One of the best ways to save on grass-fed beef is to buy it direct from the farmer. We’ve found a local source, and twice a year, we buy 1/4 side from him. We just picked our latest order up a few weeks ago, and I’m so excited to have our deep freezer filled with healthy beef to last through the summer and into the fall.
I know some of you have not bought 1/4 side of beef before, so I wanted to share what we got. As you’ll see, you can get this meat at quite a reasonable cost.
We received with our order:
1 package of tallow,
3 whole tongue (this is all my husband’s to enjoy as it grosses me out),
1 oxtail,
4 liver,
2 – 1/2 heart,
3 chuck roasts,
1 eye of round roast,
2 round bone roast,
29 packages burger,
1 big & 3 little packages of soup bones,
3 London broil,
1 brisket,
3 rib eye steaks,
3 T-bone steaks,
2 sirloin tip steaks,
3 top sirloin steaks,
1 Porterhouse steak,
1 tenderloin steak,
1 tri-tip steak,
1 bottom round roast
3 ribs,
3 packages of stew meat
Technically, we only paid for the burger, steaks, roasts, etc. The organ meat was added on for free. So, I thought I would compute our overall cost with both the organ meat and without.
Overall, we paid $655.50 for this order of beef.
Without the organ meat, we had 102.5 pounds of meat, or $6.39 per pound.
However, the organ meat and tallow was an additional 27.5 pounds of meat, bringing our total of meat to 129 pounds. When I use that total, we paid $5.08 per pound for everything.
We’re also trying something new this summer–ordering 1/2 side of pork. I’ll let you know what we get when we get it.
Do you order meat directly from the farmer? If so, how much do you pay per pound?
I have thought of doing something similar. There is no way I could stomach organ meat or tongue though. Is that an option you can choose not to get?
Yes, we get to choose what organ meat we want, if any. They also had kidney available, but I passed that one up. 🙂
Thank you for sharing this! I really do want to do this later this year and it really helps to see what a 1/4 side of beef really looks like. And I can do without the organ meat. 🙂
I could without it, too, but my husband and son like it, and it lowers our overall price. 🙂
I’ve never thought about ordering a large quantity of beef directly from a farmer, before. However, this got me thinking…can you order less than 1/4 of a side? I’m just thinking with only two people in our family, 1/4 seems like a lot!
Yes. Some people in our group split a 1/4, so they each end up with 1/8th. When we first moved here, we did that. It wasn’t much meat for our family, but we split with a couple with no kids, and it worked out great for them.
Would love to do this. Thank you for laying it all out so I can have an idea what I’m in for. My husband is really keen to do this. How many beef meals do you make per week? And how long does this last your family? Thank you for sharing 🙂
We make a few beef meals a week. Since we’re prone to food intolerances, I try to rotate the meat we eat in a week. Still, we’ll go through almost all of this beef in about 6 months. We roughly follow a Paleo diet, so we eat a lot of meat, veggies, and fruit.