Because I'm concerned with the end price including butchering, my memory of the cost breakdown details is not ironclad. Take these numbers with a grain of salt. The price varies from year to year, but we tend pay in the neighborhood of $3-$4/lb live weight. An adult live cow tends to weigh around 1,500 lbs, iirc.
All in, including butchering, there isn't a lot of saving here -- per pound of finished meat, we end up paying on the low end of supermarket prices.
However, and I can't emphasize this enough, the quality exceeds that of much more expensive meat. I never understood what vegetarians were talking about when they mentioned the "smell of death" on meat until the first time I bought it like this. The meat I buy doesn't have that smell, and once I encountered the difference, I absolutely understood what the vegetarians were saying.
The rancher doesn't butcher or package the meat. The rancher will deliver the cow to a local outfit that does that (and freezes the finished meat). We select what cuts we are most interested in, what cuts we want ground, and so forth. Then when it's done, we just show up with a truck to pick up the packages. They're packaged just like you get from most other butchers, wrapped in plastic with an outer wrapper of waxed butcher paper.
The only "party" aspect to it is that none of us has enough freezer space to hold an entire cow, so we have to coordinate so that we can divvy up the packages and take them to each of our homes immediately.
I should mention the other nice thing about doing it this way -- we (or one of us, really) actually go to the ranch to make arrangements and select the animal. That means that we can see with our own eyes that the animals were treated well, are in good health, and so forth. Doing this has made visible an awful lot of what used to be invisible and mysterious. In terms of feeling good about the process and intellectual curiosity, this is invaluable.
All in, including butchering, there isn't a lot of saving here -- per pound of finished meat, we end up paying on the low end of supermarket prices.
However, and I can't emphasize this enough, the quality exceeds that of much more expensive meat. I never understood what vegetarians were talking about when they mentioned the "smell of death" on meat until the first time I bought it like this. The meat I buy doesn't have that smell, and once I encountered the difference, I absolutely understood what the vegetarians were saying.
The rancher doesn't butcher or package the meat. The rancher will deliver the cow to a local outfit that does that (and freezes the finished meat). We select what cuts we are most interested in, what cuts we want ground, and so forth. Then when it's done, we just show up with a truck to pick up the packages. They're packaged just like you get from most other butchers, wrapped in plastic with an outer wrapper of waxed butcher paper.
The only "party" aspect to it is that none of us has enough freezer space to hold an entire cow, so we have to coordinate so that we can divvy up the packages and take them to each of our homes immediately.
I should mention the other nice thing about doing it this way -- we (or one of us, really) actually go to the ranch to make arrangements and select the animal. That means that we can see with our own eyes that the animals were treated well, are in good health, and so forth. Doing this has made visible an awful lot of what used to be invisible and mysterious. In terms of feeling good about the process and intellectual curiosity, this is invaluable.