As meat prices rise, area residents process own hogs

Many reports in the media warn of a looming meat crisis in the United States. With processing plants all across the country hit hard by the COVID-19 virus - including three major plants in Ford, Finney, and Seward counties in western Kansas - the price of everything from ground beef to pork chops has skyrocketed.
Customers were used to seeing supermarket and grocery store shelves empty of toilet paper and cleaning supplies. Now there is empty space in the meat section.
The problem may get worse before it gets better. Even local processing facilities like Duis Meat are so busy they're not able to take any new reservations until the early part of 2021.
Some enterprising locals are taking matters into their own hands.
The idea came to Amanda Choitz when she saw a posting on Facebook. "With packing plants down, producers have a lot of animals that they need to get rid of," she said. "Prices are up at the stores and down at the producers, so it was kind of a no-brainer."
Choitz started making calls. She found a place in Humphrey, Nebraska, that was letting hogs go for a bargain price. She and her husband, Ethan, took a few orders from other people, and a deal was made.
At 4:30 a.m. on Saturday, May 16, they hitched a livestock trailer to their truck and began the 166-mile drive to Humphrey. 17 hogs were loaded into the trailer. All of them weighed over 300 pounds.
A little before 11 a.m. the Choitzs rolled into the large parking area of Baumann's Repair shop. Friends from Ellsworth were on their way to pick up nine of the hogs. Three other hogs were claimed by Concordia locals. Tyler Lambert and his friends from Clyde arrived early in the afternoon to pick up two more.
"With the prices in the stores," Lambert said, "it's just a lot cheaper to get our meat this way."
The Choitzs, Scott and Denise Baumann, and Galen and Mary LaBarge processed the three remaining hogs that day at the shop.
Processing any animal for meat - whether it's hogs, deer, or pheasants - means the animal is killed and then skinned and gutted. It's kind of a messy business and not for the squeamish, but it is done efficiently in the hands of an expert.
Ethan Choitz was in charge of the processing, and in his hands the knives and saws did their work. One animal at a time, the ribs, tenderloins, and pork cutlets were processed and packed into ice chests. The side cuts and trim were ground into sausage.
The processing work and clean-up finished around 10 p.m. It was a long day for everyone involved, especially the Choitzs, who started with the drive to Humphrey, Nebraska, at 4:30 in the morning. But all their freezers were now full of meat, and when the total cost was amortized out, it was a fraction of what the same product would have cost in a grocery store.