How To Buy Meat Directly From Farmers and Ranchers
You don't want to eat bugs, do you?
Enough folks are asking me how to buy meat directly from the producers that it’s worth putting together a post about it.
Please start buying as much meat as possible from local providers. When there are shortages, producers will usually give priority to existing customers. In case you haven’t noticed, there are shortages. And massive supply chain disruptions are going to continue to make things worse.
If you don’t want to eat bugs, start building the local relationships.
The Commercial Meat Pipeline
First, a little background about the commercial meat pipeline that gets product from the producer to your freezer via supermarkets.
I’ve posted before about some of the players in the meat processing industry. Read that if you haven’t yet.
The big processing plants will convert a carcass to primal cuts. Primal cuts are big ‘sections’ of a carcass that a cutter will then turn into retail cuts. Here’s a couple diagrams for Beef and Hogs to give you an idea of what a primal is:
What happens with primals depends on the retail outlet. Some supermarkets still have in-store butchers who will take primals and produce retail cuts (think Ribeye Steak from the Rib primal) but most major supermarkets have central facilities to cut meat for retail nowadays, then they ship the retail cuts to local stores.
Most butcher shops are buying boxed primals and produce various cuts from them. The benefit here is that you can usually order specialized cuts in advance. A smart butcher will cut a primal for maximum retail value, which often means they don’t yield some specialized cuts. Everything is a tradeoff. The classic example of this is that ribeye steaks from from the standing rib roast, so you end up with a tradeoff there. (It’s a tish more complicated than that, but you get the point)
Rancher’s Tip: Many butcher shops will advertise local healthy meats, but they will sell box meat (primals they bought and cut themselves) and even worse, ground beef out of tubes, etc. Be sure that you know that local meat REALLY is local when you’re buying it from a butcher shop.
Buying Meat Farm-Direct
There’s two ways to buy meat directly from a producer. The easiest and most straight forward way is to buy by the cut. The second option, superior in my mind, is buy a whole or fractional animal from the producer and have it cut to order.
Buying By The Cut
If you just want 50 lbs of ground beef, or maybe some excellent ribeyes for a special occasion, going by the cut might be the best bet. This is far more expensive for a variety of reasons, all of them having to do with government regulation.
In the infinite wisdom only granted to the United States Government, they have decreed that you are not allowed to buy meat by the cut unless they have inspected the animal and facilities. And of course they have strict guidelines for facilities, like the inspector needs to have his own bathroom. All in the interests of public health, of course. All of that comes with extra cost and expense.
Then there’s usually State level regulations and inspections that come into play, though many of those end up waived when the facility is part of the USDA inspection game.
Now any USDA facility will tell you that the inspectors barely pay attention, are overworked, and don’t really add much to the process that periodic State inspections couldn’t fix. But that’s neither here nor there.
Any animal that is processed with USDA must be delivered live to the facility, and every step of the way must be fully compliant with a myriad of regulations. This entire process doesn’t do much for the animals, so you end up with highly stressed animals which makes for a sub par product.
Rancher’s Tip: You can find USDA facilities that do care a bit more about animal stress, and have designed their pen and chute systems to minimize stress from handling. If you’re interested in a deep dive on this, take a look at Temple Grandin’s work on it. A literal autist, she is THE expert when it comes to proper animal handling. She’s got books and facility designs for small scale producers all the way up to major processors.
Any producer who wants to sell by the cut, whether direct, at a farmers market, or on Craigslist/Facebook, MUST go through all the hoops here to do so legally. This adds overhead on both the time and money front.
Bottom line, all of this regulatory overhead increases price per pound, both directly and through increased expense from the producer. But if you don’t eat a ton of meat, or want a super specialty cut, maybe this is a good way to go.
Rancher’s Tip: When I write this (November 2021) we are hearing about impending supply chain problems triggered by USDA inspectors, already short staffed, refusing to comply with certain medical mandates and are going to be shit-canned. Regardless of what you think about said mandates, when a big chunk of the inspectors get pulled off duty due to non compliance, what do you think that does to supply?
The supply chain disruptions from this will impact both the commercial retail pipeline as well as any local producers who depend on USDA processing. This is important, people, and can majorly disrupt your life. Unless you like eating the bugs.
Buying By The Animal
This is by far the best way to go from a quality, price, and flexibility perspective. This method takes advantage of what is generally called the “Custom Cutting” rule.
What this generally means (and exact specifics depend on your State) is that you can do on-farm slaughter and cut the carcass at a butcher shop as long as the person who gets the meat owns the animal prior to slaughter.
The first benefit is obvious. On-farm slaughter is dramatically less stress to the animal. Usually it has no idea what’s going on at all, going about its regular day until one brief moment, as opposed to being confined in a pen, loaded into a stock trailer, and transported to a noisy place it’s never been, sitting there for hours until it gets pushed through a set of chutes to the slaughter room.
Rancher’s Tip: Stressed animals don’t taste good, and they don’t cut well either. Reducing animal stress is a huge component to producing good meat. Find producers that care about low-stress handling AND slaughter.
I suspect you can tell what my preference is. I don’t want my animals to have that kind of stress, so I don’t process USDA, ever.
The second benefit is that you have pretty good control over what cuts you get back, down to whatever seasoning you want for sausage or what products you want cured vs fresh.
The butcher that is cutting up the carcass will have a “cut sheet” that goes primal by primal and lets you specify exactly what cuts you want, how big they are, and how they are packaged.
