valuable resource for small scale livestock producers that are niche marketing and direct marketing.

Gregg Rentfrow: 10:05

Yeah, absolutely. And because you see that the like for example, our Kentucky Cattlemen’s Association, our Kentucky Pork Producers, and even our sheep and wool producers as well, they have recipe cards that go with the product and they’re free. But you get into states that may not have a very large commodity group organization like that and it becomes a bit of a challenge for folks to get those recipes. But if you’re looking at that, if we have some folks out there direct marketing livestock, the meat off of their livestock, off of their farms, I would encourage you to get in touch with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and National Pork Producers and so on and get those recipe cards because, you know, it seems odd that we would have a Cook Wild Kentucky featuring recipe cards for our natural resources. But we’re also, and this is probably an epidemic all over the country, we have a population of adults that really don’t know how to cook.

Gregg Rentfrow: 11:17

And we have streamlined cooking to where, you know, two minutes in the microwave, that’s homemade cooking, you know. And and so when you have to sit down and you’ve got a chunk of meat, regardless whether it is a it’s some sort of wildlife or it is a traditional livestock species, how do I cook it? And that’s, you know, your direct marketers out there, that would be something that folks want to buy off of you, but they may not know how to cook a beef round roast or a chuck roast or what do I do with this, you know, Boston butt or this picnic or something like that.

Colt Knight: 11:54

And, you know, I think the prime example of this is lamb consumption in The United States. You know, Maine was a lamb producing state in the eighteen hundreds. We were forced to be reckoned with in the lamb world. We had wool mills all around the state. You know, this was, this was an agrarian economy, you know.

Colt Knight: 12:16

And then in the early nineteen hundreds, it switched over to more of a forested and we switched over to more paper and pulp mill type deals. But what really happened with that lamb consumption was World War II.

Gregg Rentfrow: 12:28

Oh, yeah. Yeah. That killed it with the you If you’re not familiar, what happened is the C rations, now we call them MREs for the modern day military, but they were full of mutton. Cold mutton

Colt Knight: 12:43

Yeah.

Gregg Rentfrow: 12:44

And so a lot of times when we talk about age of the animal at the time of slaughter, you know, we usually discuss tenderness. You know, older animals are tougher than younger animals. But when we get into sheep, lamb versus mutton, not only are we talking about a tenderness deal, we’re also talking about a flavor deal. Mutton is a lot stronger flavor.

Colt Knight: 13:10

Yeah, whatever flavor you want to assign to lamb and mutton, the older that animal gets, the more powerful that flavor and smell becomes.

Gregg Rentfrow: 13:20

Absolutely. And that’s what happened was these people, these heroes of ours from that greatest generation returned home from the war. Boy, when they got home

Colt Knight: 13:31

They’ve been eating cold mutton

Gregg Rentfrow: 13:33

Yeah.

Colt Knight: 13:33

In a foxhole Yeah. Two foot of

Gregg Rentfrow: 13:36

water Yeah. Every day. And and the last thing they wanna eat is mutton.

Colt Knight: 13:42

Or lamb. Or lamb. It’s too close to mutton.

Gregg Rentfrow: 13:44

Yeah, it’s too close to mutton. My father-in-law is a Vietnam vet and you can’t get him to eat rice because that’s when he was over in Vietnam. You know, but yeah, the whole cooking and recipe, we’re talking about the Cook Wild Kentucky, whether we’re talking about our traditional livestock species, that is a huge, huge thing. You know, a lot of consumers just don’t know how to cook.

Colt Knight: 14:12

And that’s what happened after World War two. Yep. We had an entire generation that did not consume that lamb and mutton. Yep. And so we lost the knowledge on how to properly cook and prepare that because when it’s properly cooked and prepared, lamb is a delicious meal.

Gregg Rentfrow: 14:28

Yeah, it is. It is. And, and I’ve had lamb that I couldn’t get enough of it. I’ve had lamb where I was licking a concrete wall to get the flavor off my tongue. And and that’s the same thing, know, to steer it back around to the wildlife.

