How Much Meat Do You Get From a Deer?

Every fall somebody at deer camp swears a 150 lb buck should fill the freezer with 100 lb of meat. It won't. About half of a field-dressed deer is hide, head, bone and the stuff you trim away. Knowing the real number ahead of time tells you how much pork to buy, how many casings you need, and whether your processor shorted you (almost always, they didn't).

How much meat do you get from a deer?

The best hard number comes from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. In the 2017 gun season, Ohio wildlife officers weighed 115 field-dressed whitetails, butchered every one, and weighed the venison that came off. The average deer weighed 107.6 lb field dressed and gave 52.2 lb of venison, a 48.5% yield. Bucks came in at 48.2% and does and button bucks at 48.8%, so size and sex barely moved the percentage.

The National Deer Association uses the same rule of thumb, about 48% of field-dressed weight. Here is what that looks like by deer size:

Field-dressed weight	Typical boneless meat (about 48%)	Rough range
100 lb	48 lb	40 to 52 lb
125 lb	60 lb	50 to 65 lb
150 lb	72 lb	60 to 78 lb
175 lb	84 lb	70 to 91 lb
200 lb	96 lb	80 to 104 lb

The low end of the range is a deer shot through the shoulder, a lot of bloodshot meat, or a quick, rough boning job. The high end is a clean double-lung shot and somebody patient with a knife. Wyoming Game and Fish gives a mule deer example in the same ballpark: a forkhorn or doe usually yields no more than about 50 lb of boned meat.

What percent of a field-dressed deer is meat?

About 48 to 50 percent. Field dressed means the guts are out but the hide, head, legs and bones are still on. All of that comes off before anything goes in the freezer. Two things move your number the most:

• Shot placement. Ohio's own write-up says a shot behind the shoulder gives more meat, and a shot through the shoulder blade badly cuts the yield from the front quarters. Bloodshot meat has to be trimmed away.
• How hard you work the bones. Neck, shanks and the meat between the ribs add up. Skip them and you can lose several pounds of good sausage trim.

How much of a deer ends up as grind or sausage trim?

That depends on what you keep whole. The backstraps and tenderloins are a small share of the deer. Everything else is your call: the hind quarters can be steaks and roasts, or they can go in the grinder.

As a rough rule of thumb, if you keep the backstraps, tenderloins and a few hind roasts whole, somewhere around half to two-thirds of your boneless meat is trim for the grinder. If you only keep the backstraps and tenderloins, it's most of the deer. On a 150 lb field-dressed deer with about 72 lb of meat, that's somewhere around 40 to 55 lb of trim.

Trim it well. Deer fat tastes waxy and gamey, so cut off the fat, silver skin and bloodshot meat before it goes in the sausage. You'll replace that fat with pork. See how to trim venison for sausage.

How much sausage can you make from one deer?

Take your trim and double it. Venison is very lean, so on its own it makes dry, crumbly sausage. The standard blend is 50/50 venison to pork butt. Pork butt is about 30% fat (a cut is not fat), so a 50/50 blend with lean venison lands around 17% fat, which is where sausage stays juicy. The venison fat calculator works out other blends.

Worked example, a 150 lb field-dressed buck:

1. About 72 lb of boneless meat comes off the deer.
2. Keep the backstraps, tenderloins and a few roasts whole, about 22 lb. That leaves about 50 lb of trim.
3. Add 50 lb of pork butt for a 50/50 blend. That's 100 lb of raw sausage meat.
4. Cure #1 for 100 lb at the standard 0.25% of meat weight (156 ppm nitrite) is 0.25 lb, or 4 oz. The app works this out for you.

Most people split that 100 lb into a few products: some summer sausage, some snack sticks, some fresh brats. You don't have to make it all at once. Vacuum-sealed trim freezes well and you can make sausage in batches through the winter.

How many pounds of summer sausage or snack sticks from one deer?

If all 50 lb of trim from that example went into summer sausage at 50/50, you'd stuff about 100 lb, and after the smoker you'd have somewhere around 85 to 90 lb of finished summer sausage. That's a lot of summer sausage. Most hunters make one or two 10 to 25 lb batches.

For snack sticks, figure by the batch. A 10 lb batch fills about 53 feet of 19 mm collagen snack stick casing, which cuts into roughly 80 sticks at 8 inches long or about 105 at 6 inches. A 25 lb batch is about 200 eight-inch sticks. The casing calculator gives you the feet for any batch and diameter.

How much weight does sausage lose in the smoker?

Smoked sausage loses water as it cooks, and some fat if things go wrong. As a ballpark, plan on summer sausage coming out roughly 10 to 15 percent lighter than it went in when it's smoked on a step-up schedule and pulled at 155°F internal. Thin snack sticks dry out faster and commonly lose more, often 15 to 25 percent.

Every smoker and casing is different, so the honest answer is to weigh your batch going in and coming out once. After that you'll know your own number. If you're losing a lot more than this, your smoker is probably running too hot and rendering fat out. See why sausage fats out.

Why did my processor give back fewer pounds than I expected?

In almost every case, nobody kept your meat. The math just doesn't work the way it feels like it should:

• Half the deer was never meat. Hide, head, legs and bone are roughly half of field-dressed weight.
• Bloodshot meat gets trimmed. A shoulder hit or a quartering shot can cost you several pounds or more.
• Dirt, hair and dried crust come off. A deer dragged a long way, or hung a long time skinned, loses more to trimming.
• Fat and silver skin get cut away. That's the right call for flavor, and it costs weight.
• Hanging weight is not meat weight. If the price was quoted per pound of hanging weight, you paid by a number that was never going to come back as meat.

A 140 lb field-dressed deer coming back as 65 to 70 lb of meat is normal. If you're thinking about making your own sausage instead, see deer processing cost vs making it yourself.

Scale the recipe to the meat you ended up with

You never end up with a round number. You end up with 13.6 lb of trim and a pork butt that weighs whatever it weighs. Recipes written for 5 lb or 25 lb leave you doing math at the kitchen counter, and the cure is the one number you can't afford to get wrong.

The free DeepWoodz Sausage Recipes app scales every recipe to the exact weight of meat you have, with the Cure #1 amount locked to the safe rate. Weigh your trim, type it in, and every ingredient adjusts.

Common questions