Many years ago we did and you also paid for what you did not get, you paid for what the cow weighted before butchered. I don't know if this is the same way it is done now or not. You might be better off just to buy some good specials at the grocery unless you have other reasons to buy a half or fourth of a cow. Just my opinion.

Sue Who has cattle farms around her :) Hereford and Angus and some Shorthorn.

Hind quarter or front quarter?

Typically
when buying a quarter, it's a split share with cuts from both the front and
rear ends. ;)

two25,
we've raised them, not bought them grown.
Paying the hanging weight is the industry standard, and there will be a
processing fee (the butcher) added to that. At one time, the butchers
would allow you to come and wrap your own as they cut - that changed here
several years ago and we would pay for wrapping as opposed to paying for paper
(weighed) used. I liked to wrap my own, I had no surprises when opening a
package since I’d seen what went into every single one ;0)

If
you are dealing with a reputable grower/butcher, I can’t think of many tips you
would need. Make sure the amounts in
individual packages are appropriate for the size meals you will cook, it could
be frustrating to want a roast for three with leftovers and find yourself
thawing one that would feed a crowd.
When it was just two of us, I paid additional for ground meat in 1#
packages. If I needed more I could thaw
two, but if I’d thawed two pounds of hamburger and only need one I was
committed to cooking the rest of it. I
like flank, you didn’t mention those steaks.
I don’t think you will have many oxtail splitting the animal 4 ways but
there is always the chance someone else may not want it and it would be
available to you. Was there anything
specific you wanted to know?

Are they pre-freezing for you in their commercial freezers?

This is helpful. I am going to be calling them this afternoon to find out the price per pound hang and processing. I don't use a lot of Flank steak, I do use skirts but that's mostly because I can't get good ground beef so I grind my own skirt and add it to the store bought ground beef. Thanks for the heads up on getting the right size for our needs.

We don't eat much beef anymore, maybe not more than a few times a month. When we do, I don't think I would be as happy having something frozen (that we have no place to store anyway) instead of being able to buy fresh meat. Fresh always trumps frozen for me, whether it's meat/fish or veggies.

I used to get a hind quarter each year, but I think I do just as well by watching sales at the local grocery store. When there is a "bogo" special, I stock up.

We get a quarter or a half every year. Our cost averages to $3.50/pound. We use a LOT more ground beef than we ever expect (spaghetti sauce, meatloaf, chili, etc.), so we end up grinding a lot of the roasts and "cheaper" cuts of steak ourselves.

The steaks are always good, and not very marbled at all because the herd we buy from is grass-fed. The ground beef is also very low in fat, so it's dryer than the crap you buy at the grocery store. Plus we get the liver from several cows because most people don't like it (it's thrown in for "free" in our box), although my husband does eat it.

This was in our last order:

beef ribs
chuck roast
ground beef
rib steak
t-bone
chuck steak
round steak
rump roast
chuck roast
sirloin steak

stew meat

neck bones
filet
bottom sirloin steak
bottom sirloin roast
filet mignon

Nothing like organic, grass-fed, non-antibiotic meat on the table. :)

We did it once over fifty years ago. Found we had a good time eating all the good stuff willy nilly and then were left with a lot of hamburger! LOL We don't eat that much beef anymore although I've been trying to right now since I'm anemic.

We used to buy half a steer. We would buy it from one of the kids who raised it for the fair but didn't make the cut for the competition. A friend would buy the other half. I don't remember much about it except as Marilyn Sue said, I think we paid for the weight of the animal and of course, processing was extra. We have also raised our own beef. One thing for sure, the meat is much better than what we normally would buy.

I just spoke with the butcher at the shop we always buy package from and here is what he said. I may be off a bit on verbiage so I may break it down in simple terms.

A quarter cow using their popular 1/2 split meaning half from the front and half from the back averages 150 - 170 lbs - hanging weight and 100-110 edible meat is $3.39 per lb paid on the hanging weight. So I take average 160 lbs x 3.39 = $542.40 and when I take that and divide it by lets say an actual edible weight of 100 lbs I'm then paying $5.42 per pound for ground beef but I'm also paying that for my steaks and roast. Here ground beef is $4.99 for the good grass fed stuff and steaks, $9-16 per pound depending on the cut. The processing and packaging is included in that price. There is no additional cost.

I would be going for roasts, ribeyes, porterhouse, tenderloin, short ribs, beef shanks, oxtail, chuck steaks and skirt steaks and a lot of ground beef. As long as I keep the ground beef to 30-40 lbs I think I would do well. What do you think?

Provided there is a reason other than cost you are purchasing this way (grass fed, etc), it can come out well. If you are looking straight at cost, I find stocking up on sales to be much cheaper. If you are talking with reputable packers, they can get you all the options for which cuts/how to process the meat. For example, I get nearly all roasts, and cut my own steaks from them, as my guy gives me a price break when he doesn't have to cut them up.

Once you buy a grass-fed cow, you will never like the taste of grocery store (or butcher shop) beef again. It's healthier, too.

The price I quoted, above - $3.50/pound - is our actual cost of the meat in our freezer for the last cow-portion we bought. The processor is a friend of our farmer-friends who raise the cattle. We don't use a commercial butcher shop for processing.

We want to do this for a couple of reasons, first and foremost the quality of the beef at this particular place. We travel about 5 hours to get the meat, of course we do other things that day as well. And yes, we do it in one day as we have a diabetic cat that needs her shot every 12 hours. Having someone else do it, not an option. She would freak. Quality and price is really what it comes down to. They're meat is just that good to us. I haven't found it here. I've attended farmers markets, bought some of the beef from farmers but just not satisfied with the taste. I know that different kinds of cows taste different and certainly the way they are fed and pastured has a roll in the taste as well.

