When I buy beef from a local farmer, I pay a certain amount for the hanging weight, and a certain amount to the butcher for processing. I have wondered in the past how that cost ends up comparing to the price I see at the grocery store or in the butcher's case.
Today I picked up half a cow from a butcher I haven't patronized before. The meat was neatly packed in flat boxes, making it easy to put in the car and into the freezer. So I weighed it, just to find out how much of the cow's hanging weight actually makes it into the freezer. It ended up to be about 2/3. With the butcher's fee, the price per pound ended up about twice as much as I pay the farmer for hanging weight. That's helpful to know when I compare to grocery-store prices, and makes the grocery-store prices look less shocking.
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Thanks for providing this information. We've bought sides of beef before and split a cow with my sister, but I never knew what percentage was actual usable food.
ReplyDeleteThat is useful information!
ReplyDeleteJane and Karen, when I was writing the check to the farmer today, I realized the butcher told me the wrong weight. (It was smudged a bit on the carbon copy, so he told me 354 pounds yesterday although it was really 394.)
ReplyDeleteSo the meat in the freezer actually turned out to be more like 37% of the live weight and 61% of the hanging weight.