Gregg Rentfrow: 14:42

That’s the same thing with wildlife too. As you know, we take wildlife, it’s a different way of taking wildlife than we do traditional meat breeds of livestock where you’re going out into the forest and you’re hunting them, you’re shooting them. And you know as well as I do, you know, some of your large wildlife like deer, or here you have moose, elk, bighorn sheep, you know, you can shoot them and they’re dead but they’ll run another quarter of a mile, you know, and you have to track them and so on. And that’s where a lot of folks forget that, yes, we’re taking them for meat, but it’s a different style of taking them. And sometimes, you know, that’s why we do the program.

Gregg Rentfrow: 15:31

Like my falls are usually full of talking about food safety after the hunt. And that’s one thing that I always preference when we do when I talk about this is if I treated a beef carcass, pork carcass or lamb carcass, the way some people treat deer carcasses, they would throw me in jail. Know? And a lot of people think, well, you know, it’s not that big of a deal. No.

Gregg Rentfrow: 15:55

It’s people that get sick from eating improperly processed wildlife and undercooked wildlife as well. And so learning all that because you’re right. We’ve we’ve lost that. We’ve lost that.

Colt Knight: 16:08

You hear some people make the argument sometimes. You never hear about a recall on wild game meat. No. No. And the reason we don’t hear about that Yeah.

Colt Knight: 16:18

Is because no one tests it.

Gregg Rentfrow: 16:20

No one tests it, and it’s it’s not a commercial product that has comes up for for recalls. Now you somebody say, wait a second.

Colt Knight: 16:27

I canGregg Rentfrow: 16:27

go to wherever and I can get, like, an alligator snack stick or a deer snack stick.

Colt Knight: 16:33

And it’s from a farm.

Gregg Rentfrow: 16:34

It’s from a farm or, you know, in more precise way, says deer. It’s usually red deer out of Canada and not white tailed deer. I know most states and the Commonwealth is one of them, the Bluegrass State, it’s illegal to sell white tailed deer, you know, and I’m fairly confident. I know I watch Northwoods law, Maine’s pretty protective of their natural resources I remember

Colt Knight: 16:55

when I went to graduate school in Texas, a lot of the southern and western ranches in Texas, they got a third to half their income from selling hunts. Yeah. White tail deer hunts to be specific. Yeah. And the there was a lot of high fence ranches that sold exotics and big white tail.

Colt Knight: 17:15

And and white tail is a huge business in Texas. They’ve got they’ve got traveling veterinarians that just artificially inseminate. Yeah. You know, farm deer. Farm deer.

Colt Knight: 17:25

Yep. And they get, you know, two, three hundred inch horns, but or antlers, I should say. But the I think the way it worked in Texas is you owned the deer until you released it onto the land. Yep. So once it escaped like a half acre or an acre sized lot, it then belonged to the state of Texas.

Colt Knight: 17:47

Yes. And it was no longer something that you owned. Yeah. And so they were very protective of those animals because some of those animals were worth $30.40, $50,000.

Gregg Rentfrow: 17:57

Oh, yeah. And that and that’s one of the things that we talked about in the beginning hunter workshop we had in Kentucky. And now that’s spawned into what they call hook and cook for fishermen. And then forget the other one is the hunter one that they have. And they talk about that where you you shoot a deer and he’s on your property, but he runs over to your neighbor’s property.

Gregg Rentfrow: 18:24

And the neighbor says, you go ask the neighbor if you can go over and get it. And the neighbor says, no. It’s my deer now. No. And it in Kentucky, until that deer is checked by the state, tagged by the state, it is the state of Kentucky’s deer, the Commonwealth of Kentucky’s deer. That’s the name of that program. Feel the fork.

Colt Knight: 18:41

Yeah. But you mentioned that your, your fish program. Yeah. And that’s something that we have an abundance of here in Maine is Yeah. Is fish that taste amazing.

Colt Knight: 18:50

Mhmm. We’ve got trout, salmon. Yeah. We’ve got several ocean species that are just very flavorful and delicious fish. And we’ve even got, you know, more traditional perches, sunfish, gas, and all that kind of thing.

Colt Knight: 19:06

Yeah. And, you know, most folks either cook that stuff with butter or you fry it. And I think there’s a lot more that we could do to explore how to prepare fish and get even more out of that local resource that

Gregg Rentfrow: 19:23

we have. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. One of the things I enjoy coming up here is the seafood when it come up here. It’s because it’s fresh, you know. And I don’t want to get into debate whether fresh and frozen, different and whatnot.

