We're thinking about raising a beef calf and a piglet either this year or next but we're not sure how much meat we can expect to get off of them. We have a family of 5. For those of you who raise cows for meat, how many do you typically go through per year for your family size? Same ? goes for pigs... -J
Say on the high end you ate 2 pounds of beef a day. Thats 2 boxes of hamburger helper or a lot of burgers. 2 pounds times 365 days a year = 730 pounds of beef. One good cow will bring about that. But I bet you would only use about half that. Most familys split a cow with another family every year. One pig a year would do most people but if ya eat alot of pork you may need 2. It would be best to keep 2 of each. When you slaughter the oldest buy a young one to replace it. Nether do well alone.
We got a free Angus heifer 2 years ago which gave us 400lbs of beef and lasted us a year. She was only 1 years old though. The farmer was going to shoot her because she had a pinched nerve in her back and couldn't walk anymore. He didn't have any room in his freezer so he gave her to us. Lucky us! ETA: 400lbs of beef lasted my family a year with 2 adults and 3 children ages 10-2. We did make a point to eat more beef that year since it was FREE. It tasted so much better then the supermarket meat.
When I was growing up on a farm, we would sell feeder calves and keep one steer. Our family - with a father, mother, and 2.8 children (often had a foster kid ) - would go thru one steer each year. The steer was butchered at 16 to 18 months of age. As we grew up, we ended up taking a full-size steer to "Farmers Pack" about every 9 months. Appetites grew . We had the steer processed into sausage and bacon as well as more conventional cuts. So, our family ate beef 3 times day. With 5-600 pounds of beef, we were probably eating about what the average family was, in the way of meat, but it was almost all as beef. These days, we buy a half beef each year and split it with another family. That gives us about 150 pounds of meat. But, our household has either been 3 people or just the 2 of us, empty-nesters. We have some chicken but not much . . . plenty of eggs, always . Steve
We got a steer butchered in November, and got 478 pounds of beef on December 3. We're probably 1/3 of the way through it already! But we're a family of 8, with teenage boys... so we go through a lot of food. Somehow we've got to make the rest of it last until next December (or thereabouts) because I refuse to buy more than one steer per year!
