Purchase our Meat
Excellent pasture-raised lamb and beef is seasonal – It is best when the grass is the best, so we don’t harvest animals in the winter months. Pasture quality also naturally peaks and ebbs with the changing temperatures and rainfall throughout the growing season. Working in sync with the seasons and pastures, beef will typically be ready around the beginning of July (but occasionally also the end of August), and lambs in November (but sometimes a few available in June).
Are you interested in purchasing some meat? Here is the process:
Contact us!
Give us a call or send us an email telling us that you would be interested. Supplies can be limited, so be sure to contact us as soon as you are interested. If you have ordered from us in the past, we will contact you and send you an order form as harvest season approaches.
We reply.
We will get back to you as soon as we can and let you know approximately when we next will have animals ready.
On the list!
We will put you on our list for a reservation.
Receive order form.
One to two months before you will pick up the meat, we will send you an order form in the mail.
Send deposit.
Please fill out the order form specifying how you would like the meat cut and packaged and return it to us with a deposit. Once we receive the order form and the deposit back, your meat will be officially reserved.
Remember pickup date!
With the order form, you will be notified of a pickup date and time. We typically use either Schmidt’s Meat Market, or George’s City Meats (both in Nicollet MN) for most of our processing, and that is where you will pick up your meat.
Complete payment.
We will meet you at one of the shops in Nicollet where you will pay them for the processing (credit card, check, or cash), and then pay us (check or cash) for the remainder of the cost of the meat.
Pricing for Lamb
We sell whole or half lambs and charge per pound of live weight. Prices start at $2/lb – please contact us for the most current prices. Most of our lambs will weigh about 120 pounds at the time of harvest. A whole lamb usually yields approximately 40 pounds of meat.
Pricing for Beef
We sell quarters, halves, or whole beef starting at $2.70 per pound of hanging weight, with the hanging weight of a quarter beef ranging from 160 to 200 pounds. The final cutting will result in approximately 95 to 110 pounds of meat that you bring home (not including marrow bones or fat trim), depending exactly on the size and yield of the animal. Contact us for the most up to date pricing info.
What is hanging weight?
Hanging weight is the weight of the animal after the hide, head, hooves, and digestive tract have been removed. As the animal is cut into neat packages for you to take home, excess fat and large bones are removed, so you will take home less weight of packages than the hanging weight. If you request all of the bones and fat, then the weight of packages you take home will be equal to the hanging weight. I have done this before, using the bones to make bone broth for soup and for feeding to the dogs, and rendering some of the fat and feeding the rest to the dogs and cats, but it does take quite a bit of extra freezer space. But if you would like to take home the entire hanging weight, you certainly can.
An alternative way to think of hanging weight is to think of your Thanksgiving turkey – when you buy your whole turkey, you are essentially buying the hanging weight. The feathers, head, feet, and digestive tract have been removed, but when you are done with Thanksgiving dinner, there is a pile of stuff left from the turkey that isn’t meat. Not everyone makes use of the bones and extra fat and skin, but it is all included in the price of the turkey.
Why do we sell by the hanging weight?
We currently have our animals processed at a “custom exempt” butcher shop. The Minnesota Department of Agriculture defines various levels of inspection for butcher shops, and “custom exempt” involves the least regulation, allowing the shops to keep operating costs low. This translates to lower prices for you for processing. But to comply with these regulations, these meat markets can only process animals for the owner of the animal – and the resulting meat cannot be sold to someone because it is not USDA- or State-inspected (that is why the packages of meat you bring home will be marked “not for sale”). Therefore, when you buy “meat” from us, you are actually buying the animal, and we bring the animal to the meat market for you. So the meat market is actually processing your animal (or some fraction of an animal) for you. So for us to comply with regulations on the farm side of things, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture requires us to sell you the animal by either the live weight or hanging weight. Logistically on our farm, selling the beef by the hanging weight (instead of live weight) works best for us. So that is why we sell our beef by the hanging weight.