Frugal Hunting

About a month ago I went deer hunting for the first time. One of the primary reasons I decided to try hunting was to see if I could procure food for my family in a manner that was more in line with the way I want to live my life, which I think was successful. My freezer is now filled with about 25 pounds of meat from the deer I shot. 

There’s a lot we could discuss about this whole experience, and hunting in general. I think the ethical portion could take up multiple posts, and I haven’t decided if I want to even touch that. For me, it basically boils down to trying to do the right thing with the information I have, and I think I’ve done that. I’m sure many would disagree, and maybe they’re right. I truly don’t know. If you’ve found your way to a post titled such as this one, I imagine you’ve already decided to at least explore the path I’m going down. We’ll leave philosophy out of this one. The purpose of this post is not to go down that rabbit hole, or wax poetic about being in touch with nature and the circle of life. No, we’re going to hit this subject from my favorite angle. Math and fucking numbers! 

As someone who is exploring the FIRE space, you’ve probably already learned about the big three expenses; housing, transportation, and food. Making progress on the FIRE journey often involves trying to reduce those three as much as possible, and I see the food one discussed a whole bunch in all of the popular forums and social media outlets. More than once I’ve seen a thread where someone will ask if hunting is a good way to reduce food expenses. Usually the inquirer, who has never hunted, will say that from an outside perspective it looks to be a cheap way to get meat. After all, bullets go for a buck or two, and each one could yield you 20-40 pounds of meat. The post usually gets two types of responses: 

1. No, hunting is absolutely not a frugal way to get food. It is time intensive, and requires a fair amount of expensive equipment, weapons, and many associated costs. This answer comes from people who have hunted, but usually came to the lifestyle later in life and don’t live on land they can hunt. People like me.
2. Yes, hunting is totally a frugal option. This seems to come from people who were brought up hunting, and all the costs associated with the pursuit are merely a background part of their way of life. Whatever they do need was either passed down or bought long ago.

So which is it? Well duh, it’s both. The more I learned about hunting, the more I realized I would have to spend money just to get the possibility of maybe harvesting an animal I could feed to my family. From a FIRE math standpoint, hunting did seem to have the possibility of eventually becoming a frugal option after I made the initial expensive purchases, if I made these purchases with a lens toward picking the frugal option, and realized that the payback period on investment would likely be years.  Luckily for me, I looked at lowering food expenses as a distant and not guaranteed effect of hunting, and decided to at least try it out for reasons unrelated to frugality. Despite this, my spreadsheet addicted brain can’t do anything without running numbers and making projections, so follow along as I chronicle the experience from such a perspective.

Getting into hunting.

There’s some things that are absolutely required to hunt, and lucky for me I was able to get many of them for free. I should mention this post will deal with the hunting of deer. There’s a much wider variety of animals you can hunt and eat, but deer is the most popular game to pursue in my region. With all that said, let’s get into what you need to hunt, and how much it would cost. 

1. Place to hunt: At a most basic level, you need to go to the place frequented by the animals you would like to eat. Wide range of options here. If you live on or own acreage where your prey is plenty, lucky you. If not, you can do one of three things: 
   1. Public land. Usually free to go hunt, but many people will try to hunt this area, so it may be more difficult. May have to pay a fee to access this land, but it’s normally much less than the next option.
   2. Land lease. Pay somebody with land for the permission to hunt there. I’ve got a few friends that do this, and they say it’s much easier to find game with this option as there’s less competition. They pay about $200 a year; prices widely vary and this may be the low end.
   3. Hunt a friend’s land. This is what I did. All the benefits of the land lease without the cost. However, this would be harder to find, and requires some social capital and emotional intelligence. This may be easier than you think though. As I decided to try my hand at hunting, and discussed it with friends and coworkers, this inevitably led to them referring me to mutual friends that are into hunting. Many of these invited me to hunt with them without me even asking; from my experience all the hunters I’ve met are really nice and excited to help anyone that would like to get into such a way of life. In various ways they’ve all expressed how hunting has added value to their life, and want to pass it on as a way to counter the misconceptions that abound about it.

*If you don’t live where you’re going to hunt, remember to include the transportation cost. For me in my sweet used prius, it cost me about $25 for the round trip. 

