How buying a share works

A share is priced per pound of hanging weight — the carcass on the rail at the butcher’s, bone and fat and all, before a single cut is made. It is the only weight that exists at the moment you pay, which is why it is the one the price is set against.

Take-home weight is what you carry out in boxes: after the fat is trimmed and the carcass has hung in the cooler long enough to age, which costs it moisture. How much of it comes home is partly your own decision — the bones are yours if you want them, and a sheet that keeps them for stock and bone-in roasts weighs more than one that does not. On a typical sheet about 65% of the rail weight comes home with you.

So a bill that looks like it is for more beef than you received is almost always correct, and almost always explained by this one paragraph.

We raise the animal. A licensed processor kills it, hangs it, and cuts it to the sheet you fill in — steak thickness, roast size, how much goes to ground. They bill you for that work directly, and we never see the money.

It is usually charged per pound of hanging weight, with a flat kill fee on top, and around here the rate runs $1.00 to $1.50 a pound. Ring them and ask for both figures. If you put their rate into the worksheet above, we will add it up for you and keep it in its own column, where it belongs.

Your deposit reserves an animal in your name. That is all you are charged today, and it counts toward the total — it is not a fee.

On harvest day the butcher weighs the carcass on the rail. We bill the balance off that real number, before pickup. Until then every total anybody quotes you, on this page or anywhere else, is an estimate, and we will keep saying so.

Fulfilment is ranch pickup or local delivery. We do not ship beef.

It does, and the sticker is the only reason anybody doubts it. A share is one large number paid twice; the grocery store is a hundred small ones spread over a year, which is a far more comfortable way to spend more money. Line the same cuts up side by side — the steaks, the roasts, the ribs, the ground — and buying them direct from the rancher comes in well under buying every one of them at retail.

You also get more than the meat case is willing to sell you. Soup bones for bone broth. The fat, if you want to render your own tallow. The big bones held back for the dog. The organs, if you would like them — some people freeze-dry them. None of that is an extra. It is your animal, and it is all on the cut sheet.

The last column of the table below is what a pound of beef in your freezer works out at, so you can hold it against whatever you paid last time.

Boxed beef packs at somewhere between 30 and 40 pounds per cubic foot. The spread is real: a box that is mostly one-pound packs of ground stacks flat and dense, and one with bone-in roasts, ribs and a whole brisket in it does not.

A quarter beef wants 2.8 to 3.7 cu ft — a standard chest freezer, near enough, and the reason so many families end up with one in the garage.

Bring coolers on pickup day. Beef comes out of the processor frozen hard and you want it to stay that way on the drive home.

Plenty of people do. One person places the order, pays, and collects; how you divide it afterwards is between you, and the butcher packs it as one share either way.

If you would each rather have your own order, your own boxes and your own cut list, buy two smaller shares instead. That is what the eighth is for — it is the size that used to only exist by splitting a quarter with a friend.

We will buy it back from you. Not a credit, not a partial, not an argument — if the beef is not what you hoped for, we would rather have it back than have you eat a year of something you do not enjoy.

Two fair conditions, and they are the only two. Tell us early, please, rather than at the last steak — if there is roughly 90% of your meat left and you are not satisfied, we will buy it back. And the original deposit is not refundable, because it reserved and held an animal in your name that nobody else could buy.

Ring us. This is a conversation, not a claims process.

All of our beef is 100% hormone free. No growth implants, nothing hormonal in the feed, at no point in the animal’s life.

There is no version of this that applies to some animals and not others. It is how the herd is run.

Yes and no, and the honest answer is worth the paragraph. A good rancher treats every animal individually and as needed, and on our place we believe an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So most of the work goes in long before anything is wrong: a strong vitamin and mineral routine, a balanced diet, clean water, maintained facilities, and a lot of garlic in the ration, which is a natural antibiotic.

Even so, the cold comes and now and then a calf gets sick. We try homeopathic remedies first. If those are not working, we intervene — penicillin, or Nuflor for a respiratory infection — because standing over a sick animal to protect a label is not something we are willing to do.

Any animal we treat is marked, and it leaves through the local sales barn.It is not kept back for our farm-to-table beef. So: yes, we use antibiotics responsibly, when an animal needs them. And no — we will never sell you an animal that has been treated.

Primarily grass. Cattle are ruminants, built to digest it — turning grass into a good steak is their superpower, and we would rather not argue with it.

Every year we plant a diverse cover crop: peas, oats, sunflowers, radishes and sorghum. When the cattle come home from summer pasture in the fall they are turned out onto that leafy plantation. Then, as they near butcher time, they go onto the hay pasture and we supplement with grain — a barley, corn and oat mix, locally sourced and non-GMO, because local grain is the best grain we can put in front of them.

Which is why we call it grass fed and grain supplemented, and say both halves out loud. The grass is what the animal was raised on; the grain at the end is what makes it more tender, and what you taste.