Buying A Half Cow & Whole Pig - What Do You Get?

so what can you do to protect you and your family from this insane inflation you can do what we did stop buying your meat from a grocery store and seek out a quality butcher stick around and watch this video because you'll learn all the benefits of buying your meat in bulk and how much meat we were able to add to our freezer with about a two thousand dollar budget with today's meat prices okay so hopefully you don't have sticker shock by the two thousand dollar figure we threw out there i know that sounds like a lot of money it is a lot of money what are the benefits of buying your meat in bulk over just going to the grocery store and buying them individually you get a much better price on me we had steak for dinner tonight and it was cheaper than a pound of ground beef that i would have gotten at the grocery store it made it taste that much better yes so what did we get for 2 000 what did we actually buy we bought half of a cow a whole hog and 10 whole chickens so we're going to start with talking about the half cow that we purchased the cow actually ended up being a bit on the smaller side and we purchased a whole cow and split it in half with a family member we actually ended up saving about 20 cents per pound by buying a whole cow versus a half cow so if you have somebody else that you can split a cow with there's probably some extra savings there yeah so until we started looking into it one of my big questions was what do you get if you buy a quarter cow half cow or whole cow so what did we get alex we got 86 pounds of ground beef 14 pounds of beef chuck roast seven pounds of arm roast five pounds of rump roast six pounds of sirloin tip roast five pounds of beef stew 14 pounds of short ribs 17 pounds of round steak seven pounds of sirloin steak four pounds of swiss steak seven pounds of ribeye steak seven pounds of new york strip steak and three pounds of tenderloin steak which is also filet our family member that we split the cow with also had no interest in the suet soup bones or any of the organs so the amounts that we have for those are from the whole cow the extras we got were 23 pounds of suet which i will render down into tallow for cooking possible other skincare uses very excited about that i wasn't sure what suit was we had to look it up actually when we saw something wrapped up and said sue it if it would have said animal fat i would have known it wasn't what we got but see what was new for me we also got 23 pounds of soup bones that i will cook down and make into bone broth for us we also got eight pounds of liver and yum a two pound tongue we feel better about an animal that gave its life to us knowing that we're using more parts that traditionally just get thrown away yeah so for the total of everything we got from the half cow it was 238 pounds roughly now when you buy a cow that's the other thing you should pay attention to is that you'll actually pay for the hanging weight now you won't actually get all of that meat we totaled up at what we actually ended up taking home with us so for the half cow we got 238 pounds total of meat at 3.49 a pound we've been paying over five dollars a pound for ground beef and we haven't bought steak in years because we can't afford it yes not only do we get ground beef at 349 a pound but we're getting new york strip steaks rib eyes roasts all of that is at 349 a pound so like we said our cow ended up being a little bit on the smaller side average hanging weight for a whole cow is usually around 660 pounds putting the average hanging weight for a half cow around 330 pounds and then the half cow that we ended up buying was right at about 305 pounds so at that 3.49 cents per pound that we were able to buy that beef for the grand total for our half cow just by itself was 1066 or about half of our budget but that's great that's meat for pretty much a year for our family of four so that was the cow but that's not all that we bought we also bought a whole hog so alex what kinds of meat did we end up getting from a hog we got 20 pounds of bacon which is wonderful we eat a lot of bacon seven pounds of spare ribs four pounds of ham shank we got our whole hams cut into half and we have eight pounds of ham 16 pounds of shoulder roast seven pounds of pork hawks we got 25 pounds of ground pork and 15 pounds of that we had them make into breakfast sausage legs for us which are delicious we got 26 pounds of pork chops and 20 pounds of ham steaks we also got 11 pounds of pork fat which i will also render down into large for cooking pie crust all the good things we also got five pounds of pork liver and one pound pork kidney yum so in total we got 165 pounds of pork at two dollars and 39 cents a pound all those cuts all the ham all the bacon for two dollars and 39 cents a pound and i can't begin to tell you about the taste difference the bacon that we eat every week now is the most delicious bacon i have ever had i don't know what it is but it is so much different than any store-bought bacon and we've tried everything we bought the cheap stuff middle of the road and the crazy expensive baking you find at the store and nothing comes close to the bacon we got from this whole hog it's delicious one thing that we customized was that with our bacon ham and roast we had them smoke that and we were able to choose which wood we wanted and i would have been happy with applewood smoke but alex alex played the trump card and she selected hickory which is still really good so we're a little bit surprised at how little bacon you actually get when you're buying a whole pig rather than having the bacon packaged in 16 ounce packages or a pound we had them do 12 ounce packages which still goes a long way the 12 ounce packages that we cook each week in i feel like we're cooking a whole pound of bacon yeah we really can't notice the difference so i think by doing that we ended up getting maybe an extra four or five packages worth of bacon just to stretch that out a little bit more we ended up having our pork chops cut at about three quarters of an inch where i think the butcher said normally they would do that at an inch so we did that to get a little bit more quantity when we cook our pork chops and we asked for them to be two per package yeah that's another great thing to think through um how you'll have these packaged because that way you only have to grab out of the freezer what you need where we would shop at the grocery store sometimes you would come