Gregg Rentfrow: 19:37

But you know, one the things you have up here is like the clam chowder, the halibut chowders, and stuff like that. I would almost guarantee you the concept of putting fish in a soup in Kentucky is foreign to most people. But through this Cook Wild Kentucky program, we can explore that and give these folks an option that’s different than, like you said, battering and deep frying. There’s nothing wrong with battering and deep frying, and I think we both agree with that, you know, but but giving you more options than that. Mhmm.

Gregg Rentfrow: 20:08

You know? Because we even talked about one of the things we were gonna look at is, you know, adding maybe fish to our our barbecue program to where we could teach people how to smoke fish. You know, that was that was the whole concept to wheel back around with the Asian carp is maybe we can put that big Asian carp fillet on a pellet grill or pellet smoker and and get something different out of it.

Colt Knight: 20:34

But I think this whole concept really fits in well with our alternative marketing strategies and direct marketing that we do here in Maine. So Maine is a vacation state. Yep. We get a lot of vacation traffic in the warmer weathers and a lot of farm stands generate most of their business during vacation season. And those folks are coming to enjoy the Maine wildlife or canoeing, kayaking, hiking, hunting, fishing.

Colt Knight: 21:07

And, you know, a lot of these farms are on the highways and the roads that are leading to these major outdoor recreational vacation spots. And just because you can’t sell white tailed deer or moose or or fish, doesn’t mean that that maybe if you didn’t give some tips to those people on, hey, you know, you stopped here to buy some some beef or some pork or eggs for your camping trip. But if you catch some fish, here’s a good way to prepare it.

Gregg Rentfrow: 21:39

Here’s a recipe card.

Colt Knight: 21:40

So on and so forth. Yeah. And I think that generates goodwill and cross promotes between both the vacationing, outdoors, and local agriculture.

Gregg Rentfrow: 21:52

Yeah, you hit on something that just kind of clicked in my head. Don’t remember who I was talking to, but they said something I thought was really fascinating. That when they go on vacation, they always buy a cookbook from where they were at, so the regional cookbook. And the reason why they do that is so when they’re reminiscing about the vacation, they can go to that cookbook, pick out a recipe and have a food from that region there. And because it’s the same thing we’ve talked about in marketing livestock.

Gregg Rentfrow: 22:26

A lot of times when you’re direct marketing livestock, you’re direct marketing the beef off the cattle from your farm. Yes, the consumer’s buying that, but they’re also buying your story. They want to know when they sit down at a dinner party or they have a cookout and they’re grilling steaks, they want to be able to tell the guests, this steak came from this farm and the kids are active in four H and FFA and blah blah blah. They want that story to go with it. Know, yes, the meat is what they’re after, but the story is the huge thing.

Colt Knight: 23:01

Yeah. Yeah. Well, Dr. Rentfrow, it was great to have you with us again and discuss some of the innovative things that you’re doing there in Kentucky and seeing what we can cross over here in Maine. Yeah.

Colt Knight: 23:14

I get a lot of ideas when I come to visit Kentucky and when I have you guys come up here and help me with my extension programming. And we thought this would be of interest to our listeners as well.

Gregg Rentfrow: 23:25

Yeah, and to conclude things, you know, just because it’s wildlife doesn’t mean you can’t do it with traditional livestock species, you know, to help market things.

Colt Knight: 23:36

And always be thinking about how we can merge the different industries in the state, kind of cross pollinate. Yeah. So that we can get the most exposure and do the most good.

Gregg Rentfrow: 23:50

Yeah. You know, I don’t I don’t know how you Maine has a relationship with your Department of Fish and Wildlife. But boy, that’s a really fun one. When you can you can combine those two efforts in the state is really neat.

Colt Knight: 24:03

Well, Dr. Rentfrow, thanks for sitting with us.

Gregg Rentfrow: 24:05

My pleasure.

Colt Knight: 24:06

And I’d like to remind listeners, if you have questions, comments, concerns, suggested episodes, email us at extension.farmcast@maine.edu.

Gregg Rentfrow: 24:21

You’re sounding very professional with the

Colt Knight: 24:27

I gotta put on the broadcast voice on

Gregg Rentfrow: 24:30

some of Put on the broad and the rest of the story. So that kind of stuff.