Mobile butchers fill growing need for local farmers

Scott Dobrzynski is deftly slicing the steaming black and white hide away from a fat steer when he is asked what he likes most about his job.

“The office view,” he says with a smile, glancing at the sprawling, verdant countryside around him. “The beautiful roads. This beautiful area.”

On his side dangle the tools of the trade. A knife sharpener. A meat hook. In front of him, in the back of Outdoor Addiction Wild Game & Meat Processing’s mobile butchering truck, is a fresh carcass that will soon be divided into quarters, then hung, cooled, and aged for two weeks. 

“And seeing a calm animal, and the satisfied customers who got to see their animal taken down humanely,” he adds. 

Mere minutes ago, this steer was ambling serenely across the farmyard it trod throughout its life. It died swiftly, from a 410 slug to the head, at its home in the sprawling countryside near New Glarus. There was no clanking ride in a foreign trailer. No horrors of the stinking, crowded abattoir. No final journey with strange people to a strange place. No bellows of fear ringing in its ears. No final moments of confusion. The last things it saw were the farmers who raised it. The voluminous meat he provides will fill their table, and the tables of friends and family, for many months. 

The animal was alive so recently, on this small farm, which has been in the same family for more than a century, that the muscle fibers on the glistening white and red carcass are still twitching, even as Dobrzynski and fellow butcher Ramon Arriaga finish skinning, cleaning and quartering the carcass on board the mobile butchering truck that Outdoor Addiction brings to local farmers who would be hard pressed to get a slot at most slaughterhouses thanks to a nationwide bottleneck and the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, some farmers were told they would have to wait years to have their animals processed, prompting fear and uncertainty in the already uncertain agrarian profession. 

But now, thanks to Alex Lease and his employees at Outdoor Addiction, area farmers have a simple, viable option when it is time to harvest the meat they have raised. 

Dobrzynski has done this for more than 40 years, learning the trade from his father, and he his father before him. He still remembers being pulled out of school on Tuesdays and Thursdays as a child to help his father butcher cattle. 

Arriaga has been on the job for three weeks now, but the two are already working as a single unit, as he learns from the old master. Arriaga grew up in Mexico, where he once ranched and rode rodeo bulls and bucking broncos, before moving to Wisconsin, where he has lived for the past 21 years. He says the work is easy and gratifying, and he enjoys spending time on farms in the Driftless area. 

Heading it all up is Lease, who owns the business and began running a taxidermy shop in Blue Mounds nine years ago out of his uncle’s game processing plant. In 2019, Lease took over what was then a processing center for deer harvested during Wisconsin’s brief but bountiful annual hunting season. 

In two years overseeing the business, Lease has invested and innovated relentlessly, installing an all new, state-of-the art meat cooler at the 10345 Co Rd ID business, as well as developing a popular line of beef meat sticks. (The secret ingredient is no secret, he says: “It’s good meat.”) He also began offering on-site slaughtering and butchering for local farms who are desperately in need of the service. While Outdoor Addiction currently butchers livestock for farmers who have already sold the meat to customers, they will soon be running a custom-designed, 38-foot gooseneck trailer that will allow them to butcher animals for commercial sales in stores, as well. 

By any metric, Outdoor Addiction is a growing business. The Blue Mounds headquarters handles approximately 1,000 deer annually. When 2020 hit, most people struggled with the obstacles a global pandemic and the ensuing financial mayhem caused, but Lease seized what he saw as an opportunity to surge forward with an expansion plan he was already cultivating. One year later, he has a laundry list of initiatives that he is checking off, and he even has his own calves grazing in a yard nearby. 

“People kept calling and asking if we did beef,” he explains. “We had this building sitting empty most of the year. Now, with COVID, we aren’t going back to the way things were before. People want to know where their meat comes from.” 

“In March and April of 2020, I saw it as my opportunity,” he continues. “This was my chance.” 

In the spring, he landed a unique contract through the Wisconsin Pork Producers Association. Outdoor Addiction would process 30 hogs each week, then deliver the meat to food banks across the state. 

“We were doing work that really feels good,” Lease says. “I got so many letters from people who got this pork and were thankful.”

That is why Lease initially purchased the mobile butchering truck that the business uses today to process livestock; to deliver pork to people who needed it most during a global health crisis. 

Lease met Dobrzynski, a veteran butcher, at a gas station. Dobrzynski was so impressed with Lease’s vision that he decided to join him, becoming Lease’s ace.

“I’ve got a lot of good people around me,” Lease says. “It helps. I always want to hire people smarter than me.” 

The butchering business took off so rapidly, in fact, that Lease sold his booming taxidermy business to his employees, who still run it out of the same space. 

“They’re still there, which is awesome,” he comments. 

“I know I’m in the right lane,” he muses, “because all these doors keep opening for me.”

Lease comes from a farming family just outside Barneveld. He says visiting local farms feels like something of a homecoming. In addition to his day job, he also hosts a podcast about business, and used to host one about hunting. 

When Lease, Dobrzynski and Arriaga arrive at the first farm of the day, the sun is spilling across verdant fields, and the farmer hops out of his front loader to greet them at the end of a steep driveway. He points out the steer that is ready for butchering, in a roomy outdoor pen with heifer. The animal is killed and loaded onto the mobile truck, where it rests on a wheeled set of rails. Dobrzynski and Arriaga expertly slice and pull away the hide, making sure everything falls away without touching the meat, then remove the viscera and divide the carcass into massive quarters, which they hang on hooks that will allow the meat to begin cooling as they drive away. In total, it takes just over an hour. It is enough food to feed a family for a year. 

In the old days, Dobrzynski used to do most of this work on the ground, then heave the meat into the bed of a pickup truck. The current truck is a massive upgrade, but it’s nothing compared to the one Lease and he are custom designing and hope to begin using by the start of 2022. 

Dobrzynski and Arriaga are serene and mostly quiet while they work. From time to time, the former will pause to point out the fascinating inner workings of bovine anatomy. He comments on the functions of various organs, and he illustrates where prize cuts begin and end. He counts off ribs and examines the thick slab of fat that rests atop a massive brisket. He jabs his knife in to show where the ribeye end and the T-bone begins. The hanging weight is about 900 pounds. 

“Don’t let your emotions make your decision for you,” he muses while assessing a piece of equipment that needs to be mended on the fly. “They’ll be wrong.”

At the end of the day, the quarters will be delivered back to Outdoor Addiction’s headquarters in Blue Mounds, where they will hang and age for 14 days before being divided into the final cuts. 

Driving away from the farm, Lease explains that the venison processing business he took over laid the foundation for all that came after, and all that is to come if Outdoor Addiction continues growing. As his truck rolls down the road away from the farm, a wild doe, sleek and red in her summer coat, makes her way across a field of young corn. He slows down and admires her, then hits the gas again, back to work as the head of a rapidly growing business.