I will agree the weight seems low, but not out of the realm of possibility.

20 lbs seems low

With bucksticks and summer sausage pork is typically added, not fat. By pork I mean either pork trimmings or boston butts.

One thing to remember is that when drying either sausage or buck sticks you are going to lose about 30%-40% of the 'fresh' weight.

Most processors I know when making buck sticks typically mix deer meat with the pork meat 50/50 and make the batches 15 pounds each.

20 pounds seems very low to me if this was an average sized S Tx doe and the shoulders were not damaged too badly.

Depends on what kind of shape the quarters where in. If they were left swimming in cooler water, that sounds about right. I always place quarters in heavy trash bags so they don’t come in contact with the ice in the cooler. I shot a mature Coleman county doe and the quarters and one blackstrap were 47 lb. That yield 30 lb of grind to make 60 lb of 50/50 mix.

You should always get the gross weight when you drop your meat off. If you mix 50/50 pork, normally you can gauge the yield off the gross weight. Snack sticks and Dried links drop 40% additional in moisture, so keep that in mind.

I would think that you would get 20lbs with filler added in on just two big S.TX does hind quarters. Sounds like you got short changed!

I've killed 100's of does in South Texas and they are not all as big as some of you think they are. If a place is over populated with deer then the body sizes will be much smaller than you think...even in South Texas. Largest I have killed in South Texas weighed 109 lbs dressed. I have killed them as small as 65 lbs. on that same ranch. On my place here in Goliad County they have ranged from 56 to 94 over the last 8 seasons...the 2 I killed this year weighed 74 and 75 lbs dressed.

Thanks everyone! It is what it is, you live and you learn.

Thought about this one a little. I have cut up "one or two" deer before. In fact and at times, I have cut up "one or two" deer at a time. We have a group that makes sausage together. When Bug Man opens his ice chest, it is a thing of true beauty. You would think it is all cut up back strap, all red and nothing silver, white or anywhere near shiny. No sinew or membrane to be found. I have to be careful because if I bring in something and there is a shine to it, boy do you catch grief. When you cut up your own, you control the lengths you will go to and that determines two things, quality and quantity of the meat. The more you trim, the less you will end up with. The less you go after, the less you have to trim. It's no different with processors, you just give up that choice to them.

I have true friends who process, between them, over 10,000 deer a season. Much more. Dirty deer, ill maintained deer meat being brought in and unbelievable product quantity expectations lead their list of difficulty.

I've been getting about 60 percent of live weight in a carcass, and about 60 percent of that in meat, pretty consistently. That's four quarters, rib cage, and neck, so a 100 pound deer yielding about 36 pounds... minus any damage

You got taken, unless it till had spots

Snack sticks and summer sausage usual add 30% min pork.

So 20lbs total weight means they would have added 6lbs of pork to 14lbs of venison.

A truly mature South Texas doe is going to average 60lbs dressed, yielding approximately 30lbs of meat total.

Take a front shoulder, backstraps, neck, ribs, and tenderloins out of that, and you're down to roughly 15-17lbs of meat left.

Most processors do not spend much time actually "trimming", because it is time consuming and time is money.

They cut out the big chunks and leave a lot attached to the tendons and silver skin.
Tendons and silver skin plug and dull grinder blades, which cost them time, and time is money.


Your situation sounds about right, but.........


20 years ago I took a neck shot 110lb North Texas buck, quartered and rib cage intact to a processor in Conroe.
Two weeks later he handed me a single brown paper grocery bag with exactly 18lbs 4oz of sausage and backstrap steaks in it.

When I stated WTF he became extremely angry and threatened me.

The Game Warden wrote him a total of 33 violations for various things including selling the meat.
The judge fined him over $15,000 and he lost his license to process for 5 years.

It was kind of cool testifying at the trial, and I actually got my 18lbs 4oz of sausage and backstrap steaks back from evidence that they kindly kept frozen for me 4 months later.