Terry Conger and TC Butchering find a harvest home

Photo by Taro Yamasaki

By F. Josephine Arrowood

Sun contributor

Late summer and early autumn in northern Michigan means harvest time, when we focus on our place in the cycle of the natural world, and our relationship with our food sources. In its way, it’s a story about death—that dark place of unknowing; the thing that looms as the end of all. It’s also a story about one man and his family, who work hard, live honorably, and make their livelihood by harvesting, culling, killing, slaughtering, butchering—death by any other name—animals into food for us..

In this largely rural region, numerous youth participate in 4-H clubs, learning how to raise livestock, including pigs, cows, and sheep. Or maybe the local organic farmer invests in a few pigs or goats as part of a Community Supported Agriculture business. Now it’s autumn, and those once cute little animals are fully grown, needing food, water, and daily attention, and taking up quite a bit of space in barn, shed, or field.

“Harvest season” becomes a pleasant, bucolic euphemism for, “We have to deal with all these animals that we raised.” At the end of that growing process looms the question: Now what? Most neo-farmers lack the knowledge, skills, and logistical capacity to kill, cut up, and store even one large animal. This is where Terry Conger of TC Butchering can help.

“I’ve always made a living with a knife,” he says. He has sharpened his skills over a long, self-directed apprenticeship that included prep cooking and managing a well-known Traverse City restaurant; working at area retail groceries; and processing thousands of game and farm animals. He and his wife Janet possess a ferocious work ethic that includes ninety-hour work weeks, boundless energy, smart business instincts, and a sense of humor. They’ve undergone the rigors of licensing and inspections by the USDA and its affiliates. These qualities have enabled them to carve a niche business in a region that needs residents with year-round jobs, who in turn contribute to the economy.

Terry grew up in northern Michigan. After high school in Elk Rapids, he worked for a time in a manufacturing plant in Traverse City, where he met Jan, a Newman from Cedar. They married, had two sons, and bought some rural property north of Lake Ann.

“I always liked to cook, my mom had taught me how to cook a little bit. I quit my job at United Tech one day, and went to Chamberlain’s Family Restaurant. I talked to Charlie Chamberlain; I said, ‘I don’t know that much about cooking, but I’d like to learn.’ We started off prepping, we went to the line, and before we knew it, we were the assistant kitchen manager. Did that for three or four years.” He and Chamberlain’s son Randy—now the chef-owner of the acclaimed Blu restaurant in Glen Arbor—bonded over their mutual love of creative cuisine, and still keep in regular touch.

“Now and then, I’ll hook Randy up when he wants to do something off the wall, or something special. One time he wanted a whole ham leg. You’re not gonna go to Meijer, or order off the truck from Gordon’s or Sysco for that. You gotta find a butcher!”

With his appetite whetted for the culinary business, Terry approached a local butcher shop—Pleva’s in Cedar. “I was always good with food. I thought, ‘What if instead of cooking it, I just cut it up?’ I’ve cut up a lot of deer [from hunting]; I thought I’d give it a shot.

“It happened they were looking for an apprentice, so I kind of fell into it. I wanted to learn the trade, wanted to do it right, learn the art of it. At Pleva’s, we cut up beef, some moose, some other wild game. We processed deer. That’s where you learned your cuts, how to run the saws. After a couple of years, I wanted to learn the speed part, the production part of it, so I went to work for a grocery store, and learned to cut up meat really fast. I still have ten fingers.” He grins as he holds up his hands, displaying his many scars.

“It was all right, showing me how to lay out a retail case and things like that—but it also opened me up to corporate monkeys, middle management. You got your owners coming in, and your store directors. Too many bosses! You’re one person trying to please twenty-seven different people.”

He moved on for a time to other grocery stores, each one adding to his layers of knowledge and providing opportunities to gain experience at his chosen craft. When the USDA changed the rules to ban farm-killed meat processing in a retail establishment, he found himself taking on more side jobs.

“I started doing more of custom cut animals on my own after that. I had a shop [at home], and I’d started picking up different pieces of equipment here and there.

“By this time, the economy started to fail [around 2009]. The wife lost her good job that paid 15 bucks an hour, and I thought, Well, I’ll cut up a few deer, and she’ll get a new job in the spring, no big deal. We made it through the winter; I cut up some deer, everything was good.

“In the spring, she didn’t get a good-quality paying job like she’d had. She got a job that was half of what she was making. I thought, So, I’ll keep working at cutting up a few animals on the side. Did that for a while. Then she got a better job, things started going good, I backed off a little. Then that job moved away, and she went back down to another nine dollar-an-hour job. So I cranked it up a little harder. People would ask me, ‘Can you cut up a pig?’ Yeah. ‘Can you cut up a cow? Can you cut up a bear? Moose?’ Yeah, I can do all that.” Meanwhile, he still had his retail job at the chain grocery store, working six days a week.

