If you’re a meat hunter, as many deer hunters across America are, you’re going to be much more interested in pounds of venison than inches of antler. So it’s natural for new hunters, and even experienced ones, to wonder how many pounds of venison they’ll harvest from any given deer.
While you’ll see a bunch of different figures thrown around there on the web, the National Association just published a great video breaking down the facts. According to the NDA, you should expect to get about 48% of the deer’s field dressed weight in boneless venison. So for easy math, if a doe weighs 100 pounds, you’ll end up with about 48 pounds of boneless meat. This is assuming that the guts have been removed but the hide and head are still on. This is also not including organ meat.
This isn’t just opinion. The NDA cites a study from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources which assessed 115 field-dressed weight white-tailed deer that weighed 12,370 total pounds before processing. According to the study, “After processing, the 115 white-tailed deer yielded a total of 6,001.8 pounds of venison. The average deer weighed 107.56 pounds field dressed and yielded 52.19 pounds of venison, or a 48.52% meat yield. Below are the average yields for one deer according to Antlered (bucks), Antlerless (does and button bucks), and Combined (bucks, does, and button bucks).”
This, of course, is assuming you do a good job of butchering your deer, which means slicing off all the available neck and scrap meat.
There are two other key factors in how much meat you harvest from a deer: shot placement and field dressing care. If you have meat damage from a bullet that blasted through the shoulder, you should expect the percentage of harvested meat to go down significantly. Also if you bring in a carcass that has not been cared for properly (it’s dirty or hasn’t been cooled well) you’ll likely lose even more meat.
But even if your deer was perfectly shot and properly tended to in the field, there’s a chance you might not be getting as much meat back from the processor as you expected. Part of this is because most hunters are not great at estimating the weight of a field dressed deer. But it’s also because busy processors in the heart of deer season sometimes prioritize speed and efficiency over maximum venison yield. That’s kinda part of the deal. But if you want to know how good of a job your butcher is doing, you could simply weigh your deer before dropping it off with them.
If you’re truly concerned about harvesting all of the possible venison from a deer, it’s best to just do the butchering yourself. Take your time, save all the scrap meat that you can, and weigh your results to see how you did.
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