You do need to feed them rabbit food, which can be purchased cheaply from feed stores, and hay. The rabbit pellets make excellent fertilizer, the dirty hay makes good ground mulch for the garden to keep weeds down.

I made a 4×8 foot raised bed, used two rabbits leavings and leafs which I composted on the bed over winter. Spring and summer I grew half tomatoes, halve basil. I had enough fresh basil for three years, plus I gave away a lot, plus enough dried basil for three years. And I use a LOT of basil.

I fill a large commercial food processor with basil and chop it fine, adding either butter or olive oil. Then I pack it into muffin tins and freeze it. I had about thirty pounds of basil total. I feed the stems to the rabbits.
I usually get about six crops, cutting the top half of the plant off. Half way through the season I add more rabbit manure and a small mount of composted soil.

The tomatoes did well too, they grew so well that I had to seriously thin them out to prevent mold.

One of the biggest reasons to buy it, is you might be able to check out the place where it’s cut up and ensure that you get all the meat from the same cow.

These days many grocery stores get ground beef already ground from major suppliers. The suppliers may grind up meat from a dozen, two dozen, three dozen, maybe even hundreds of cows. Did they do a good job of cleaning the equipment? It doesn’t matter if they are putting that many cows through. Your almost bound to get fecal matter in it. Especially if it’s from a major supplier. Their grinders are the size of a small car. The collection container is the size of a pickup truck.

If all your worried about is cost, then, yes, buy from the grocery store, cook that hamburger really, really well. And don’t eat rare or medium rare hamburgers.

The beef is entirely grass fed and free range 365 days a year.

Because the beef comes from our own farms, we are able to show transparency throughout the process, I am even able to supply a photograph of the cow before slaughter should you want.

If anyone would like to discuss the purchase of whole carcasses, quarters or even half sides, please feel free to contact me: Paulccm86@gmail.com

I am also able to supply Halal Certified beef as the abattoir used has the facilities in which to do so.

Please let me know if you are interested.

Paul Martin

Thanks!
Pete

So about frozen and fresh…to be honest your not gonna notice if you go to a restaurant and your steak or burger was frozen as long as it isn’t old or freezer burnt what’s the issue, if it was my shop i would Vac seal, but my boss first wraps in plastic then paper which does well at preventing freezer burn. Our freezer is -20 degrees and does a great job preventing ice crystals from piercing cell walls.

There are three things that you should consider when buying beef. The past-the treatment of the animal(nobody likes a farmer that treats his animals like pigs, even pigs) Present-Slaughter and butchery(I know of a butcher who has mold on his carcasses and is too lazy to get caught up with the count he is slaughtering) and last but not least the future how is it going to affect you is the beef tainted by chemicals hormones or bacteria.

If your just going to eat ground beef you can do so on a whole beef and get a distinct flavor instead of the McDonald beef that is being spit out by the one world order in the beef world, granted your local butcher probably made his retail stock from these factory farm beef.

On another note, hogs… don’t trust them. To be honest they all need to be caged up and fed through a tube. Little bastards bite each others tails and just make for bad hams, I’m sure there are great hog farmers out there that have great colonies and low “trauma” I just haven’t seen any do it on a natural, organic and free range platform. I have killed skinned and gutted alot of pigs and have been seriously turned off of porcine meat.

So to sum it all up yes walmart is going to be more consistent feeding you the same beef day after day but if you shop around with your local or at least regional ranchers and find one that is humane and puts out a good animal and a good knowledgeable butcher that cuts it how you want, you wil have a voyage of a great rural tradition.

Don’t get me wrong. I have had “grass” fed beef that was great. But there are a few ideas that many folks don’t understand about the term “grass” fed.

Corn is a grass. Barley is a grass. Rice is a grass. Whether or not I feed my animals “grass” or grass with the grain–it all means it is grass fed. Many folks do not understand this. So if you feed it pasture, it is also grass. And to me, pasture fed beef has an off taste while the other three feeds give the meat a wonderful taste.

If a bovine gets only grass (as in pasture grass) it has a very off flavor. If you like that kind of taste (and some don’t mind it), then you can save money buying this way. But if you buy $1300 worth of meat and it tastes off, then you have a year to eat it. That’s been too much for me.

Another caveat emptor: If you buy a beef by yourself, do you know enough about a healthy or sick one? Can you tell when a beef is not healthy, has not been fed right, is thin or too fat? Do you know if the animal just came off antibiotics and just recovered from being sick? If you cannot tell these things (or if your seller isn’t honest), then you could be wasting your money or getting a lesser quality product. I doubt you’d buy a sick animal that could infect your family–mostly I have not heard private farms doing that. But you do want to know the animal is either healthy or raised with other animals so you can see if they are healthy or just this one is sick (it doesn’t look or act like the rest).