“One day, we were sitting around and—I’d always had the dream of having my own business, and I’ve told the wife that for 20 years. But I always said I would wait until my last kid was grown and graduated. A few years ago, my son was coming up to graduation, and I asked for a half day off. I put in my request four months in advance for his graduation party. Schedule comes out, and I didn’t get my half day. I was told I’m too valuable an employee, and they can’t afford for me to take that on a Saturday in August.

“The day came, and I left at lunchtime and went to the graduation party. When I punched in on Monday, they said, ‘You’d better go home and think about whether you want to work here.’ I thought about it for a few seconds. I shook the man’s hand and said, ‘I’ve made up my mind, thank you very much for the opportunity,’ and I walked out.

I came home, it was only eight o’clock, and my wife said, ‘Why are you home?’

‘I don’t know if I just quit or was fired.’

‘Well, what are you gonna do now?’

’I’m gonna start a company called TC Butchering.’ And we kicked that fully in gear about six years ago. Didn’t plan on quittin’ your(sic)job that day—but something snapped, the stars lined up for a split second, they pissed me off at the right moment.” He laughs.

The store had a hard time finding a meat cutter after that. “That’s the whole problem: there’s meat cutters and there’s butchers. A meat cutter can stand there in front of a band saw all day long; you get a box of meat and cut New York strip, strip, strip, T-bone, T-bone, porterhouse, porterhouse. That’s nothing. But go find that porterhouse on that cow out there.” He waits a beat, watching as realization dawns. Nods.

“That’s the difference. Anybody can cut pork steaks off a pork butt from a box, but go find that pork butt on the pig. It is not on the rear of the animal like you’re thinking—it’s the front shoulder. You go up to an average person in a grocery store, even a meat cutter: ‘Where does a tri-tip come from on a beeve?’ And they don’t have a clue where it comes from.”

Terry’s intimate knowledge of where our food comes from seems startling in our day and age. The average American does not know these details, and most of us would rather not know. He sounds sorry for us in our ignorance and disconnection from something that, until recently, was so basic to survival. In 1900, 38 percent of the U.S. population farmed; by 2000, it was about two percent.

He knows how to kill animals. And he does so regularly; it’s a necessary part of the business of food. It’s not just about processing an animal that somebody else, such as a deer hunter, has taken from field or woods. That dairy feeder or steer from the 4H club? Those pigs your local CSA farmer has sold as shares, or the goats your neighbor pastured all summer? They all go somewhere to be butchered and turned into food for the table.

You may think, “How terrible,” or, “How cruel.” You love animals, or you’re a vegetarian, or animal rights activist. And we all need champions to protect and support the beings that cannot speak for or defend themselves, whose lives are at the mercy of humans.

These lofty goals are not all contrary to the work of the butcher. We all die; no one, as a friend of mine liked to say, gets out alive. Would you be content, and perhaps less afraid of death, if you knew that you could live in relative comfort, and that someday, at a date and time unknown to you, your life would end quickly, cleanly—so quickly that you wouldn’t have time for regrets, so cleanly your pain would be minimal? While you live, would you start to think about the measure of your days in terms of quality rather than time logged, or time remaining?

A visit to the animals on Terry’s property shows them resting comfortably in spacious outdoor pens, with shade, bedding, and water. He says, “People are blown away by what I do. They cannot believe how calm and cool and collected my animals are. You’ve seen pictures of the big processing plants: the animals are screaming and going ape. My animals are here, chilling out, relaxing, happy—the way life should be. They don’t know if I’m going out there tonight, or killing them tomorrow; they don’t have a clue, and that’s the way it should be. No stress. They come in on trucks and trailers, they’re stressed. We’re gonna give ‘em a few days just to chill out and relax; I want them to. And it’s better for the meat, too.”

He goes on, “It should be all about the animal. Unfortunately, these processors are not about the animal; it’s about get ‘em in, get ‘em out; it’s about volume and making money. They’re called factories for a reason. I’m not running a multi-million dollar operation. I know how much money it takes to pay my bills—any more than that, we can go out to dinner.”

Building a business from scratch can be difficult. “When you go out and hunt down your paycheck every week, you find out it’s not always a lot of fun. It takes a while to get used to that. You want to go get groceries, but guess what? You didn’t sell anything this week.”

He was lucky enough to get in on the local food, farm-to-table movement, which plays well with his business philosophy. “I’ve always been a big fan of trying to keep it local and support my neighbors. I’m just trying to feed people in northern Michigan here with some good quality food, and show them that it doesn’t have to be as expensive as what it is. You don’t have to send your animal downstate, or pay $250 for a hog to be processed.”

