How to make meat/bone meal?

[MrsSheridan]

Hi everyone! I am attempting to create my own turkey starter mash. The most expensive and biggest hurdle is meat meal. I have an endless supply to beef and pork scraps from my grandpa's butcher shop (licensed and inspected abattoir for those that care). Does anyone know what I have to do to them to make them into bone/meat meal? Should i even use bone, or just the meat? Do i just put it through a dehydrator and then grind it? Thanks in advance!

 

[pdirt]

Drying meat is a tricky thing. I am no expert on it, but I have dried some meat for human consumption, but it has always involved salty marinades (aka jerky), which won't work for poultry because of the high salt content.

You might find it easier to grind the meat and freeze it. You could cook it first before freezing, but I don't know if that would matter much. To feed, you would want to measure an amount of thawed ground meat (for protein and fat) to an appropriate measured amount of grains, vitamins and minerals. It would be a meal type of feeding program, not something you could mix up and store in an container in your garage, of course.

I use a commercial fish meal made by Fertrell. They use a rosemary extract called Naturox to preserve the fish meal. I am not sure if you can buy this retail or what the application entails. Could be something to look into. There are traditional preservatives like sodium nitrate/nitrite, etc, but I don't know much about them or if they are safe for poultry use.

 

[cppeace]

As for basic bone meal you can burn, bake or boil then crush it to blend with feed or use in a garden, As for meat I'd assume you have to cook it, think slice it the over dehydrate so it can be crumbled.

 

[glib]

I think you should just grind it fresh, and freeze it in pre-measured ziploc bags. For bones, rabbit and chicken bones grind with some effort, alternatively you could make bone broth for yourself, and after one day for pork, two days for beef, the bones become somewhat tender. Surely they become tender with less time in a pressure cooker.

In fact, if you have enough skin and cartilage and guts in your scraps, you could just skip the bones and use egg shells for calcium. Skin and cartilage will provide the collagen and the organic micronutrients present in bone.