2. Something to kill the animal with: Either a bow or a firearm, but if you’re just getting started it’s probably going to be a firearm. This will be at least hundreds of dollars, and could be over a thousand. You also need to know how to use such implements, and if you don’t currently possess the knowledge you can easily spend the same amount of money for quality training. Your locale may require various permits to obtain such weapons as well. For me it was a double edged sword. Through work I’ve gotten plenty of training on a variety of weapons, and am comfortable with all of the firearms typically used for deer hunting. While I own a few firearms, none of them would be legal for deer hunting where I live. Regulations vary state by state, and I just happened to be out of luck in that arena. Win for me though; the guy who’s land I hunted has a few extra rifles of legal deer hunting caliber, and I was able to borrow one. Again, you may be thinking this is rare and I just got lucky. Somewhat, yes. But I would guess that 7 out of 10 hunters who have offered to take me with them have also mentioned they have an older spare firearm I could borrow. Like other things in the consumer world, many hunters upgrade weapons and gear every few years, and keep extra on hand for friends or family.
3. Gear: Can really go off the deep end here. Much of this depends on the topography of the land you intend to hunt, but at the very least you’ll need some clothes that will keep you warm and dry. I’ve got a friend who is an extremely skilled hunter, and just wears what most people would take backpacking or hiking. Research suggests that the vision of deer is much more advanced than ours, so wearing camouflage probably doesn’t help much. More of a style thing. On top of clothes, some tools like rangefinders, spotting scopes, and tree stands may be necessary depending on the type and location of the hunt. Lucky again for me, I have a plethora of warm clothes from work and outdoor hobbies. Upon the recommendation of my friend, I bought a small folding camp stool for $15 at walmart. Definitely made sitting in the cold, wet woods a tad more comfortable. I also bought some cheap coolers to transport whatever meat I was able to procure immediately after field dressing. $12 allowed me to keep the heart cool on the trip home and fry it up for my family the night after. I also spent $5 on a blaze orange stocking hat as required by my state to reduce the incidence of other hunters accidentally shooting me.
4. Tags: Cost and amount of this vary by state. I paid $52 total for a buck tag and an antlerless deer(young buck without antlers or a doe) tag. This way I could harvest whichever deer I saw first.
5. Knowledge: You could get all of the above, and just wander around aimlessly or sit in the woods for days and never even see deer. If you do see deer, where do you shoot it, and then what do you do with it? You can spend months going down a youtube, blog, and book rabbit hole, from which you’ll glean some decent information on answers to such questions. I did a fair amount of this, but was really thankful to have a friend next to me during the entire process, pointing out over a dozen small nuances that I was screwing up and helping me to correct them immediately. I think this was crucial in helping me to harvest a doe the first day I’ve ever been deer hunting(no doubt luck was involved too). Though I’m a fan of researching the crap out of stuff, I think having someone showing you what to do in person can save plenty of time instead of learning it the hard way. You can pay for this type of education through hiring a guide, but this can get pricey. Thousands of dollars range.
6. Processing:  After you shoot the deer, you need to field dress it. This keeps the meat from spoiling, and also makes the deer marginally easier to handle. My friend walked me through this, and at minimum you’ll need a good knife. $20 would be on the very low end, and can go up from there. After field dressing, which is removing all of the organs, the deer needs to be processed. This means skinning, then butchering; ending with all of those neat little slabs of meat you see in the grocery store. You can do this yourself, and again youtube may come to the rescue. Various tools can make this easier, and if it’s not refrigerator temperature outside, you’ll need a way to keep the carcass cool for this process. Turns out there’s a reason there’s a name for this profession; that’s because this is quite involved, requires skill, and economies of scale make it more efficient for a small subset of people to be paid to provide such specialized service to others. I have high hopes of learning how to do this in the future, and will try to learn first hand from the growing network of friends I keep meeting in this world. I’m not there yet, and the friend I went hunting with suggested for simplicity sake I pay for the deer to be processed by a professional butcher this first time. Prices range depending on the size of the deer and which butcher you go to. Cost me $80 to process my mid sized doe.
7. Storage: Lucky for me, the freezer portion of my normal sized fridge was half empty, and I was able to fit all of that meat in there with little drama. Had I shot a larger buck, or filled both of my tags, I had arranged to borrow chest freezer space from neighbors down the street. I’m hoping to continue hunting, and eventually source all of my family’s meat supply this way. Hunting is legally constrained to be seasonal, so this means stocking up on a bunch of meat in a short period of time, then living off of it the rest of the year. To do this, I’ll need to buy a chest freezer. I’ll be keeping an eye out for sales and used options, but this will be at least a few hundred dollars. 

