How to choose the right freezer for your grassfed meats

hey there folks joe here from wanda farm uh so today we're gonna tackle that question uh okay i wanna buy that half a cow but i don't have the freezer space uh so we're gonna talk about freezers and storing it so the first question is how big of a freezer am i going to need so the range is going to be anywhere from 25 to 35 pounds of meat per cubic foot of freezer space so if you're buying uh let's say a quarter of a cow which is going to be about 120 pounds of meat plus or minus you should figure you're gonna need about four cubic feet of freezer space so a half a cow just double that you're gonna need eight cubic feet of freezer space for a half a cow uh a pig you're gonna figure right around similar gonna be probably a little more if you're doing a whole pig figure around that 140 pounds of meat so you're probably looking at again four to five pounds or i'm sorry four to five cubic feet of freezer space um you're going to need for that whole hog so those are just kind of the numbers to use as you're trying to figure out how much space you need you know the other thing to think about too is i like to say there's this balance between you want to get more than what you need because chances are there's going to be other things you're going to want to store in your freezer than just the mate but you don't want to get too big because ideally you want to have the freezer space as full as possible to be the most efficient with it and everything is going to stay frozen and frozen and fresher but for longer and if there's more product in the freezer if that makes sense the other question is kind of how long uh you should probably figure on storing your meat for no longer than one year i mean i'm not saying hey after one year throw meat out we've eaten meat two three years old before with no problems but as you're making your purchase say you figure hey we're probably only going to eat a quarter cow over the next year versus a half well then just get the quarter cow don't plan too far in advance so i always recommend just plan for one year's supply for capacity okay so then let's move on to upright or the chest freezer so some of the advantages you're going to find here with the chest freezer is you're going to have more usable space um i the reason i give that range of 25 to 35 pounds is it's going to depend on the meat i mean some meats most meats are about the same but it's going to depend on like the cuts of meat because some are oddly shaped and that's some cuts are easy to stack and be really efficient with the space and some are going to have gaps the other reason too is because of the freezer and with these chest freezers because you're stacking the meat on top of each other you're really efficient with the space and you're if you have a chest freezer you can probably figure that 25 pounds of meat or i'm sorry 35 pounds of meat per cubic foot of freezer space um the other the other nice part about these chest freezers are you're gonna find the cold air is all gonna stay at the bottom so every time you open this door you got all the warm air coming out first and the cold air tends to stay at the bottom heat rises so that's the advantage on these is you're not getting warm air on your meat necessarily is easy the other nice part about this door is they're heavy um they're not necessarily light like this one is a newer freezer so it's spring loaded which makes it kind of easy to pop open but these things are usually heavy it's not like a little kid can easily pop these things open um so the disadvantage of these is they're not very organized you're gonna find when you're putting your product in there you're gonna have to dig through things to get to another cut and it just is the disadvantage of it unfortunately it's not the easiest freezers to organize now you can get creative i've seen people have like little containers like milk crates or different kind of plastic containers or they find these like dividers and they put dividers in there and you know you can get creative with trying to organize it the other disadvantage of these is they tend to use more floor space as you can see this is uh so this chest freezer here is about a 24 cubic feet but it's about eight feet long so it's using a lot of floor space and now i got all this empty space up above me so that's what i have for you on the chest freezer next let's move over and i'll show you what our upright freezer looks like okay guys uh right here i'm standing next to our upright uh freezer so these upright freezers are nice um so they the nice part about them is the most obvious is you can organize everything so much easier versus a chest freezer so you got all this space on your doors to put things you got shelves uh so it just makes life much more organized um and more accessible to get to things you're not typically moving a bunch of stuff around just to get to your rib eye stakes so that's the nice part about these now the other uh but you know the disadvantage is that cold air rushes out right away you'll find things on the door are going to start to frost up right away if you're in here for a few minutes um you know so that's kind of the disadvantage of them and they also kind of the big thing for me that i don't like about them is this door is so easy it can so easily get left open and if that gets left open it swings open and now what if a little child you know is playing in your basement where your freezer is and they open up the freezer and it doesn't get shut and you could have potentially a loss of all of your product um so that's you know it's a scary thing so i always recommend they these things come with a lock on the side keep that key have it up on the top or something and have it just part of the rule you always have to lock the freezer when you're done with it the other thing we've done is we've had uh we've had like a five gallon pail that we've pushed up against the door and that we know that that's pushing keeping it shut so those that's kind of probably the biggest disadvantage in my opinion of these uprights um now you know the newer ones they have an alarm system a lot of times built into them so if the temperature reaches a certain level it sounds an alarm so that's a nice option to have uh if you're going to have an upright maybe the newer one's the way to go with the alarm system now you can you can buy alarm systems so we we actually have one of those these are called the brand is uh it's actually called wireless sensor tags and it's just this little tag and you basically just stick this inside the freezer and then it has a little um it connects to this little home port and this you just put by your wi-fi router and put the app on your phone and it will automatically notify you if the temperature reaches a certain temperature so these are i think like 60 bucks maybe 80 bucks i can't remember offhand i mean you can go onto amazon and find a similar product too but anyways these are nice for you can do this for the chest freezer too if you wanted to um you know the other advantage of these is they're going to use less floor space as you can see this thing's a lot taller and you know as far as when you're figuring on how much space you're going to need these are going to be on the lower end so you're probably only going to get 25 pounds of meat per cubic foot and the reason for that is because you'll end up having some empty space typically because things don't stack as well like in a chest freezer so you're going to have like say this empty space up here where you just can't fit anything in there and it ends up just sitting empty so anyways um i hope this these videos are helpful and uh in picking out a freezer and what you need for getting prepared for your half a cow um so until next time uh thank you and remember know your farmer and you know your food

Channel: Wanda Farms

Views: 11,160

Keywords: Bulk Beef, Bulk Pork, Freezer, Grass-fed Meats, Wondershare Filmora

Id: Af1CwK2twno

Length: 10min 36sec (636 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 11 2021