Glenda Pereira: 00:11
What did you teach today?
Colt Knight: 00:14
Animal contributions to humanity. It’s not really exciting, but I did have piglets last night. Not me personally, but my sow. I had piglets last night. And so I got here early and created a short video to show them the farrowing process.
Colt Knight: 00:30
Yeah.
Glenda Pereira: 00:34
Welcome to the Maine Farmcast. For today’s episode, we have the two cohosts here. So Colt and I are recording the podcast together, and I just wanted to give a distinction. So I called you an assistant professor in one of our writings the other day, and you’re an associate professor, soon to be Full. Full professor.
Glenda Pereira: 00:55
So just wanted to make sure, put it out there because I did make a mistake. I wrote something and it said assistant professor. But today, we’re gonna be doing a podcast together on some of the events that Colt leads throughout the year, specifically the Maine Meat Cutting School.
Colt Knight: 01:14
Very popular program.
Glenda Pereira: 01:15
Yeah. So tell us more about it because
Colt Knight: 01:20
So the Maine Meat Cutting School was originally designed back in 2017, and it involved a group of six Maine meat processors, some industry folks in the livestock industry, and myself, a professor from the University of Kentucky, Dr. Greg Rentfrow. He’s been on the podcast a few times. And then at the time, my supervisor, Richard Brzozowski. And so especially the folks in Cumberland County will probably recognize Dick Brzozowski’s name. He was heavily involved in the sheep and goat world for twenty or thirty years before he became an administrator.
Colt Knight: 02:00
So we all got together, and we were trying to combat a few issues. One, there’s a lack of meat processing availability, not just in Maine, but most of the country, all of the country, but it was an issue for the folks of Maine. And so we thought, how can we increase capacity without just building more meat processing facilities? Because there’s an inherent issue with this. There’s not enough livestock in Maine to sustain year-round livestock processing to just open up a bunch of new meat processing facilities.
Colt Knight: 02:37
They would stay super busy in the fall and early winter and maybe parts of the summer, but then they’d have to lay all their workers off.
Glenda Pereira: 02:45
Right.
Colt Knight: 02:45
In the late winter through the spring, and then you can’t sustain a business model like that. Right. You know?
Glenda Pereira: 02:50
It’s really a seasonal business here in Maine.
Colt Knight: 02:55
Yeah. So if there was year-round demand for that, we could legitimately probably open up quite a few more meat processing facilities. But without that year-round demand, it’s just the cost and the infrastructure and the logistics of hiring seasonal workers. It’s just nearly impossible.
Glenda Pereira: 03:12
Right. And storage is an issue because, really, like, if you could store for longer periods of time, but that’s not a reality.
Colt Knight: 03:20
Top cost of meat processors? Cold storage. Yep. Yeah. And electricity prices are through the roof in Maine.
Colt Knight: 03:27
So just building huge freezers is not an economical solution. You know, the other way that we could build capacity is if we hired more workers, so we increase the productivity of the plants that we already have. That seemed like a challenge that we could work with. And so the original thought process for the Maine Meat Cutting School is we would train a new generation of meat processors. So the companies could go out and hire folks that were semi ready to cut meat.
Colt Knight: 04:01
They weren’t complete newbies, or they weren’t on a work release program, or, you know, that there were some folks that had some background in it, and they could hit the ground running, so to speak. And we initially thought that the processors would send their workers to the Maine Meat Cutting School to get up. Well, to date it turns out those folks are so busy, they can’t turn their employees loose to come and take a week-long meat cutting school. And so it was an issue. So we started bringing in outside folks that had no experience whatsoever in the meat cutting world, and they were just coming to learn to become meat cutters. And it quickly devolved into commercial chef-type folks.
Colt Knight: 04:50
Mhmm. They wanted to learn more about the process. A lot of homesteaders, a lot of livestock producers that either wanted to just learn about the process, or they had aspirations of opening up their own meat processing facility. Yep. And then we also get vacationers, folks that just wanna come to Maine and do something unique for three, four, five days.
Colt Knight: 05:19
And so it’s really spread across the whole gamut. Now, that’s not to say that we do not get professional meat processors that come and take our class. We do. Every once in a while, a facility will send us some of their people or some of the smaller mom-and-pop places will bring their family in and take the class together. So we’ve had quite a range of different types of individuals that take this course.
