Buying a Whole Cow - From Finding the Rancher to Putting it in the Freezer and How Much We Got

welcome to the fermented homestead my name is Anna and today I wanted to bring you along and share a bit of information about a recent experience I had of buying a whole cow so if you're interested in this process I'm gonna bring you along and show you everything that I could think of to show you in this process not too long ago we picked up our cow from the butchers and we didn't raise this cow we found this cow rancher whatever you want to call it we found them on Craigslist and we found it about a year and a half ago I would say and in the beginning we purchased a quarter of a cow from this rancher to kind of test it out and we quickly realized that was not gonna be enough meat to get us through a whole year and from this one it kind of just to us it seemed well to me I should say it seemed like the cow was just too good to be true to actually be a grass-fed cow so I did a little more searching around and found another one and we bought a half of a cow from that one to make sure that we had enough meat to get through the whole year to the next kind of traditional like butchering time which is like kind of early fall I guess and so we bought the half cow and we were super not happy with that one it was terrible and it had almost no fat on it whatsoever the meat was tough it tasted gamey like it was and it was just not good and I think that the cow that they had given us was a very young cow and it just didn't have a lot of time on it and it was just not a pleasant experience so this time around when we were ready to buy a whole cow we ended up going back with the first butcher so basically the way that the whole process worked for both of these two ranchers as well as at the actual butcher process what they did was is that well actually different ways one of the ranchers I believe they kind of delivered the cow to the actual butcher and they butcher them at the the process they meet facility and the other one they had mobile butchers who came out and processed and did the hanging weight there and then they took the carcass over to the actual butchers business I guess you would call it I don't know but they took it there and then they would actually let it hang in the in the cooler for about two weeks and just let it age and then before the two weeks is up they would use the butchers would give us a call and ask us okay how do you want us to process this meat and then we had no clue what we were doing so we would just you know we'd ask them you know what do you recommend what you know they asked us what we like and we kind of came up with this game plan of how to have this cow butchered what cuts we want you know do we want more steaks do we want more roasts do you want more ground beef you kind of get to customize and customize it a little bit and so you give them all the instructions and then once they have gone through and processed this cow in the way that you want they freeze it completely solid and then they call you and you say hey this meats ready come and pick it up and so at that point you kind of just you have like a day or two where you have to figure out a time where you can go to the butcher and pick up all this stuff and then take it back home with you and figure out where to put it so it's a really it's kind of a bit of a rush just so you want to make sure that you're preparing ahead of time which we did we cleared out all of our fruit two of our freezers ahead of time to make sure we had enough space to actually fit this cow in which turned out to even still not be enough space because this thing was gargantuan so kind of your typical cow is gonna be probably I would say about six to eight hundred pounds kind of roughly in that area our cow ended up being 1,300 pounds hanging late I don't know where all that meat went because we ended up only getting about 700 pounds of that stuff back and so I'm kind of gonna be repeating myself a little bit here because this one is I'm filming this way after the fact and so I just kind of wanted to give a little bit more information into the process of buying the cow and less in I wanted to also include facts but also just kind of walk you through it a little bit and a bit of what we experienced at least and I know at some of the butchers they will give you like a sheet of paper and you will fill it out or they'll email it to you or something like that and you fill out exactly what you want on this piece of paper in our experience from two separate butchers they called and asked you what you want it so so then you go and you go to the butcher and you make sure you have a ton of cooler space or boxes or bags or something that you can fit all of this gargantuan amount of stuff in just for a bit of of reference this 1,300 pound cow that hanging weight that ended up being 700 pounds of actual meat ended up filling up the entire bed of my truck I filled up two coolers two giant cooler bags and filled up I didn't even count how many boxes and a huge garbage can that was clean it was not anything that had actual garbage in it and so it filled up the entire bed of my truck so I mean you got to make sure you have enough boxes bags coolers you know whatever you can get your hands on and without going out and spending a ton of money just make sure that you can actually if you're within a reasonable driving distance of the butchers they are frozen enough that you can make it home and be just fine like you don't have to have all coolers but coolers are helpful and so go to the butcher and you go there and you tell them you know this is this is me and then you go in there and you pay for the actual butchering part of the expenses and then they come out with these huge towers on wheels of all these different carts and things like that and you spend all of this time trying to pack it away and it just it took me I think I filmed it was a little bit easier to actually get the time on I think it was about an hour and 10 minutes about and I was booking it I was going super fast I wanted to get out of there and be done and get that meat home in the freezer so I was going as fast as I could by myself for about an hour in 10 ish minutes something like that and so I got it all packed away and drove home as quickly as I could and we were probably about I think this butcher is about an hour or so away from my house so I don't live anywhere close to it but drove home and you know on the freeway terrified trying to make sure I get everything all strapped down to make sure that you know lids aren't gonna fly off and you know I'm not gonna have to to deal with you know any of that kind of stuff and made it home safe and sound and then Robert was home by that point and Malakai was also home and you know they Monica kind of helped he was just more curious and then Robert helped and we unloaded everything from the truck and we had I don't know if you can see but we had like a little scale and I was weighing each one and writing the pounds in grant or not the pounds but I was writing the weight in grams on each of the packages and writing down each one that I have I found that that's really helpful for the kind of long-term getting an idea of what you have because you can just each one is marked with a number and most of them are different and