Make it to the All Blacks and a player's base salary could be $500,000. Highlanders can pull in $100,000 annually. Join the Strath Taieri senior team and there won't be any salary, but newcomers will be well fed.
Struggling for numbers this year, the club is trying to lure Dunedin tertiary students to Middlemarch with a promise of dressed meat for the freezer - mutton, lamb, beef or even a cut of wild pork.
Two players from the town now living in Dunedin were returning for Thursday night practices and turning up for Saturday games in Middlemarch or Dunedin, club sub-captain Larry Langley said.
Finding another three Dunedin-based players to fill up the car would be "ideal", he said.
The club had advertised through Student Job Search but had had no takers yet.
Langley said he had seen a leg of lamb on sale in the supermarket for $26 a kilo.
"If we could get three guys from the same flat and keep them in meat they would be happy and we would be happy."
Amateur rugby clubs in Otago signed a charter in the 1990s agreeing not to pay players but Langley said the Strath Taieri deal was an incentive rather than payment.
"Incentives happen everywhere. All the clubs do it ... This is the leanest year we have had for players and if we don't do something we're history.
"It would be a tragedy if the team folded. If you lose your rugby club you're not really a town any more, are you? You're a village or a hamlet."