Some animals are so thin or old that you get meat that doesn’t eat well. Those animals, raised by professionals, are ground entirely into hamburger, mixed with hamburger or fat from animals that were mostly steak type animals, and sold as hamburger entirely. Do you know how to judge the age of a beef animal? Some animals are so fat that they have 60 pounds of fat cut off and thrown away. Those animals cost you a lot more because so much is waste.

I am not trying to discourage you or anyone else from purchasing your own beef. I am saying Buyer Beware. If you don’t know animals and cannot judge their health, you might want to trust a professional that cares about his/her reputation. I’d ask you: Do you want to pay $1300 for a beef that you have to eat and eat and eat over the next year that tastes off, or would it make more sense to buy from a professional for $1800 and get beef that you look forward to eating every time you eat it? Sometimes you get what you pay for–and I would rather pay 1/3 more and get quality.

I will be curious to know how your meat tastes. It is interesting to me to see how folks do when they head out on their own to save money.

We raise cattle specifically to sell as freezer beef’s. We raise and market our cattle as hormone free and antibiotic free. We take pride in knowing that our product is high quality and a good safe food source. We eat it as well. Our cattle are essentially raised organically, I just have not gone through the formal paper work to be designated as such.

It was curious to me how most of the above discussions seemed to view grocery store beef as comparable to buying a whole half or quarter from a farm. My customers and my family simply detest eating store bought meat. The store bought meat doesn’t taste as good, you do not know where it came from, you do not know how long it has been laying around, repackaged, etc.

Seriously think about the ground beef that you buy from a grocery. What is in it? Not only is it meat from potentially hundreds of different animals many imported from Mexico, Central and South America, but they also add fat. When we brown our ground beef (like for tacos or spaghetti sauce, etc.) there is virtually no fat to drain off.

We all know that the large feedlots use hormones and antibiotics. That is fine, it is legal, we just don’t really want it in our food. Our customers are the same way.

Our customers know they are paying more to buy from us. They also know that they are getting a much better product.

We thought those might be some valid and interesting points to consider in your discussion.

Beef, it whats for dinner.

Have a good one.

We burned through that quarter so quickly and the net price was about $3.20/lb finished. I knew I needed to find a better deal. So I found a farmer who wanted to get rid of a steer that kept knocking down his fences but he was pasture raised and grass fed. I found him on Craigslist.

Here is the trick, if you can find a live animal and do all of the coordinating yourself then you bypass the food brokers. Anyhow, I bought a nearly 1,100 pound (live weight) angus cross hereford steer for $700 plus $75 for the kill fee plus $0.55/lb processing. In all, I will spend $1,229.85 for nearly 620 pounds of finished weight, or about $1.98 per pound (end product).

Point being, spend the time to investigate live animals and run the project yourself. if someone is selling it, they are making money off of you. So if you can go around them and do it yourself then what was there profit stays in your pocket and I believe that is the spirit of this website. How to save money, right?

So here is my challenge to you. Can you put a whole steer in your freezer and do better than $1.98 per pound (finished weight)? everyone here is saying they are paying nearly $3.25/lb (like I did). Regardless of what the savings is compared to the restaurants and grocery stores, what is the savings compared to other beef buys?

$3.25-1.98 = $1.30/lb savings
X 620 weight = $806 savings
40% Savings

There is your challenge!!!

Where are you located? I am in CA.

Breed, region specific and Non-distressed animals make a huge diference. There’s a new standard that’s been developed called “Certified Humane”. If you buy from a grocer take a look at Meyer Natural Angus for the best national angus program that’s both natural and certified humane. Their anmals and primals are smaller because they don’t use steroids or antibiotics. A typical Meyer animal is 300lbs lighter than comparable animals that are “pumped”.

No one mentioned bone weight of their take home side of beef? If 40-50% of your total is ground beef and it costs you $3/lb blended, you’re really paying over $4/lb for ground beef. I agree with the comment on “family packs”. Buy what you want in moderate quatities, freeze what you don’t use and temper it through your refrgerator several days in advance.

It’s a game and almost any type of animal can be graded prime if fed the right way. Cows can be 20+ years old when processed so don’t fall for some of the tricks out there.