After six years, he’s seen his business grow and take on more regular rhythms. “Mostly we work off my reputation,” he says, “word of mouth. There’s just a few processors left that do what we do, and if you’re good, word’s gonna get around. We do very little advertising; it’s a one-man operation. The wife will come down when I get real busy on the weekends.

“We could make it bigger, but it’s just hard to get people; they’re not gonna work this hard. Winter is our busy season. We’re just getting started. About the first of August we start picking up some animals, just before the fair. Then the fair is really the kickoff; after that, it just gets busier and busier. You’ve got farmers that have a couple of pigs here, couple of beeves there, goats and lambs. Farmers are getting ready to do some crop hunting for deer, wanting to know if we can take them.”

But they need to call before they hunt, because Terry’s availability continually shrinks as autumn progresses. During deer season, they can have as many as 120 deer in two weeks, or three an hour. “It’s all bone out. We’ll cut deer for a day, the second day, we’ll grind and wrap.”

About those work rhythms, he says, “There’s so many things that could go wrong. With butchering in general, you’ve got to know where your next paycheck is coming from: an animal out there alive that I haven’t found yet. There’s the animal I know on paper that I gotta go get next week. The animal alive in this pen I’m going to kill this week. I’ve got to have animals in my walk-in that are dead right now. I’ve got to have them in my walk-in already cut up that I can wrap. Ones in my freezer that are done, but I’m waiting on hams and bacon to catch up. The ones that are done, but I’m waiting for my customer to come pick up. At any time, if anyone drops the ball . . . the game stops. It’s a delicate balance of everything.”

He’s in it for the long haul, he says. “It’s fought me every inch of the way, but everything I’ve done, it’s been worth it.”

What’s the most unusual animal he’s processed? “Monkey,” he says with a straight face. Then he and his wife burst out laughing. “You’re kinda gullible, aren’t you? No, probably the weirdest thing I’ve ever cut up was an emu; we did some of them over at Pleva’s. Yeah, I think it tasted like chicken,” he laughs again.

“Of course, bacon’s still out there. We’re licensed to process your animal; we can smoke your hams and bacon and whatever. We’re also licensed to buy and sell any USDA product; like if I want to buy some pork bellies and smoke them, turn them into bacon, I can turn around, sell them as retail product here, too. I sell bacon out of the garage, brats, snack sticks, all sorts of stuff. I have a catering license, too.”

As the butchering season winds down at the end of winter, Terry puts on his chef’s toque for the summer’s picnics, graduations, and weddings. A recent party featured a hundred pieces of chicken. “I brined it and smoked it in my smoker, fully cooked it, then I brought it up to temperature. They went nuts over it, I think even more than the pork. I get to play; same thing with any of my snack sticks, sausages. I make all my own recipes, any way I want.”

He builds and rents smokers for pig roasts, and provides the instructions, the pig (you tell him how many people you plan to feed and he gets the appropriate sized animal), and even the gallon of barbecue sauce.

He’s got a hog slated for The Homestead where each summer, he says, “there’s a local chef who likes to work with different cuts. I’ll do primal cuts, wrap it, get it over them. If you hear me say I’m going to chop and chunk, I’m gonna go cut something up with my cleaver.”

Good, sharp knives are a staple of the business, of course. “You just can’t have enough. It’s about finding good steel in the knife. What really gets them dull is when you’re boning the animals, cutting through cartilage. What I consider a dull knife, you’re going to think is still an extremely sharp knife. I’ve probably got eight or ten at the sharpener’s now, and twenty more in my shop.” In the slower months, he sharpens his own.

He tries to minimize waste from the animal as well. “You can sell beef or deer hides. We donate some of the deer hides to the Elks Club; they make gloves and moccasins. The femur bones from the beef, we make into dog bones. Sometimes people want the organ meat for their animals with special diets. People use the fat or tallow to render it, make candles or soaps.” He teases Jan about all the soap he receives from his customers, which he gives her as gifts. Then he grows reflective.

“I was never truly happy with any of my other jobs because I never felt they could challenge me to the limit. Having my own business has pushed me. I am more happy now than I’ve been in over twenty-five years. The first couple months—couple of years!—she [Jan] was a little grumpy. But she’s seen what I can do. I will get in over my head, and she will freak, and I will still dig myself out, seven days a week, whatever it takes. She’s seen me work ninety or a hundred days straight with no day off; fourteen, eighteen hours a day, until I was satisfied I could walk away. But we’re into August now, and it’s time to work.”

He pounds his fist on the picnic table. “It’s time to work. I’m ready, I’m rested, I’ve got 30 days of animals on paper—let’s start this.”