Students learn meat cutting in school

School buses drop off students on a rainy morning in Mantachie, Mississippi. The district of 1,000 students in the northeast corner of the state has the usual classroom offerings for students, but excels in agricultural trades instruction.

Fourteen students in the Meats 2 class are working on breaking down deer carcasses that area hunters have delivered for processing. As some work on whole carcasses, separating the large cuts, others do trim work, or grind the venison through a grinder. 

Matt Spradling, Mantachie Instructor: “Students that is working together right now. Those students have three or four deer out at one time. And but that being said, you have to have communication to keep all of that straight so that whatever deer came out of the cooler stays with that same person's name as it goes through to be processed and finished that way.”

Whether a student is doing the knife work or holding the carcass for others, they are applying what they have learned in the classroom to the cutting table. 

Matt Spradling, Mantachie Instructor: “I guess the easiest thing to pick up is just making sure that everything is clean. And part of that is because we do go over that so much. I guess that would be the easiest. The hardest thing that I would say for them to pick up is our students sits on our break down table whenever that carcass comes out there is four different muscles within a hind quarter of that animal.  A lot of the times it takes several days for students to understand how to actually cut those out without cutting part of another piece off with one. You know, they might cut out one and a half pieces and only half of the other.”

Students in the Meats class find the nuance of separating the different cuts challenging, but rewarding.

Wesley Umfress  “Really getting down the cuts. Really cutting, right. And really, because you got to separate the muscles and the meat. So really just doing that and making sure you get everything right and get everything clean and just cutting.”

Conversations about school with students from other districts illuminate how unusual the meat program is at Mantachie.

Wesley Umfress. Mantachie student:  “. The conversation with them is a lot of "That's crazy. All we do is sit in a classroom", It's definitely something different that nobody else really gets to experience. So I enjoy it very well.”

The agricultural curriculum at Mantachie also includes courses on forestry and general agriculture. In an average year, 80 percent of Mantachie 8th graders take an agriculture class as an elective. 

The agriculture program at Mantachie has a long legacy in the community. Many of the students in this class have parents who took the class themselves. Instructor Matt Spradling grew up in Mantachie and took the classes he now teaches.

Matt Spradling, Mantachie Instructor: “Uh, my family's been in Mantachie for several generations. Mantachie is home to me. Oh, always has been and will be. And it's nice getting to come home to your school that you put something into as a student, and now then getting to keep putting into it as a teacher.”

The strength of the agricultural instruction carries over to the success of the FFA program. Mantachie FFA often competes in regional and national meat competitions. As the only meats lab in Mississippi public schools, it joins the few dozen meats programs that are part of the national FFA. 

Both the startup costs of building a certified meat processing room and the scarcity of meat cutting instructors keeps limits the number of meat programs across the country. 

Matt Spradling, Mantachie Instructor: “Hopefully, you know, some of these students will go into the career of a butcher or something one day. I even have a couple of students right now that is helping out at a local, you know, meat shop in town and even get some that them as well as some of their family have their own deer processing facility at their house that they're using what they're learning here to go and make money somewhere else.”

Students rotate positions from day to day, but each has the part of the butchering process they prefer.

Keileigh Spencer, Mantachie student: “The table I'm on right now, which is like the grinding table, the pre grinding table, which is where we take what's came from the break down table. So most times it can be like the front shoulders, the ribs and all that. And we cut it all off, take off the all the meat. And just that's going to sound really disgusting. So you cut off all the blood clots and all that and cut it off the bone and get ready to go into the grinder. So that's probably my favorite part.”

Students in this class will process up to 500 deer between November and March, along with some beef and pork carcasses. Once trained, one student is able to break down one deer carcass each hour. Tracking each cut through the process is paramount.

Matt Spradling, Mantachie Instructor: “If I bring in a deer, I get my exact deer back kind of deal. And that teaches communication, teamwork, work ethic and these students, the more they do it, the better they get at it. And, you know, sometimes when something happens, you know, they make something wrong off of one deer because they didn't read a tag correctly. Some students don't like cutting. They got a role. They can work on the grinder, they can do the tenderize or vacuum sealer write on the bag to let people know what cut they're getting in that bag. So there's a job for everybody. Even though you're not physically cutting the meat, there's still a job for you somewhere in that meat facility.”  

Even though the number of those who pursue meat sciences as a career is small, Spradling agrees learning a hands-on skill can leave students with the courage to try new things, and enter the job market with the confidence to learn new skills.

Matt Spradling, Mantachie Instructor: “So people just ask pretty much about what we do and then they're pretty amazed at how much stuff that we have that a lot of places don't.”

For Market to Market, I’m Peter Tubbs