A few weeks ago I promised I would share my experiences getting a grass fed quarter of beef. Here in Virginia steers are grass fed as the norm about 9 months of the year. Some are sold to feedlots but some farmers sell grass fed directly to people like me and you.

Yesterday we got up relatively early and drove out to the country. About two hours south of here is a town called Harrisonburg, in the middle of rural Virginia.

Several weeks ago I had gotten a call from a farmer who I had previously contacted. She said a grass fed two year old steer that had eaten nothing but grass (along with kelp and salt available when it wanted) was going to slaughter. I ordered a front quarter.

The way it works here is this: the animal is slaughted and the beef is "processed" at a meat packer. In this case the packer is a neighborhood butcher in Harrisonburg. The meat hung to dry age for about two weeks in their facility.

I called them and discussed the order. I opted for vacuum packed freezer packages rather than butcher paper as these last longer. I ordered one inch steaks (the ribeyes or delmonico), the good roasts deboned and put in 3 pound packages, about 10 pounds of sliced liver, and the bones in a separate bag. The rest was to be ground into hamburger with about 20% fat that they put into one pound packages.

The quarter weighed a surprisingly high 145 pounds. I can't tell you how much meat I got, probably somewhere under 100 pounds. They cut and froze it Thursday so it was getting pretty solidly frozen (but not entirely) when we picked it up on Saturday. There was a full box of ground beef, several packages of short ribs, the steaks, about 6 roasts, the liver, and some other stuff along with a big bag of bones.

Last night we had hamburger. It was not as fatty as I thought it would be, and the meat was a bit tougher than what I am used to (corn fed as I have not had grass fed burgers much.) It was a little beefier tasting. The fat was not nearly as, how can I describe it, *hard*. Definitely different but delicious. We are used to grass fed steaks that we pay high prices for at Whole Foods but now we will eat grass fed beef whenever we have beef.

The cost was (in US dollars) $1.55 per pound to the farmer for the full weight, $0.46 per pound to the butcher for the full weight, and the costs of pickup. I would guess the total cost is somewhere around $3.00 or so per pound. Not cheap but not outrageous either. 

Next: we are looking out for grass fed pork and pastured chickens! "Free range" chickens according to sources are a bit better than factory farmed chickens but not the same as pastured chickens and we want the pastured kind.

--Richard