Glenda Pereira: 05:45
But and especially because you cover quite a bit of content. I know in the past, like, you’ve even added some workshops on composting, sort of like the, you know, what happens when they go to the process facility and then even how to cook some of it. So you’ve, you know, that class isn’t only meat cutting, but
Colt Knight: 06:16
There’s quite a bit involved. We would do a disservice to our students if it was just they came in and cut up an animal. We really have to talk a lot about food safety, sanitation, HACCP planning, and some of the laws and legalities that revolve around the whole meat processing industry. So it’s kind of a combination of classroom learning and hands-on meat processing, plus going to a licensed facility and doing tours. When we initially started this project, our goal was to take a small group of students, maybe 15 people, to a meat processing plant here in Maine and have the school at the processing plant, because they have the facilities, they have all the equipment, and whatnot. But turns out they’re not designed for teaching.
Glenda Pereira: 07:19
Right, you’d have to have a whole dedicated educational space.
Colt Knight: 07:22
So, you know, an average meat cutting floor is big enough for two tables and maybe three cutters. There’s not room in there for an instructor to do a demonstration and have 15 or 20 people watch. And so we struggled. We struggled pretty hard with that because, you know, the first three or four people in the group could see what was going on; everybody in the back, they couldn’t see. Plus meat processing plants are really noisy.
Colt Knight: 07:47
And so the people in the back couldn’t hear what you were saying, either. And so we struggled with that for a couple years, actually, trying to figure out how to make this work. The other thing that we struggled with was just finding animals. Yeah, people would promise you animals. Then when the day came, they may or may not deliver.
Colt Knight: 08:08
Or they may or may not bring a satisfactory animal for the process. Yeah. We had an issue one year where we had 19-pound lamb carcasses. And that’s too small to even cut up. Right?
Colt Knight: 08:22
I mean, the lamb chops were the size of your little finger. We couldn’t even cut them up into individual chops. We just had to do, like, a big roast out of it. Yeah.
Colt Knight: 08:35
And so we’ve struggled with that too. Another thing that we struggle with is beef. Because a beef is a large critter. Right. And we do not have facilities to handle a half of a beef
Glenda Pereira: 08:48
Yep. Or a
Colt Knight: 08:48
whole beef. Yep. And so we’ve struggled with that a little bit. And so
Glenda Pereira: 08:54
But with your feedback and what you learned, you’ve kind of now fine tuned.
Colt Knight: 08:59
We started
Glenda Pereira: 09:00
and fine tuned it too.
Colt Knight: 09:00
Every year, I think we make this better and better. And so the first big thing that we did to make an improvement is we left the meat processing facilities. We found a place here on campus that we modified where we could, where we had some freezer and cooler space, and we could do the meat cutting here on campus. And of course, campus is full of lots of educational classroom-type places. So the space was no longer an issue, right?
Colt Knight: 09:27
Now, we don’t have all the equipment that the big processors have. We have bare-minimum equipment. We cut everything up with a hand saw and a knife. There’s no big band saws. We’ve got small grinders.
Colt Knight: 09:40
That’s another bottleneck. You know, if we cut up six pigs, it takes a day just to grind that all up into sausage, which is boring. Yep. You watch somebody grind sausage for five minutes, you’re like, I got the hang of this. I don’t need to do this for four hours.
Colt Knight: 09:55
That’s…
Glenda Pereira: 09:55
But I think it’s feasible because if we think about your clients, you said they’re so diverse, whoever attends the Maine Meat Cutting School, but something that we have to remind ourselves is that it’s likely the people that are attending that are wanting to start phasing into their own processing, they’re not gonna
Colt Knight: 10:15
Our equipment is well suited for those folks.
Glenda Pereira: 10:17
Yeah. Truly, the equipment, right? They’re gonna be hand-sawing maybe for the first or second year, or whatever. And as they build up their processing facility, they’ll get that more, like, and as they grow in demand, obviously. Right?
Glenda Pereira: 10:33
Yeah. That’s a big piece of it. If you don’t have animals, if you don’t have a market, you really can’t invest into your infrastructure. So I think it’s really practical for the people who are attending. They find out how to use the tools and build on the skill set with the tools that they have, because that’s what they’re gonna be doing themselves.