I’m sure I’m missing plenty here, as I’m brand new to hunting. But the above covers the basics. With all of that established, lets math some shit up!

What I paid this year:

There are some miscellaneous expenses that aren’t accounted for in the above. I bought my friend dinner the night he helped me harvest my first deer, and got some coffee on the road. I didn’t include this because we’ve gone back and forth on buying each other meals for various other reasons and I think it’s a wash. I also didn’t include depreciation due to wear and tear on my prius, nor did I try to calculate what the dollar equivalent would be of asking my in-laws to come help my wife with the kids while I traipsed around the woods for a weekend. I’m crazy with the spreadsheets but not that crazy.

How’s that stack up to normal meat prices? Thanks to inflation and supply chain issues, it’s actually kinda competitive. My apologies, but while I did weigh the total amount of meat, I didn’t weigh it by cut. I just got so excited to start cooking! I would estimate that we got about 5 pounds of ground venison, and then an even split between steaks and roasts for the rest. In comparison, my local grocery store is currently charging $7.49/lb for lean ground beef, $4.99/lb for roasts(think they’re on sale due to nearing expiration) , and $14.99 for steak. Many would argue that the venison in my freezer is equivalent to grass fed free range premium organic beef, whereas I used prices for normal beef. I did this because that’s what I actually buy on the reg. Maybe that’s one point where I cross from frugal to cheap; while I get the value of the organic option, I just can’t get over the sticker shock. So anywho, that adds up to:

Wow, hunting really is more frugal!

Just kidding. Yes, in the above comparison my price per pound for meat did favor the self sourced method. But like everything else in life, there’s way more nuance and severe binary distinctions are rarely accurate. Annoying, right?

The major issues causing this price comparison to be skewed are twofold.

1. Time: I left Friday night to go to my friend’s place, and didn’t make it back home until Sunday afternoon. Then I had to wait a week for the butcher to get through all of the other deer shot on opening day, and another few weeks for my friend to be in town during which he dropped off the processed meat. We’re talking almost 48 hours of work(ish), then three weeks of waiting, versus the 25 minutes it takes to drive to my grocery store, buy the cuts I want, and then drive home. 
2. Friend with benefits: No, not that kind. I’m talking about my super awesome friend who let me stay with him, hunt his land free of charge, let me borrow his rifle and use his ammo, show me how to hunt, how to field dress, and transport the doe to the butcher and then to my house. My friend was happy to do this because he loves hunting and enjoys introducing other people to the pursuit. He considers himself a sort of hunting mentor, which is actually a common thing in that sphere. He’s invited me to come out again, where he’ll help me get some reps on field dressing and maybe butchering. 

I don’t feel comfortable constantly borrowing my friend’s stuff, and I don’t want to overextend my welcome. While I’ll take him up on his offer, I would also like to eventually try hunting the public land much closer to my house. At a minimum, that means buying my own firearm and possibly bow. I’ll also need to purchase my own knife for dressing, and a tarp for the back of my prius for transporting my prey(sounds like some Dexter type thing). I’m also planning on buying a chest freezer, and switching to a scentless soap. And I’ll probably buy like five or more other things I haven’t even thought of yet. That price per pound is going to shoot way up! 

As I mentioned before, I’m okay with this because this isn’t purely about saving money, and I know it’s going to take years to recoup the cost, if ever. Because I’m me, I will be making all the purchases with a frugal intention; doing plenty of research, buying used or on sale, and balancing durability/reliability with the cost. My hope is to chronicle this as I go, and do a similar report on the price per pound of hunted meat at the end of next year. I think there’s value in this type of analysis, because I would have loved to read something similar before jumping into this world. I’ll try to be better about getting exact weights of cuts as we go on.

Who knows, I may drop some major coin, spend weeks in the woods, and not see a thing! Such is the exciting nature of hunting. Has anyone else out there done similar calculations, or am I the only rookie hunter spreadsheet nerd on the internets?