How to Buy Hormone Free, Grass Fed Beef

Our family recently had our first experience with buying hormone free, Grass Fed Beef, and it was definitely a much different process than going to the store and picking up a package of meat. We recently switched to a more organic lifestyle, and it has been a moderately paced process. It didn’t happen overnight for us, but we have taken one small step at a time. Buying grass fed beef was the next step for our family.  There are some things you might like to know before you head down this path, and we’d like to share a few tips we learned through the experience.

You can see in the picture above that there is very little fat, and ground sirloin is much more expensive in our area than the other ground meats. It looks like 90/10 when cooked in the frying pan.  Check out all of our organic living posts and our green living posts.

How to Buy Hormone Free, Grass Fed Beef

1. Know how much you need. We started with a quarter of a beef, instead of a half and we split this three ways between my mom, our family, and a friend.  This resulted in about 20 pounds of ground beef per person, and several steaks and other cuts of meat. In the end we calculated all of the beef to be about $3.50 per pound, which is muss less than what we could buy in the store when you consider the cost of hamburger in our area is $4.99 per pound, let alone steak and better cuts of meat.
2. It costs less, but the bill is high.  It was a little bit of sticker shock when I had to pay $780 to the farmer and $120 to the butcher. It was $900 total and split between the three of us, it was $300 per family. Again, this was much cheaper than store-bought meat, but had I purchased the quarter just for our family, it would have been $900! That is a lot of money to fork out at one time for beef, so know exactly how much this is going to cost your family.  Make sure to do the math beforehand so you aren’t way over your budget.  Our cost was $3.00 per hanging pound plus another $0.50 to butcher and wrap.
3. Know which part of the cow you want.  There is the front, middle, and back ends, and we chose the middle section at the recommendation of the farmer.  He explained that this has the most versatile cuts, and we would be able to get a good mix of steaks, hamburger, ribs, and more.
4. Decide if you need a freezer. We knew immediately that this would not fit into our regular freezer, so we plugged our deep chest freezer back into the outlet, and thank heavens it still worked. You will need to decide if you can fit all of your meat into your freezer, and if you get a quarter or half for yourself, you may need an extra large deep chest freezer, so know exactly how much your freezer will hold.  You don’t want to be stuck with meat that doesn’t fit the day you bring it home.
5. Make sure they flash freeze the meat.  Because we arrived at a certain time of day, they were able to freeze our meat some, but it wasn’t completely frozen, so we had to lay each pound of hamburger on its side so blood did not run into our car.  The butcher prepared us for this, so we placed garbage bags into our empty Huggies diaper boxes before we left our house, so it did not leak out into our car. I can’t imagine the smell of meat blood in the car, so make sure you lay down some garbage bags just to be safe.
6. Check your freezer often. I have had several friends who have had their freezers quit working, or electricity go out and a breaker blow and they don’t know that their freezer has stopped working. This is a lot of money to lose in your investment, so you probably want to check your freezer at least once a day. Honestly, I check mine in the morning and in the evenings. Our one friends who lost their meat many years ago still impacts me just from the smell that it left in their house!
7. Check out your farmer. We had several local farmers to choose from since we live in PA dairy and beef country. The farmers we chose actually go to our church, and we are somewhat familiar with their family. Oftentimes, organic farmers will sell whole organic chickens as well. Make sure to get references from others who have used the same farmer so you know you are truly getting organic, grass fed beef.
8. Find out when they butcher. Our butchers only sell this beef twice a year. I realize that I will run out of beef before our six month window this first time. So next time we will probably keep a quarter just for our family of four.  One of the butchers we talked to also only butchered organic, grass fed chickens a few times a year, where the other butcher butchers their chickens all the time, so we could order whenever we wanted.

These are just a few tips that we learned along the way in our process of buying grass fed beef. If you have other tips, please comment them below.