Colt Knight: 10:50
Yeah. And, you know, the other big issue was where do we source the animals? Right? And I kinda had to quit relying on folks that promised me animals. And I started using my own pigs that I raise on my personal farm because I knew they would be consistent.
Colt Knight: 11:08
Right.
Glenda Pereira: 11:08
You know, be the right size.
Colt Knight: 11:10
Could deliver them personally to the processing plant to get them killed and ready to ship here to the campus. That helped a lot. But there’s some issues with that too, because I don’t want to waste my pigs that I grew. So we had to get our facility licensed as a meat processing facility, not just an educational facility. And so the state would allow us to distribute that meat to folks.
Colt Knight: 11:37
And so in the past, we’ve done it a couple ways. We’ve sold them custom exempt to faculty and friends. We have donated it to food. We’ve donated a lot of meat to food banks. Yep.
Colt Knight: 11:49
A lot of meat to food banks. So that’s been beneficial. Yeah. The problem if you do it custom exempt like that is you are selling a product to an individual that students are cutting up for the first time. Yeah.
Colt Knight: 12:05
So they make mistakes.
Glenda Pereira: 12:06
Yeah.
Colt Knight: 12:07
And, you know, it might not turn out perfect. Yeah. And so you feel bad delivering that to folks and
Glenda Pereira: 12:14
But it makes some really good pulled pork.
Colt Knight: 12:16
Absolutely.
Glenda Pereira: 12:19
We’ve been lucky to actually have some of this product. And, you know, sometimes when we have events, like, we’ll just throw all of those cuts that aren’t perfect, like you mentioned, and we’ll make some really good pulled pork sandwiches with it, which I so, so you just kind of have to adapt. Right? And I think that’s a part of this process is that people are learning. And so you have that that comes with it.
Glenda Pereira: 12:46
It’s not gonna be perfect. But the meat quality has always been great, in my opinion.
Colt Knight: 12:52
So yeah. And what I do now, and that was also a cost-saving measure to save on tuition fees for the students, now I just buy pigs, commercial pigs from a large-scale meat processor. They deliver them to a local meat processor here, and then they just give them to me as halves.
Glenda Pereira: 13:13
Yeah.
Colt Knight: 13:14
And legally, we can’t sell that.
Glenda Pereira: 13:18
Right.
Colt Knight: 13:18
I can donate it and I can give it away and stuff. So we still feed people with it. We don’t throw it away. But since I purchased that, and we’ve been lucky to get some grants and some donations, I can keep the tuition low for the students. And then plus they can just do whatever they want to that meat.
Colt Knight: 13:37
So if they screw it up, it’s no big deal. Yeah. And then whatever’s good, we’ll donate it. And then whatever’s less, we just grind it up in sausage. Yep.
Colt Knight: 13:45
You know, so that’s helped a lot. It’s taken the pressure off us. It’s taken the pressure off me because now I don’t have to time my farm schedule around it and everything. And it works out really, really well doing it that way. Plus, you know, food banks get a lot of extra food. Destitute students here, we give them to our broke grad students and stuff will get some, and so that’s been helpful.
Colt Knight: 14:11
The other thing that we’ve done to really streamline our process, everyone always wanted more and more hands-on cutting experience. And we’ve got about four good cutting tables. And so we could only ever do four halves at one time. And, you know, if you got eight people cutting up one pig half, that’s not a lot of cutting experience. And so what we do now is we have the instructor demonstrate how to cut up the entire pig.
Colt Knight: 14:42
So he’ll take an entire pig, he will cut it up. We’ll write it, we’ll kinda write the steps down on a big whiteboard so folks have, like, a road map of what, and then we’ll split those students up into two groups. Group A will be broken up into four different groups. So there’ll be about two or three people, and they get to cut up a whole pig. While Group B assists them.
Colt Knight: 15:10
They don’t do the cutting, but they’ll do the packaging, the grinding, you know, moving trim here and there, clean up and whatnot. They get done with that, then we flip them. Yeah. So now Group B gets to do the cutting and Group A gets to do the assisting. And so they basically get three times the experience in the same amount of time.
Glenda Pereira: 15:30
Right.
Colt Knight: 15:31
Whereas before we tried, like, you know, Group A would go on the cutting room floor, and I would take Group B to the processing plant for a tour. And then maybe there’d be another instructor doing classroom instruction, and it was like flipping people around. Well, that’s really tough on the instructors because then we have to do everything three times.
