Raising your own beef for consumption....

[Jolyn]

Wow great info guys!!! I still need to go back and take notes on all you said. I will be back with more questions and I'll also PM you turnerstar. Thanks so much.

 

[greyfields]

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This is the place for it.

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Of course. All kinds of people raise beef here.

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18 months or so, end of their second summer... with some being over-wintered until the spring flush then processing around 2 years of age.

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We get around 550 lbs of meat out of a beef cow and it lasts us a year. I do five per year and sell the other 4, so essentially our customers pay us to eat the 5th cow for free.

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A weaned calf will be $600-$750 depending on weight. Processing costs me $0.82/lb through USDA. You will be able to get it in the $0.35 to $0.50/lb range if you go the farm slaughter route.

 

[Jolyn]

Awesome information greyfields!!!!!! Thank you so much!

 

[quadcam79]

2 years to grow out....this reminds me, has anyone else seen a movie called King Corn? http://www.kingcorn.net/
anyway, two guys from the city decide to go to Iowa and raise an acre of corn and track where it goes after it's harvested....I'm gettin to the beef part......

so in one section they talk about how cattle that are raised for food are held in these small lots called feed lots where they are fed corn constantly to make them gain weight fast so they can go to market.

they actually have to be ready within something like 4 months or
else the constant diet or corn will start giving them ulcers and they'll start to die.

 

[priszilla]

so what kind of cow tastes best?we have been discussing getting a calf for meat too- going in halves with our neighbor who has the pasture

 

[rjv_piper]

I just got into showing steers in 4-H and know alot about raising, feeding, and showing them, so if you have any questions, feel free to pm me.
My show steer this year is a limi flex (limousin crossed with an angus) he looks very good and has turned out very big. He will be about two years old when he goes to the butcher. I don't know much about processing or the price of that, but I know quite a bit about the best feed, what a good steer should look like, and how to raise a healthy good looking steer.

 

[turnerstar31]

sweetshoplady no problem I will try and help you with anything thing that i can

 

[turnerstar31]

I do have to say it is the best. You in the end prolly pay a little more but once you taste it you will never go back to store bought. In fact I hate the taste of store bought meat and I can taste if I have to buy it. Last year I did because my freezer got low because the people that we have butcher our cattle seem to really be racking in the busniess and there is a list but I will not go through any one else so I had to wait to get mine done up but it is so worth it.

 

[Wildsky]

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Its just gross, there is a feed lot about an hour from us, we've driving past it and it smells SO SO bad....... just that and reading Omnivore's dillema made me think alot about what we eat.

 

[Their Other Mother]

Along time ago in a far off place... back when I was in Highschool -- I used to raise a calf every year as an Ag project for school. One of my classmates had a Dairy and would sell me a Brown Swiss bull calf for $10 bucks. We fed him hay, rolled corn & rolled barley and would have him butchered at about 1 year old becaue I had to finish out the project and turn in all the recorded data. The cost per pound of meat was always higher than that at the grocery store so we didn't save money that way but the quality was far superior. Now if we would have had pasture for graizing that would have been a different story.
As for getting attached - Well no matter how often you tell a kid - "Don't fall in love - it's for slaughter" It aint gonna work! What did soften the blow was that we would have a butcher come pick the live steer up to take it off for processing. So in our eyes the steer went away in a big blue trailer. Then we just went to the butcher shop and picked up little white packages of beef. We never saw the slaughter house. We would rent a meat locker at his place too because we didn't have enough room to keep it all at home and the meat would last us a little over a year for a family of 4 allowing for visits from relatives.