This is what responsible, healthy, direct beef consumption looks like.
Factory farming is far worse. Avoid factory farmed meats for your own health, for our environment, and for the animals’ sake.
Not so much this:
This: “We slaughtered a steer to supply us with our next 6 months of beef. Here’s an album of pics.”
“This particular steer was bought at auction when it was a calf, after buying the steer, paying for the guy to slaugter and deliver it to the butcher, then paying the butcher, the end cost was about $2/pound. The cheapest hamburger goes for about $3.50/lb where I live. He grazed for about 9 months before he was killed.
We now have a few cows and there’s a bull that visits when they want a gentleman caller. Last year we kept a calf from one of the cows and just had him slaughtered in June. Cost on that one was just over $1/lb. I’ve been told that the quality of the meat is on par with the organic free-range grass fed beef you’d find in high end grocery stores for upwards of $15-$20/lb. I’ve never bought that kind of meat so that’s just hearsay…
Grass is cheap, you don’t get as much meat and they grow slower, but the meat is lean and delicious. Also the cattle don’t seem to get sick when you’re not loading them up with grain and regular animal feed, so vet costs are few and far between.
We split the meat with another family since one steer produces a lot. I share some with my family and put the rest into a chest freezer at -10 degrees, it lasts 9 months easy, the ground beef will go a year pretty easy. If it gets too close to being too old we have a big BBQ to use up anything that’s at the limit. I also have a lot of it sliced for jerky, probably 20lbs or so out of each steer ends up as jerky…
Once you go grass fed the meat from the store will taste really funny. It’s got a much meatier flavor, for lack of a better word. Also leaner, and the fat that it does have has a much better flavor. This steer was split between 2 families, a total of 4 adults and 7 kids. It yielded around 320 pounds of meat which lasted about 6 months.”
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The above is via Reddit, and imgur. For (much) more by way of comments, click here.
More on grass-fed. More on mindful meat consumption.
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