The 1/2 split you mention is different from how they do it around here. We get true front or rear quarters -- so if you wanted all the cuts you listed, we'd have to get a 1/2 beef.

Before you order yours, be certain they include the oxtail, shanks and such. They should be able to give you specifics on what cuts will come out of the split quarter you are buying. We also ask for all the extra fat and bones from the quarter. I roast the bones and make a hearty beef bone broth. The fat is put outside for the birds through the winter.

I do get most of my beef from a private butcher. Taste and cut of beef really is worth the "extra" cost. I also know there are no injections of "flavor enhancers" such as what Walmart puts in their meats.

We get a 1/4 cow every 8 months or so. It costs us over $800, we also get 10 rounds of sausage in that price. Not cheap. It is pastured beef so, yes, the taste is very different from supermarket beef.

There's lots of local grass-fed beef in my area. I like it for ground beef but I don't like it for steaks and roasts. For whatever reason, conventional beef seems more beefy to me.

For what I get at 1-5 pounds at a crack, I rely on Whole Foods buying practices (emphasizing local producers) to find what I want. I've tried grass fed beef from many sources (including what Costco has from across the 7 Seas) and I do find the local stuff to be tastier. But not tastier enough for when I want a tri-tip to BBQ, for that I prefer local but conventional beef. Fresh, not previously frozen.

I have not in ages. Of course I was raised on a farm and we had our own cattle and sheep which we would have butchered and packaged the freezer was always full between that and the deer and ducks and geese and what ever else the hunters brought in. I don't eat much beef any more. I do eat ground beef and roast occasionally but rarely steak it seems to really affect my stomach negatively. We both really like lean pork and mostly boneless skinless chicken breasts. I do watch for the good sales and stock up the freezer. It would take us way too long to eat that much beef so I don't see it happening.

Before some of us got old enough to head off to college and beyond (when everybody was still in EL-HI), my Dad, his sister and her neighbor would split a half a steer maybe 2-3 times a year. This would have been back in early 60's when having a "deep freeze" was kinda the thing. Between the 3 houses, 5 adults and 8 kids. Lived in SE PA and would drive down in the neighborhood of Conowingo Dam (maybe Chester county, can't remember for sure)... usually in Dad's big old, green Ford station wagon. Everything was cut, wrapped and labeled. You got half of pretty much EVERY part of the steer... way too much liver and other "gross" parts for my liking. Remember my grandmother chasing us around her house with the TONGUE.

I don't remember anything about the cost. Do remember it being a bit of a road race to get home before things started to thaw during summer.

When I was in college, would often come home on weekends. Remember one Sunday, going back with 2 1-lb packages of frozen short ribs... along with a big onion, bell pepper and big can of some kinda tomato something. Was living in a big old house with 15 other girls and didn't take long for housemates to start sniffing out where the aroma was coming from.

We get 1/2 a buffalo every winter but we're going to skip it this year, we still have a lot of meat in the freezer. We try to get as much in stew meat, steaks and roasts and then the remainder is ground. I don't use a lot of ground meat, so that's why we don't need any, I think we have about 50 pounds of ground waiting to get used.

I've thought about buying a quarter but like Elmer I have never cared for frozen beef. I do freeze ground beef or flank steak that will be used in recipes but I avoid freezing steaks or roast. You can put me in the category of disliking grass fed steaks and roasts. I prefer grain finished for flavor. It's difficult enough for the home consumer to find a good steak these days with the trend to leaner cattle. Once in a blue moon I will come across a really good steak past it's sale date marked down that people bypassed because it was to fatty (marbled). If it is getting a bit brown around the edges even better. I was raised in a meat loving a beef loving family.

I try not to freeze meat for more than a month. When I lived at home my mother & grandmother purchased 1/2 a steer. It always came with vegetables, as a filler on the price to make it more attractive. We had to own a freezer to store it and pay to keep it running. The meat is better& cost less, hand picked at the supermarket....was our assessment.

How much room in the freezer for 1/4? I've thought about it in the past but never looked into the actual volume needed to store it?

Would you buy a big steer? Or a little steer 0;) Expertly tightly wrapped, its said to take maybe 5+ cubic feet for a quarter beef. It's hard for me to guess, but the GE side by side refer I just replaced in my garage was 10 cubic feet on the freezer side and I'm sure it would have been more than half filled. Not that my preference would be to store beef long term in a self defrosting appliance attached to a refrigerator.

I had a 23 cubic feet upright in my former basement, with some things of my own frozen. My girlfriend bought an entire black angus with no place to put it for a couple of weeks. We got it neatly into that freezer but I don't remember now how many pounds it was. It was a lot ;0)

OT - I loved that freezer, and had it 40+ years without so much as a hiccup. I left it in place when we moved rather than take the door off the freezer and two off the house to get it outside like we had done moving it in, and replaced it with an energy efficient 18' upright that has proven to be small for our needs - I'd misjudged.

The steers we always butchered were 18 mo. old. That makes a lot of beef. They were raised in a pasture but fed grain every day. I don't think we came out ahead on the price of the beef....I am sure we didn't, but having that much meat on hand and the taste made up for it. It comes very well wrapped from the butcher...I don't think it affected the taste adversely.

We raise our own beef and its all shrink wrapped. I can see the meat as I take it our of the freezer.