Scott Bowen @ScottABowen - Twitter Profile

11 days ago

I've received a lot of DMs asking about beef pricing and I'm putting the explanation here so I can reference the post in future responses: Why rancher-finished beef costs $6 a pound hanging weight when you can buy cheaper elsewhere. (Hanging weight is 70-75% of take home weight, putting final cost between $10-$11 take home weight per lb.) It's a fair question especially from those who haven't been around cattle or ranching. The answer comes down to what "finished" means and how the animal got there. Finishing is the last stretch of a beef animal's life, the final four to six months, when it puts on the fat that gives beef its marbling, tenderness, and flavor. An unfinished animal is leaner, tougher, and blander. Some folks sell cattle that never went through a real finishing phase; less time and less feed, and you can taste it the first time you cook a steak. It takes like deer meat (to me anyway). Our cattle finish on open pasture with free-choice feed available whenever they want it. They graze grass, supplement themselves at the feeder, and take the time they need. They have fresh water, shade, room to roam, and frolic. No growth hormone implants and no confinement or restricted movement. Our finishing steers on a cool morning will run, buck, and play right up to harvest weight. An animal finished this way typically takes 24 to 30 months from birth to harvest, and it lives well the whole way. Grocery store beef comes out of feedlots where thousands of head stand in manure filled dirt pens, no grass, no shade, eating a formulated high-grain ration, with hormone implants boosting weight gain 10 to 20 percent. All is designed to get to slaughter weight faster and cheaper. A feedlot animal is often done at 14 to 18 months. They rarely move, and that's intentional. By the end, they can at most barely waddle from the feed bunk to the water tank. That kind of scale is exactly how the price gets driven down, and it comes at a cost the label doesn't show. Cheap beef requires crowding, confinement, and treating animals as production units, "Quality" is whatever survives the process. Then it all gets pooled. The beef in the grocery case is blended from countless animals, often including imported beef from overseas. Nobody can tell you what ranch it came from, because it is a mix of beef from across the globe. It's why one beef recall affects hundreds of thousands of people-- nobody knows what cow the diseased meat came from or what it was mixed with. The $6 a pound at our place goes to raising the animal, meaning two-plus years of grass, hay, and feed for one animal rather than 14 months of commodity ration split across ten thousand head. It covers land, water, and vet care, with no implants doing part of the work for free. Processing runs another $1.05 a pound hanging weight, paid to a small family run processor that cares and hangs and ages your beef for two to three weeks instead of rushing it from kill floor to cryovac. Nobody's getting rich at $6: we turn a modest profit only because we own the land. A rancher paying to lease or buy ground doesn't break even at $6 a pound hanging. That's the real cost of raising beef right at small scale, and it's why the price can't go lower without changing how the animal is raised. When you buy from a ranch, you're paying what the beef actually costs to produce, not what an industrial system can squeeze it down to. Cheaper beef is cheaper because somebody cut corners. Around here, nobody does. All life costs life and to believe otherwise disrespects that which sustains us. Our philosophy is to respect every animal that sustains us and our customers, giving each the best life possible. That is the real cost of doing business this way, and it's worth it.

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Scott Bowen

@ScottABowen

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