4 ms·

How much is the full cow? Does the rancher vacuum seal the individual pieces for you, or do you pick up 600lbs of meat and have a meat packing party? Any othe

• SECProto 7y ago
  I've been involved in this from a relative and gotten it wrapped in butcher paper (waxed one side). It works pretty well at keeping the moisture sealed (avoiding freezer burn), but you could do vacuum sealing (or maybe even just ziplock bagging) for some improvement.
• JohnFen 7y ago
  Because I'm concerned with the end price including butchering, my memory of the cost breakdown details is not ironclad. Take these numbers with a grain of salt. The price varies from year to year, but we tend pay in the neighborhood of $3-$4/lb live weight. An adult live cow tends to weigh around 1,500 lbs, iirc. All in, including butchering, there isn't a lot of saving here -- per pound of finished meat, we end up paying on the low end of supermarket prices. However, and I can't emphasize this enough, the quality exceeds that of much more expensive meat. I never understood what vegetarians were talking about when they mentioned the "smell of death" on meat until the first time I bought it like this. The meat I buy doesn't have that smell, and once I encountered the difference, I absolutely understood what the vegetarians were saying. The rancher doesn't butcher or package the meat. The rancher will deliver the cow to a local outfit that does that (and freezes the finished meat). We select what cuts we are most interested in, what cuts we want ground, and so forth. Then when it's done, we just show up with a truck to pick up the packages. They're packaged just like you get from most other butchers, wrapped in plastic with an outer wrapper of waxed butcher paper. The only "party" aspect to it is that none of us has enough freezer space to hold an entire cow, so we have to coordinate so that we can divvy up the packages and take them to each of our homes immediately. I should mention the other nice thing about doing it this way -- we (or one of us, really) actually go to the ranch to make arrangements and select the animal. That means that we can see with our own eyes that the animals were treated well, are in good health, and so forth. Doing this has made visible an awful lot of what used to be invisible and mysterious. In terms of feeling good about the process and intellectual curiosity, this is invaluable.
  • theNJR 7y ago
    You really got me interested in this! Thank you for all the details.
• Pfhreak 7y ago
  We paid ~$6.50/lb for our animal, which was a grass fed, organically raised animal. That's obviously high for ground beef, and obviously low for filet mignon. About 40% of what you take home is ground beef by weight (the way we had our animal broken down.) The butcher broke it down into packages, each package double wrapped in plastic and paper and deep frozen. I have to go pick up 600lbs of meat, then parcel it out and deliver it to my friends (or have them come pick it up.)
  • dbancajas 7y ago
    Can't you just have the butcher already divide them by X ? (X=# of friends)