One last thought: The previous post stating $650 cost for 150 lbs of ground beef- plus approx. 50lbs of steaks and cubed beef- can be broken down. You can probably buy 150lbs of gr 80/20 ground beef from a reputable wholesaler for abour $2/lb.. This leaves $350 for the 50lbs of steaks/cube for a $7/lb. average cost. Keep in mind that the source selling you that animal needs to process the whole animal. You can probably knock $.30-$.40 off the hanging weight price if you negotiate some more. Poor trim standards and bone weight will raise your price per lb in a hurry, so beware of what sounds like a low price per pound. The weighted average price of WHAT you’re buying is more important than a low price per pound figure. I recommend paying more for the right animal instead of whatever sounds cheap and comes in bulk.

I sell beef. It is so much better than what you can buy in the store. I’ve purchased store bought, and it is nothing at all like the Angus we harvest for ourselves and others. The flavor, tenderness and quality is so much better.

Buying from the store means you might get beef grown in Chile or any other country that the US buys from. I don’t like that thought. I want to buy US.

Buying from the store means that you have no control over what your animal has been fed or how it has been raised. And yes, it makes a huge difference if the animal is scared.

I prefer as close to organic as I can, and we raise Angus. Angus produce far better meat than just buying from the store. There is absolutely NO comparison. I will never go back to the store if I can avoid it. Did you know that most of the meat you get from the store is Holstein steers? Those are the black and white spotted cows that produce all the milk. The bulls don’t produce milk, so they are sent as steers to feedlots. I can’t seem to find the quality of steak in the stores that I can raise.

This last summer, we ran out of beef for a few weeks. I purchased some beef from a well known store tha advertises how great their beef is. When I cooked it, my husband said, “This is store bought isn’t it?” I told him it was. He said, “Sure makes a difference doesn’t it?” The steaks were frankly tough, and they did not have the flavor that our home raised calves do. The last one we sold, the buyers told us, “I can cut it with a fork.” You can’t beat that!

We advertise regularly on craigslist.com in Sacramento. We eat meat because we like it. I can’t go vegan. First my husband would leave me, and second I wouldn’t know how to make the food taste good. Besides, the vegan sell fake hamburger–I never do! I love beef! It’s what’s for dinner!

Raising cattle is not the safest thing a person can do, but I disagree with cattle being dumb. Cattle are no different than any other animal. You treat them kindly and with respect for their size, they will follow you anywhere and fear you just enough so as not to hurt you. I can walk amongst my herd with no reservations…I guess you can say I know the rules and so do my cattle.

Great article!!! Wish I would have saw it when it first came out.

My brother got me a deep freeze @ an auction. As soon as we get rid of some furniture the freezer is taking it’s place & will be filled with half a organic cow from my Dad’s home town. What I’ve noticed in the 5+ years I’ve been occasionally buying organic meat is that it tends to last longer in the fridge. The vet tech in me thinks it’s might be the lack of drugs but who knows??
I like it when I can make a big batch of something yummy for lunch for the week & have it taste as good on Friday as it did on Monday (unless I eat it all by Wednesday like last week).

I can respect a persons decision to go veggie but, I think the human body does need meat on occasion. That said, I do think the American diet is too meat heavy but that’s another topic. I can rack up the veggie protein till it comes out my ears & I’ll still go anemic if I don’t have a burger every week or so.

BTW – if anyone wants to share some recipes out of antique cook books let me know. Those cook books are hard to find – probably because they fell apart from use. The best one I’ve found is a green one from 1934. “Joy of Housekeeping” I think is the title.

So, buying the meat as a side or quarter saves you money, then your freezer costs less to operate, plus you don’t have to run to the store just because you have a need to have a steak for dinner tonight.

I have bought a quarter several times, the price does flucuate due to the current market value of the cow, but I have always ended up paying a bit less then the price of hamburger at my grocery store, and for that price I get ground meat, steaks, roasts, ribs, stew meat, etc. Ends up saving me quite a bit on my grocery cost annually.

We harvest a hog at the same time we harvest beef, and lamb, so I make mixed bags which hold a variety of cuts. This forces me to use all of the meat effectively — keeps me from “cherry picking” the steaks and being left with a lot of round steak.

If you don’t know what to do with all of the “odd” cuts, get an antique cook book. I have found some wonderful ways to make brisket, round steaks, etc.

As for the heart, tongue and liver — I love liver. Heart and tongue get cooked slowly in the oven and sliced for my dogs. They have their own bags of bits in the fridge.

I raise the animals myself, and want to make sure that I don’t waste any of it. I care for my animals respectfully and with great care, but I also understand what they are here for. My sheep wouldn’t get 7 – 9 months of playing around on clover-filled pasture if they weren’t intended for the freezer.

The animals are born to be harvested for meat. I give them a good quality of life while they are here, ensure that they are harvested in as humane a way as possiblle, and use everything I can from the animal.