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Hope this is the right place. Figured many here stock up on meat.
Every year to help save money and have some food built up 3 of us split 1 cow and 1 pig. We have been doing this for many years. I noticed a big increase in both pork and beef prices over the last 2 years after being fairly steady over the previous 8 years .
The price per pond is hanging weight. Beef $2.70 and Pork $1.70 Processing total is about $1 a pound and they do an excellent job of packaging and cutting everything the way you want it.
My share is 1/4 cow 181.5 pounds hanging weight and 1/2 pig 86 pounds hanging weight. My total cost was $957.35 for my share. This includes a $25 delivery fee since the farmer we buy the cattle and pigs from lives 60 miles from the locker.
Anybody else have anything butchered lately and if so what does it cost in your area?
I raise beef and goats, but buy hogs and mutton from some neighbors, and I hunt and fish. I butcher my own, I even bought a meat saw and grinder at an auction, so taking care of my own is pretty easy.
I have a smokehouse to cure bacon and ham, and I corn some beef too.
It's just me that I'm working for, so I can do whatever spices I want and whatever cuts I like.
The last time I went to a professional Meatcutter, I only got back about 1/2 the meat I should have.
Do most of you raise and butcher your own meat or stock up on sales at the grocery store?
I don't raise any animals. I do have 4 bird dogs though. My wife and I have a garden large enough to supply most of our vegetable needs for the two of us. Our two adult kids do raid my freezer and canned goods from time to time, lol.
2-3 deer and a hog pretty much feeds us throughout the year as far as meat goes. I get my hogs from a Hutterite Colony and a guy in Choteau MT butchers it for me. I do take the head, liver and all the bone scraps and fat. I make my own panhaus (scrapple). I get quite a few birds during the year. We usually wind up with 18 pheasants, 12-24 grouse, more goose than I care to eat too, so no reliance on chicken, other than an occasional whole bird roasted or something like that.
I'll have to wait to spring when we get out beef portion. My family buys the whole animal(s), pasture finished on our land, but we only do grass fed. In addition I/we buy 'other' meat too. My costs are sustainably less then retail, but here's the retail PDF.
When I raised my own meat, I produced superior meat and I had an excellent butcher who knew how to age met and process it correctly.
My experience with buying animals from other producers is that they have raised the animal economically so it isn't any better than the meat I get from the grocery store. Some of the private butchers don't do a good job. It's not worth it to me to spend twice what the meat costs in the market and to have it not be any better.
When I raised cattle and pigs, I fed them for premium flavor and I got that premium flavor, but it is an expensive way to raise a meat animal. People raising livestock for a profit are not feeding that way.
I butchered my own poultry and have the plucker and everything needed to do it. It's lots of time and money to raise first rate chickens.
Besides the chicken ducks and geese, I would butcher pigs and rabbits, but beef has to hang and age for 2-3 weeks, so that would go to the custom butcher because I didn't have a good place to hang it. Because it costs money to hang beef in a temperature controlled environment, most of the custom butchers would not hang the meat for long enough. They want it out of the cooler and cut and wrapped and their money in their pocket. When I would buy a side, the seller never wanted to pay the higher cost for the good butcher, so the meat wouldn't be processed as well and there was one butcher in the area well know for not returning all of your meat.
If I did the butchering myself, I would do a better job (minus cattle, which got sent out)
Id don't know how much they are charging now for kill fee and cut and wrap. But like everything else, I'm sure the price has gone up rather steeply.
Last edited by oregonwoodsmoke; 01-09-2023 at 02:47 PM..
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