New Rocori Class Is A Cut Above

COLD SPRING (WJON News) -- Rocori High School will be offering a new unique class this spring. The school's FFA program received an almost 40,000 grant from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA) to renovate a classroom and buy equipment to start a meat-cutting course.

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The MDA is providing the grants in an effort to boost interest in meat cutting as a career. Agricultural Instructor Tamara Berger says the class will be pretty basic at first:

"It's very basic you know, how to use a knife properly, and safely, maybe getting into some grinding of some cuts of meat just to kind of see that this is how you could do your own ground beef if you wanted to, and then possibly just understanding the anatomy of an animal and where, why certain meats are tender or why certain meats are tough and getting them just exposed to the industry itself."

Berger says she likes to teach subjects from beginning to end:

"As a butcher or as someone that would be working at a facility they should know a little bit of you cook it dry or you cook it wet or you cook it slow or you cook it fast and that is how they would enjoy the product. You want them to come back to you and you don't it to think that it's the way you harvested it or the way that the animal was raised, it can go all the way down to how you cook it and so we wanna quality product all the way to the end."

Berger says the class will be 6 weeks long at first but could expand to 12 weeks down the road. Renovation on the classroom will start this Saturday and should be done by the time winter break ends on January 3rd. If everything goes well the class will start in March.

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