There are two ways to purchase meat directly from a farmer. You can order individual cuts of meat, just like you would purchase them from a butcher or a supermarket. If you want to order some ribeye steaks or a porterhouse, you know how to do that. The alternative is to purchase the meat as a share of the animal. Typically, you will be buying a cow share or a hog share, representing a portion of the animal or the animal.
How Does a Cow Share Work?
Cow shares are typically sold as a quarter of a cow, a half of a cow, or a whole cow. A few farmers will sell an eighth of a cow, but that is typically a bit harder to find. When you purchase a cow share, you will typically be quoted the cost of a deposit on the website. What is advertised on the website is typically the cost of reserving your animal. Most websites indicate how much you will pay when you pick up the meat or when it ships. The final cost will depend on the size of the cow and how much meat you will be getting.
Once you put in your order, you will not have your order shipped the next day. If that is what you are expecting, you need to change that expectation. Once the full animal is sold, for example, if you purchased a quarter of a cow, the other three quarters might not be sold yet, so the full animal must be accounted for. Once the full animal is purchased, the animal will be slated to be butchered. This process can take between 1 week and three weeks, depending on the butcher’s preparations.
Once the cow is dead, the cow must be bled out in order to ensure the best quality meat and to abide by food safety regulations. A combination of things typically happens after the cow has been drained of blood. First, the meat is butchered, and next, the beef is dry-aged. Some butchers age the meat in larger cuts, some age it in smaller cuts, this will depend on the butcher. The beef is aged between 7 and 120 days; the norm that I’ve found is 2-3 weeks. This aging takes place in a refrigerator between 34 and 37 degrees F.
The customer typically completes a cut sheet before the meat is butchered for delivery or pickup. This sheet provides instructions to the butcher for what pieces of meat you want and what thickness you want your pieces made into. Once the meat is cut to your specifications, the beef will be frozen for delivery or pickup.
Depending on who you ask and how things are explained, it should be expected that a pasture-fed direct-to-consumer with no hormones, antibiotics, and fattening before butchering will weigh less than you would get from what some people call a beef factory. The size of cows has increased by about 18% over the last 20 years due to how beef is prepared for market and is now about 1400 pounds. This 1400-pound cow has a hang weight of roughly 60% of this, which is about 840 pounds. In many farms that I have looked at, a full cow share yields around 600-620 pounds (some will be more, some will be less). The reason for this is that the direct-to-consumer cattle is now fattened up before being slaughtered; they just live a life of grazing, which creates much better meat (in my opinion).
The quarter-cow that I purchased recently yielded me about 125-130 pounds of meat.
Considering the entire process above, it will take much longer than if you purchased different cuts, like four porterhouse steaks from the farmer. The big difference is that you can get everything that the cow has to offer, ranging from T-bone or porterhouse steaks to filets to stew beef to tri-tips and briskets, to name a few. From start to finish, my quarter cow process took seven weeks to complete, but I could not be happier with the quality of the beef I received. I paid $1274 when I picked up the beef after a $100 deposit for $1,374, an average of $10.99 per pound. Keep in mind that this is the average cost per pound of meat.
How Does a Hog Share Work?
The process farmers follow for hog shares is essentially the same for hogs. The typical purchase size of a hog (or a pig, if you will) is either a whole hog, a half hog, or a quarter hog. Since the hanging weight of a pig is 175-225 pounds for a 250-325 pig, an eighth of a pig is small enough that you should likely purchase what you want.
As with a cow share, there’s a variety of cuts available with a pig share, including; butt roasts, shoulder roasts, pork chops and loin, ham roasts and steaks, pork belly, ground pork, as well as some finished products like sausage, bacon or smoked hocks.
With both hog and cow shares, all individual cuts will be packaged in cryovac and likely frozen (unless you’ve made some other arrangement).