Glenda Pereira: 15:49
Yeah. Yep.
Colt Knight: 15:50
And there’s a lot of standing around because either the tour would go long or short, and they would just stand around and watch, and folks didn’t like that. But when we keep them all together as a group, there’s no standing around. Yeah. And that’s probably been our biggest success story of the whole thing, is to get rid of the standing around time and to give everybody good access to cutting and where they can hear everything. Yep.
Colt Knight: 16:14
Which is a huge struggle that we’ve had in the past. Something that, because we’ve gotten so many homesteaders, backyard producers, and folks wanting to start their own small-scale facility, something that we added to the course was the composting that you spoke about. Yeah. It’s because what do you do with all the waste from the process? You know, and historically, what you would do is you would call a rendering service.
Colt Knight: 16:42
And the rendering service would take the bones and the guts and whatnot, and they basically just boil it down into grease. And then that grease could be sold for use for whatever purposes. There’s not a lot of that in New England. And to be honest with you, a lot of the rendering services are like mafia controlled. I’ve got a funny story about this.
Glenda Pereira: 17:06
Was gonna say, how did you learn about this?
Colt Knight: 17:08
Because my buddy, Dr. Rentfrow in Kentucky, when he first got hired in Kentucky, there were some folks that had some issues with their rendering service. And so they went to the university and said, hey, we’re having issues with this rendering company. We’d like an alternative. Can you do some research on some alternatives?
Colt Knight: 17:28
And he’s like, yeah. Yeah. Perfect use of my time. Well, he got a couple anonymous phone calls with a New York accent. Would call him, be like, you know, a new professor like yourself that doesn’t have tenure, it doesn’t seem like it’d be very good to be going against the rendering. And, you know, he’d get those anonymous semi-threatening phone calls about it. He was
Glenda Pereira: 17:57
like, oh. Interesting.
Colt Knight: 17:58
And so that’s how we kinda learned about the
Glenda Pereira: 18:01
Interesting. And we’ll leave it at that.
Colt Knight: 18:04
Leave it at that. And so what’s the alternative to that? The other thing, the hides, the leather hides, we used to salt those and we could sell them for 30 or 40 bucks. Yep. There’s no hide industry left in the
Colt Knight: 18:20
No one is buying those hides.
Glenda Pereira: 18:24
Right.
Colt Knight: 18:24
The salt costs more than what a leather tanner is willing to pay.
Glenda Pereira: 18:37
Right.
Colt Knight: 18:38
And so now we’ve added cost to the, because they used to be able to recoup 30 or 40 dollars in the processing. Now they have to tack that on to the front end. Plus, what do you do with it all?
Glenda Pereira: 18:37
Yep. You know?
Colt Knight: 18:38
And even if you do live in an area that has a renderer, not all renderers will take hides because it doesn’t fit with their equipment. And so folks are turning to compost because we can compost hides, we can compost the guts, we can compost the bones and things, and we can create a sellable product, you know, good-quality compost. I think the local fella up here, he’s selling it for 75 dollars a yard. Yeah. You know?
Colt Knight: 19:04
So good investment there. But composting is a complete art and science of its
Colt Knight: 19:10
own,
Glenda Pereira: 19:10
really cool.
Colt Knight: 19:11
Yeah. And we happen to have, like, the premier composting team in, like, the entire world here at the University of Maine. So we have now since invited them, and they get an entire day. Yeah. So they will do classroom instruction on composting.
Colt Knight: 19:26
And they get, it’s three guys that do it. It used to be
Glenda Pereira: 19:30
Mark, Mark, and Nick. Yeah.
Colt Knight: 19:32
Used to be Mark, Mark, and Mark. So we always just called them the Marks.
Glenda Pereira: 19:35
And two Marks have H for their last name. And I was like, how did you guys differentiate? It’s Mark K, Mark H, and Mark H. Yeah. And something that, so these folks obviously own, a lot of the folks that you have in your class also own livestock.
Glenda Pereira: 19:49
Yes. And so sometimes, they can use, so I think this day classroom is really beneficial for two reasons. One, they can compost
Colt Knight: 19:58
the
Glenda Pereira: 19:58
waste, the waste. But two, they’re learning about a process where they could potentially compost animals as well.
