If you enjoy home-cooked meals using farm-raised beef you will love buying meat in bulk. Besides being convenient to have a selection of high-quality proteins for your meals – you are saving yourself money! Just imagine being able to cook up a scrumptious meal any night of the week without the hassle of visiting the grocery store to shop for meat!

Checking things off the grocery list

Checking things off my grocery list (FOREVER) is a passion of mine. First, it was eggs, then chicken. After that: oregano, pork, turkey, and mayo. The satisfaction of growing something yourself is hard to explain. You truly gain an appreciation for the work that goes into making food.

Ways to locally source your protein

Our most recent grocery list check off was beef. But, you don’t need a farm to stop buying burgers and steaks from the store. There are ways to locally source your protein.

We currently have one 4H steer (a male cow that has been… fixed). He’s Sophie’s best friend, so that we won’t be eating any “Dwight tacos” over here. Instead of eating our own, we bought half a steer from another 4H kid. We plan to divide the meat over 12 months until we can buy another half (or whole) at the end of this 4H season.

How Much Beef Do You Get?

Honestly, we had no idea what we were going to end up with until it arrived, so for those considering doing the same, here is a rough idea. From half of a steer, we got approximately 200 pounds of meat. Here’s what we got:

A few things to consider when buying beef in bulk

We eat a lot of ground beef at our house so there were some traditional steaks that we chose to grind.

Buying a 4H steer is a great way to support your local agricultural community. These kids work really hard taking care of these animals and supporting them keeps programs like this running.

The average cost per pound for us was $7.50. That included expensive cuts (filet, brisket, etc) of high-quality beef that wasn’t raised in a commercial lot. For the earth, our family, and our community it was totally worth it.

If buying a quarter, half, or whole steer for your family is something you are interested in, we are happy to help you get in touch with the right people!

No Experience Necessary,
Kelly