home with a big package of like nine pork chops and then that was extra work with dividing them up and putting them in bags and freezing them also if you're going to be ordering breakfast sausage something we didn't think of was that our butcher actually put them in casings and we tend not to be a big fan of caseins at least when it comes to breakfast sausage so that's something we'll change next time we also had all of our roasts split in half to make them last longer and stretch it a little bit more for us and then there are also a set of ribs on a pig and we have those quartered yeah a full slab of ribs sounds delicious but knowing that you only get two full slabs and a whole pig we wanted to stretch that a little bit so we had them quartered we wanted to enjoy the ribs more than once yes so the grand total for buying a half a cow a whole hog 10 whole chickens plus all the extras we discussed was right around one thousand nine hundred and sixty dollars so we were under budget we got some extras and our freezer is stocked yes buying your meat in bulk doesn't have to be very complicated but there are a lot of tips and tricks that we kind of learned along the way that will probably make the process even easier for you so we're going to share those with you today so if you've never purchased meat in bulk before and you start looking around you might be surprised that there are a lot of suppliers you'll probably find big names in your area and also some local butchers you'll want to do your research ahead of time and pick a quality butcher and make sure that they're meeting the standards that you and your family look for things such as how they treat their animals how they're going to package it for you how they price items if you have any special requests there's a lot to look into so when you're out there looking at different butcher shops some are going to be usda certified and some are not if a butcher is usda certified there are some restrictions that they have for example we couldn't take some of the organ meats and certain cuts had to have a specific name yeah some of the cuts of meat were we were used to calling something a filet if you were ordering at a restaurant usda required them to call it a tenderloin so just some small differences there if you do work with a butcher who is usda certified you might be different than me but anytime i've looked at meat at a grocery store i've never once really thought about where that meat came from i know it was a living animal but i don't know what farm it came from if it was from a factory a local farm or what so another benefit to buying your meat from a butcher is that you can get a lot more background information find out their practices and find out where did your meat come from what do they feed the animal are they pasture raised do they get fed grain is it gmo grain non-gmo grain your meat is also very fresh when you pick it up i believe our cow was butchered and it was a two-week dry aging process i don't know how long the meat sits at the grocery store but my guess is probably a bit longer than that now when you call one of these places and you're doing the research you're probably going to be talking with the person who works with the animals directly so you'll be able to pretty much ask them any question you can think of and our experience has been they're always willing to share that information and are happy that somebody is interested some butchers even have it where you can come and see the cow visit the farm everything before you get your meat so one thing you'll have to think about if you're going to be buying your meat and bulk is where you're going to put it and how much freezer space is going to be required for that now all i can speak to is what we purchased so for that half cow whole hog 10 hole chickens all of that was able to fit into an 18 and a half foot cubic freezer which is pretty large if you're buying something smaller than that you can get away with a smaller freezer but that pretty well fills that freezer with a little bit of room of extra space we learned that when it comes to pork it does start to lose its flavor a little bit after about six months of being in the freezer nothing's wrong with it and you can still eat it if you are going to be buying your pork in bulk you might just want to try to buy about six months worth for your family you'll probably want to think about protecting your investment if you ever lose power all of that meat is vulnerable and you're going to want to think about what your plan is if that ever happens consider buying a cheap generator you don't need anything that's going to power your entire house but just something that could run your freezers one of the options also if the freezer goes out or just to have on the shelf for convenience you can can your meat you can can beef you can canned pork you can can chicken and it makes for quick easy suppers too we probably would have done this years ago if i didn't have so much sticker shock with buying meat but i really wish i would have thought it through more and didn't just stop there and think that's a lot of money we're not going to do it because the more we put pen to paper we realized that we would actually save money yes we feel like we got the deal of the century by buying low and watching the prices continue to rise not to mention the quality taste and peace of mind that came with our investment if you're a bargain shopper you'll probably get a small high off of buying your meat from a butcher in today's economy it makes even more sense to buy meat this way if you've purchased meat and bulk before and have any tips or tricks that we didn't mention share them down below in the comments so others can get the help as well if you got any value out of today's video please click the like button so this can spread to more people and we'll see you in our next video

Channel: Maple Hill Homestead

Views: 4,781

Keywords: Maple Hill Homestead, Cow, Grass fed, Beef, Half cow, Buying a half cow, Half beef, Meat, Tallow, Buy a cow, Buying a cow, Soup bones, buy a cow, buying half cow, buying half beef, how to buy half beef, how to buy half cow, how to buy quarter cow, how much meat in a half cow, how much meat in a quarter cow, how much bacon in a half pig, how much bacon from a pig, how much meat is a half cow, how to buy meat from a butcher, how to buy a whole pig, homesteading, meat inflation

Id: zjeBCFXdhPY

Length: 11min 35sec (695 seconds)

Published: Fri May 27 2022