Colt Knight: 20:04
Yeah, this dead
Glenda Pereira: 20:05
stock is really beneficial here in the state of Maine because we don’t have a rendering facility. We don’t have an incinerator. So I’ve learned they can
Colt Knight: 20:15
On my personal farm. Yeah. I’ve learned how to compost. Yeah. From them teaching it in my class.
Colt Knight: 20:21
And so now I’m able to, whenever I get dead pigs or chicken waste from processed chickens, I can now compost at my home. And it’s been nice, especially in the wintertime, because you can’t dig a hole in Maine in the wintertime to bury livestock. So I’ve learned quite a bit. Overwhelmingly, the feedback from our students, they love the compost part. Yeah.
Colt Knight: 20:47
Because it’s not just classroom oriented. The Marks and Nick, we will actually go to a meat processing plant, and then I can give them a tour of a working facility so they can see the process in a real commercial facility. But they also have a composting site there as well. And so the Marks will get out, and Nick will get out buckets of, they’ve got like 20 buckets of different composting material. Yeah, it’s
Glenda Pereira: 21:12
pretty fun
Colt Knight: 21:13
to do that activity. They quiz everybody. It’s like, well, what’s this? What’s its compost value? We go out to the real meat composting piles there, which is cool, because they’ve got everything from where they’re just taking the loader and dumping the raw waste on one pile.
Colt Knight: 21:30
Yep. And you can walk down the rows of piles to get to the finished compost. So you can see it in every stage. They can take thermometers and they can measure the temperature in every one of those.
Glenda Pereira: 21:41
They do a mini compost school.
Colt Knight: 21:44
And they can go kick over stuff and look underneath. They can put their hands on it. They can smell it. They can see it. And, you know, I think what amazes most people is we’re dealing with dead animal guts, carcasses, meat, manure, right?
Colt Knight: 22:00
To make compost piles. There’s no smell.
Glenda Pereira: 22:02
Yeah. If you do it
Colt Knight: 22:03
right, there’s no smell.
Glenda Pereira: 22:06
There’s no fly activity because that’s another issue we face, is that flies love waste. Yep. And so if you get it right, there is no smell, which is really beneficial; you’re not attracting predators, raccoons, all those fun trash panda things. And then you also don’t create more issues with, like, the flies, for example.
Colt Knight: 22:32
Yeah. And, you know, when you do it correctly, the birds aren’t carrying off pieces of dead animals, spreading disease from one place to the next. So there’s a lot of science going on there. It’s like the science of composting, the science of not spreading disease, the science of getting rid of your waste, economics of turning a useless product that we used to pay to get rid of, and are now making a profit for the facility. So I think that’s been probably the nicest thing that we’ve done here recently, is to incorporate that into the whole process.
Colt Knight: 23:06
We’ve got over 100 people on the waiting list for the meat cutting school every
Glenda Pereira: 23:10
was gonna say, so when is the meat cutting school and how do people sign up for it?
Colt Knight: 23:17
That’s a good question. It varies year to year depending on availability of all the instructors. Yep. So I have got to wrangle our meat cutter from Kentucky, myself, the composting team, and a food safety instructor. So we’ve gotta get all those folks together at one time.
Colt Knight: 23:39
Ideally, we wanna do it during an academic break here on campus. So either during spring break or after graduation week, because then parking isn’t an issue here on campus for those folks.
Glenda Pereira: 23:53
Because it’s usually been in May.
Colt Knight: 23:55
Historically, it was the week after graduation. I say that we’ve done that for the last four or five years. Before that, it was kinda all over the map. Yeah. Anywhere from February through May.
Colt Knight: 24:07
And I don’t know when the best time of year is because it’s always full. It doesn’t seem to matter to participants what time of year it is. When you got over 100 people that, you know, some people can’t come because of work or other commitments. So everyone always says it’s never ideal. Yeah, we never have any trouble filling the class.
Glenda Pereira: 24:26
So usually in May and then
Colt Knight: 24:27
it’s
Glenda Pereira: 24:28
a
Colt Knight: 24:28
week
Colt Knight: 24:31
It’s three days now.
Glenda Pereira: 24:31
Okay.
Colt Knight: 24:31
We’ve streamlined the process. We’ve cut out a lot of that standing around. And so now it’s just three days, which is also helpful because, you know, tuition for this is expensive. It’s 5 or 600 dollars. Right.