so you can just cross off each one you have and you if you maintain that then you have a pretty good idea of what you have left in your freezer and it's a little bit easier for the meat for the the inventory you know what you have left and you know what you've used and you know it's just kind of helpful unless you know what you end up with that's how we found out that we only had about 700 pounds of actual meat from the original 1,300 pounds so that's how we were able to figure that out so we were just unloading everything counting everything and that process also took about an hour maybe a little bit more and then you know we ended up filling up that one big cooler and then we ended up filling up that smaller cooler or not cool but freezer and I think the bigger cooler is about four feet long and you know see your typical I don't I don't know the cubic feet on it I should probably go and check but I don't want to you right now so sorry it's about four feet wide and then the smaller one is your pretty typical I think is about two feet two feet wide and so we ended up filling up both of those both of those freezers and then we had a bunch in our actual kind of stand-up typical side-by-side freezer and after that I just kind of took a mad dash and tried to process as much of it as I could to kind of clear out some space and then but I think from what I'm from what I've heard you kind of want to make sure that your cooler is as full as you can get it or you're not gonna keep saying cooler but I mean freezer and you want to make sure it's as full as you can get it so that the it kind of keeps itself frozen it makes the Machine work less because everything's already frozen and it's supposed to make it easier I don't know for me I would think that it would be the opposite like you kind of want to have some flow and things like that but it makes sense both ways so that's a bit of kind of the process of how everything works and hopefully that gives you some clarity and maybe a little bit of just insight into what's in the process maybe alleviate some of the the curiosity that you may have surrounding it so to get into a bit more of the detailed numbers and figures of the cow that we bought we ended up getting I have it all written down so if I have to keep looking down but we got two hundred and forty four packs of ground beef and those are about a pound made usually most of them are a little bit more than a pound and then we got four tip roasts that were about 22 pounds and we got one round bone roast which was about six pounds and then we got four rump roast which is about 20 pounds ii-if 20 pounds total for that we're just marked actual just roasts and those ones were about 20 pounds and we got 20 packs of rib steaks and those are two to a pack and that was about 68 pounds and then we got twelve packs of sirloins also packed - - a pack and those were about 25 pounds we got 30 packs of cube steak and those were kind of all over the board and a little more than a pound and they're about 39 pounds a total we got 30 packs of stew meat which was 34 pounds ish we got three of the little tenderloins about 4 pounds total we got 16 packs of t-bones - - a pack and so if total of about 48 49 pounds we got 11 packs of short ribs at for a total of about 59 pounds and twenty two packs of soup bones for 93 94 pounds and we got about 25 pounds of brisket I totally kind of guessed on that one it was a little bit difficult to actually weigh that one and then we also ended up getting 45 ish pounds of a little more than 45 pounds of the kidney fat the suet and so we ended up paying $3 a pound for hanging weight which is pretty good for grass-fed you know pasture raised beef but it ended up being such a large cow and we didn't get a whole lot of return I think it was because in the purchasing process which I forgot to mention if you want to make sure that you get to keep any of the organs or the fat or the bones other than like soup bones and things like that you have to make sure that you specify that you want to keep those otherwise and just toss them and we forgot to actually mention that and so they ended up tossing it unfortunately which was a horrible experience I wanted to keep all of those but we couldn't we we didn't get them so we ended up getting a big loss on that one and so we ended up paying about three thousand about four almost $4,000 for the actual cow itself at $3 a pound hanging weight and typically you pay that just a hanging weight and $3 a pound is about $4,000 and then we ended up paying another C 11:48 for the actual processing and they also charge on the hanging weight not like what you actually get in your freezer so we ended up kind of not getting a super great deal on that not for what we were used to in the past but we still got a pretty good deal you know $7 a pound seven dollars and 21 cents a pound not including the weight of the the this suet at all so not the best deal in the world but I mean if you go to Costco they're gonna have around here they have like that the three packs of the just the ground beef and those are I think three pounds and it's about twenty dollars so and that's just ground beef nothing fancy and so this is much better and after we have been kind of digging into it and and eating it in things it is oh my gosh is so delicious it's it's just it's incredible meat and I've rendered all the tallow and it's nice and just a nice dark you know just a good yellow color and it's just it's it's amazing it's amazing me it's really good so we're hoping that by the next time well I guess I should say I'm hoping my husband is a little bit indifferent doesn't one way or the other but I'm hoping that by the next time we're ready to actually purchase a cow we can maybe raise a cow or even just by an actual cow maybe feed it a bit and then they send that one off to the butcher and kind of raise our own a bit we'll see how it goes and now that we have our own homestead we can hopefully be able to do things like that coming up here in the future and I can kind of share that with you guys as well and hopefully get a bit of a better deal on that one so I hope that you enjoyed this video I hope you found it informative and maybe answer some of your questions that you might have about the buying process of a whole cow half cow or quarter cow the process is all just about the same it's just kind of quantity what you get in return so if you enjoyed this video please go ahead and give it a thumbs up and if you haven't already please do subscribe to this channel we have a lot of amazing videos coming in the future a lot of meat processing videos and fermented videos and Gnome studying videos and all sorts of different things along those lines so if you're interested in that make sure you go and hit the subscribe button and we will see you in the next video thanks for watching bye

Channel: Fermented Homestead

Views: 10,508

Keywords: buying a whole cow, buying whole cow, whole cow, buying half cow, buying quarter cow, half cow, quarter cow, buying meat bulk, buying meat in bulk, buying bulk beef, how to buy a whole cow, butcher, how to butcher a cow, carnivore, carnivore diet, eating meat, carnivore dream, buying a cow, whole beef, buying a cow for meat

Id: dWciGhR5F1E

Length: 15min 10sec (910 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 04 2019