Cole Ward: Basics of Butchering & Opportunities for Farmers

Join this lifelong butcher, teacher, author as he introduces the basic principles and tools needed for effective homestead butchering and an introduction to premium cuts of meet, current market demands, and profit opportunities for farmers supplying these high-quality gourmet niches. Cole Ward is the author of the book The Gourmet Butcher's Guide to Meat and once worked for a number of years as “butcher to the stars” in Los Angeles. He lives and cuts meat in his native state of Vermont.

Cole Ward grew up in the tiny Vermont town of Sheldon Springs. At the age of 14 he began working part-time for a local butcher, washing meat trays and stuffing sausages for 20 cents an hour. At 15, he became an apprentice meat cutter at the local IGA, and in very few years was a master butcher specializing in whole-animal culinary butchery. In his early 20s, wanderlust took him out West to a job at LaFrieda Prime Meats at Los Angeles’ celebrated farmers’ market. The famous butcher shop was next to CBS studios, and Ward’s celebrity clients soon included Billy Crystal, Bernadette Peters, Perry Como, Edith Head, and Raymond Burr. He also did meat props and special set-ups for television sitcoms like Three’s Company. In 1982, Cole returned to Vermont, where most of his large family lives. He worked in markets and supermarkets around the state, managed meat departments, and eventually began giving workshops and doing on-farm cutting. Now Cole mixes hands-on butchering with teaching; his encyclopedic knowledge of the meat sector makes him a sought-after lecturer and seminar leader at culinary academies, colleges and agricultural and sustainable-living conferences.

(1 hour, 3 minutes, 42 seconds) Recorded at the 2014 Acres U.S.A. Conference, Columbus, Ohio, Friday, December 5, 2014.