Colt Knight: 24:43
Gonna be less cost. If you’ve gotta buy a week worth of motel rooms on top of that, it gets really expensive. The last two years, we were fortunate enough to find full scholarships for everyone. I can’t promise that this year because a lot of the federal grants have dried up for that. But if we can make it three days, then they only have to buy two or three hotel rooms instead of six or seven. That’s been really helpful because over half the class is gonna be far enough away.
Colt Knight: 25:13
They can’t just drive. Yeah. Drive here. I would say the majority come from Maine, but 30% are from outside of Maine. And not just Connecticut or New Hampshire. I mean, we’ve had folks from Michigan, California, and Florida
Glenda Pereira: 25:30
Yeah.
Colt Knight: 25:31
Come in. Yep. That I know of. So really popular. You asked, how do you sign up? It’s such a tooth-and-nail clawing to get to the
Glenda Pereira: 25:44
Email Colt and email Melissa.
Colt Knight: 25:46
Don’t email me. Email Melissa, because I’ll just forward you straight to her. She keeps a list of folks interested in the meat cutting school. And every year, when we finally have the dates ready, Melissa will send an email to everyone notifying them when the registration page will open. And so the folks that are on the list, we give you a day’s notice; you get the notice before we send it out to the general public.
Colt Knight: 26:17
And so if you’re on the list, you’ve got a much better chance of getting into the school. The school has literally filled up within five minutes in the past. Yep. Usually, it’s about a half a day, maybe a day to fill up. So when we send you that notification, you got to be on top of it.
Colt Knight: 26:33
Yep. We’ve talked about doing lotteries and, man, it’s just such a, just that nothing that we can do will make everyone happy.
Glenda Pereira: 26:43
Right.
Colt Knight: 26:44
And it’s just like I said, some people have been on that list for eight or nine years at this point. Yeah. And it’s really difficult. Friend of mine and colleague down at North Carolina State that runs the meats program at NC State, Dr. Dana Hansen, he does a barbecue camp.
Colt Knight: 27:03
And his waitlist is 400-something people. And he’s been doing it for like twelve or thirteen years. And, like, people literally call with bribes trying to get in on his lottery. I mean, it’s so popular. And I was like, I understand, maybe not at your scale.
Colt Knight: 27:19
But I understand what that’s like. I hate it every single year. That’s the one thing, the one day I don’t look forward to, is because we’re going to open the class 7 AM, say on Monday or Saturday or whatever. And it’s gonna fill up quickly. And then for the next week, week and a half, irate people are gonna be calling me and demanding that I let them into the school, or telling me how unfair it was because they had to work that day or
Glenda Pereira: 27:50
Yeah. You can’t make everybody happy. You’re not pizza. You’re not fries. You’re not a multitude of things.
Colt Knight: 27:58
Yeah. So that’s one thing. And I love doing the course. It is a lot of work because I basically do everything behind the scenes and teach
Glenda Pereira: 28:09
Yeah.
Colt Knight: 28:10
at the class. And so I rely heavily on Dr. Rentfrow to teach the meat cutting part while I’m doing everything in the background and everything. I’m exhausted by the end of that week.
Glenda Pereira: 28:23
And cool fact about Dr. Rentfrow, he was a graduate advisor for my meat cutting professor, which I’m not an, I’m not a meat cutter. I’m not a meats anything, meat scientist. But I got to cut up pigs during the pandemic. And it was with Dr. Ryan Cox, who’s at the University of Minnesota, who’s a trainee from Dr. Rentfrow. And one of my really good friends who’s now the meat scientist at South Dakota State University, Chris. She was also a trainee of Dr. Ryan Cox. And it’s just, it’s so cool to kind of, like, look at the pedigree of folks. And I’ve learned a ton from Ryan Cox.
Glenda Pereira: 29:07
I’ve learned a ton from Chris. I haven’t taken the meat cutting school, but the little bits that I’ve got to spend with you and Greg, I’ve learned a ton from. So it’s just a full circle, you know, it was a full circle moment for me when I learned about that because Ryan Cox is a fantastic instructor and he’s the meat scientist at the University of Minnesota, and they have their own plant there and everything like that. But anyways, it’s just such a small world when you think about it.