For example, if you buy a hog, you might say you want half the pork chops to be cut 1.25” thick and packaged two chops per package, and the other half cut 0.5” thick and packaged six to a package. And please package the sausage in 3# packages. Ultimate flexibility.
Over the years as our kids have grown and left, we’ve been able to change portion sizes along the way as the sheer amount of food we cook for a meal changes. This is a great benefit.
Usually you’ll get the cut sheet ahead of time, and then the butcher will contact you and take the order over the phone. I wish more butchers would get out of the stone ages and take orders online, but for whatever reason they don’t.
Since you are buying by the animal now, you are out of the “per pound” game and every single animal is different. There are rules of thumb that I’ll go over in a bit so you understand how to figure out how much meat you’re likely to get, but your best bet will always be to ask the producer. For example, my hogs yield far better than most others in the area, so one of my whole hogs is more meat in your freezer than someone else’s animal.
Every producer and butcher will be happy to handle whole animals. When you want less than a whole you have to make sure the producer and ESPECIALLY the butcher are willing to do that fraction.
Beef is usually available as a whole, a side (half of a beef), or a quarter. Lower than that is rare, and usually means you split it afterwards with someone else.
Rancher’s Tip: When you order a quarter beef, the butcher doesn’t give you the front or back half of your side, they will give you roughly half of every primal that comes from that side. That makes it fair for both buyers of the quarters that came out of that side of beef.
Hogs are generally only done as a whole or half. They aren’t big enough for the most part to warrant quarters. Again, if you only want a quarter you want to split a half with someone else afterwards.
Smaller animals like goats, lamb, and the like tend to be done as a whole, and are usually done flat rate as opposed to by the pound.
How You Pay For Custom Processed Meat
Custom meat is billed by the producer by hanging weight. You will also pay the butcher a per-pound cut and wrap fee, and usually the producer will pass on the slaughter fee to you as well. If you want any secondary processing to the meat (sausage, curing, smoking, bacon-izing, etc) then there will be additional per-pound fees from the butcher for that.
Hanging weight is simply how much the carcass weighs after the slaughter process is done, so it only includes edible meat, fat, and bones. Viscera and organs are always removed, the head and hide are removed (skin for hogs may or may not be, clarify what you want with the producer)
Rancher’s Tip: If you want organs, let the producer know. Lots of organs are good for dog food even if you don’t eat them yourself. Also, there’s good cuts of meat in the head, but if you don’t specify that you want it, you might not get it. So be sure to talk about that with your producer.
Overall, the process goes like this:
You buy an animal (or part of one) from the producer ahead of time. Usually you’ll put down a deposit to hold the animal and lock in your hanging weight price.
When the slaughter day comes, an on-farm slaughter guy shows up at the producers place, kills the animal, and does initial breakdown to sides/halves.
The slaughter guy or butcher will send the producer the hanging weight for everything that was slaughtered that visit.
The producer will reach out to you with a bill (and they usually add in the pro-rated kill fee that the slaughter guy charged them)
The butcher will get your cutting instructions and get all of your meat cut and wrapped (after aging, if appropriate) and into the blast freezer.
The butcher will generally not release the meat to you until the producer lets them know you’ve paid for it.
You pay the butcher his fees, and take home the goodies, praying you have enough freezer space for all this meat.
Just How Much Meat Can I Get Per Animal?
First a few definitions:
Live weight is how much an animal weighs walking around, alive. Hence the name.
Hanging Weight is how much the carcass weighs after the slaughter guy dresses out the carcass. Your bill to both the producer and the butcher will be based on this number.
Packaged (or Trimmed) Weight is how much meat you get cut and wrapped and in the freezer.
There’s some basic rules of thumb you can use for conversions, but you really want to ask your producer for specifics on his animals. Every breed will be different, and different finishing methods can alter the percentages.
For beef, if you take a 1,200 pound beef steer, it will hang out at around 730 pounds or so, and once trimmed it will be about 500 pounds of meat.
You’ll rarely know what the live weight of the animal was, but if you figure that for beef you should on average get about 65-70% of the hanging weight back in packaged weight, so if you get dramatically less than that, you should ask questions. Packaged weight will be higher if you have a lot of bone-in cuts.
Rancher’s Tip: Bones that were removed from the cuts are not included in the packaged weight. So if you get soup bones, etc back, don’t include those when you do the math. And you most definitely should get bones back, makes some wicked bone broth. And don’t get me started on roasted beef marrow.
Taking a 360 pound live weight hog, it will hang out at about 270 pounds, yielding about 200 pounds of packaged meat. Same as with beef, you won’t know the live weight, but the packaged weight should be roughly 65-75% of the hanging weight. Hog yield varies a lot more than beef depending on how much fat the animal had, and how closely you have the cuts trimmed.
How Much Space Does an Animal Take Up?
You can usually fit about 40 pounds of cut meat into a cubic foot in the freezer. That number varies based on the cut types, shapes, and so on. But it’s a reasonable rule of thumb.
Doing that math, you’ll need about 13 cubic feet of freezer space for a whole beef, and about 5 cubic feet for a whole hog.
How To Find Producers
This is the easy part. Look on Craigslist (Look in the Farm and Garden section) or Facebook Marketplace. Ask at your local butcher shops.
If you’re searching Craigslist or Facebook I find that searching for “grass fed” or “hanging weight” usually pops up listings.
Any Questions?
Ask away, here or on Twitter. Enjoy the Good Eats, folks.