Colt Knight: 29:37
Yeah. It’s like, you know, and because of this meat cutting school that we started here in Maine, I’ve now made friends with
Colt Knight: 29:59
folks in Kentucky, North Carolina, you know, all over the country. And it’s expanded my horizons because I was a nutrition graduate student. I was not a meat science student.
Colt Knight: 29:59
I’ve kind of become the de facto meat science person in Maine because of this school. And whenever I get questions that go over my head, I can pick up the phone, or I can call folks like Dr. Rentfrow or other meat scientists now where I didn’t have that before. It’s been extremely helpful. They have invited me down to help them with their meat cutting schools in Kentucky.
Colt Knight: 30:21
That’s a lot of fun. It’s amazing because it runs so much different than how we do ours. You know, they go in there and they basically do, like, a brief two-hour classroom thing the evening before. And then after that, they just walk through their full meats lab. And they just go through the process.
Colt Knight: 30:43
And just kind of learn as they go kind of deal. And I can say they’ve got nicer equipment than us. They get to go from live animal to packaged animal where we can’t do that here. But, you know, I think our teaching setup is actually nicer here. You can hear better because it’s not the basement of a nine-story building.
Glenda Pereira: 31:05
Right. Right.
Colt Knight: 31:06
A million things going on in there.
Glenda Pereira: 31:08
Right. Those meat plants at most land-grant universities, some of them aren’t state of the art. No. So the acoustics and, really, like you’re saying, you know, a lot of that stuff was in person, not meant for, like, recording.
Colt Knight: 31:22
You know, it was designed for college students to go in there and work one on one, you know, to learn how to do that stuff.
Glenda Pereira: 31:30
But as we’ve adapted and now everything, you know, people always request things to be on video and recorded somewhere because if they miss something, they don’t have time.
Colt Knight: 31:40
Yeah, Dr. Rentfrow and I have got a series of meat cutting videos.
Glenda Pereira: 31:47
Sweet.
Colt Knight: 31:48
They are filmed with two camera angles in 4K. Yeah. One looking above the carcass and one looking straight on. We’ve got a full carcass breakdown and retail cuts of pork, lamb, and beef. Mhmm.
Colt Knight: 32:04
I have edited all those videos together, and we are about to release those on YouTube free for the public. I’m just waiting for my intro and outro pieces to be approved. Yeah. So that we can publish them. Yeah.
Colt Knight: 32:17
But we’re really looking forward to see the view counts and stuff on that and see how far we can reach with those. I’m also kind of worried that it’s gonna, like, quadruple the demand for my meat cut.
Glenda Pereira: 32:31
But that’s a good thing to have. I mean, you’ll work around those logistics. And hopefully, by the time this is released, this episode’s released, potentially, you’ll have that set up so you can put the link in the show notes, so folks can look forward to that. And if not, be sure to subscribe to our livestock newsletter and follow us on Facebook because you’ll be sharing the link to those videos there in those two sources.
Colt Knight: 32:56
Absolutely.
Glenda Pereira: 32:57
Yeah. So that’s where folks can find out more. And as well, for the Maine Meat Cutting School folks can find information, Facebook, our Livestock and Forage newsletter. That’s a couple of the ways to keep updated.
Colt Knight: 33:09
Mhmm.
Glenda Pereira: 33:09
Yeah. So with that, I think we’ve kicked the pig and we’ve discussed everything from the snout to the tail. So this was an awesome episode and I hope folks look up the Maine Meat Cutting School. And if you’ve been on the waitlist, I hope it’s your turn. Next year you get picked and you get to do the Maine Meat Cutting School.
Colt Knight: 33:33
It is a ton of fun.
Glenda Pereira: 33:34
Yeah. We
Colt Knight: 33:35
have so much fun in that meat cutting school.
Glenda Pereira: 33:37
I just get to benefit from it, to eat the pig on the other end. So I like it as well. But for folks who have questions, suggestions for future episodes, comments about this episode, be sure to email us at extension.farmcast@maine.edu. Snout you later.
Colt Knight: 34:01
I want to know if you thought about that tagline for a while or if that just came on the fly.
Glenda Pereira: 34:08
It just came on the fly when I said about kick this pig and then I said from snout to tail. Yeah. Snout you later. That’s funny.
Colt Knight: 34:17
I like it.