A buyer's guide to butchery

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October 30, 2024

The process of going from a live animal to meat in your freezer doesn’t have to be mysterious to you as a buyer. To the contrary, the more you understand about the process, the better you can make decisions as to how you buy. We're here to help our patrons make informed decisions about their food. In this post, walk through the processes our animals take to go from our lush pastures to your home.

Poultry

Most of our poultry gets processed on Polyface. Our summer stewards, our apprentice team, and our full time staff help with this throughout the year. If you are visiting the farm, we welcome you to come observe the processing as it goes on. Some of our farm workshops even teach you how to do it yourself.

Our chickens are packaged either as whole birds or are cut up into parts and you can buy: leg and thigh quarters, boneless skinless breast, tenders, wings, livers and hearts, necks and backs.

Cutting up chickens is more labor intensive than packaging our birds whole, which means that buying your birds whole will always be the more economic option. If you don’t have a specific recipe that you need a certain cut of chicken for (wing night!), consider trying a whole chicken.

I like to roast them in the oven, then after you have used the meat off your chicken, you can use the bones to make chicken broth! You can also learn how to cut up a chicken all on your own, there are plenty of videos to show you and it is a helpful and fun skill to learn!

Beef

Our grass fed and finished cattle are sent to our local abattoir straight from our farm. After the initial kill, the beef is skinned and gutted, and the carcass is hung in a cooler before being cut up. First, the beef is cut up into "primals" (eight large sections) and is then cut into roasts and steaks.

When you buy a whole beef or half beef, you will hear the term “hanging weight”. The hanging weight is the weight of the carcass that is hung in the cooler (about 60% of live weight). Additionally, when the beef is then cut up, the final product is about 65% of the hanging weight because of the bones and fat that have to be removed.

Beef purchased from our online store is sold either as one bundle or or by the piece - this means that you will receive beef within the weight range you select for a set price.

For each beef that goes to the butcher, we can only get a certain amount of steaks, roasts and organ meats cut and packaged. For instance, we only get one heart and tongue from each animal. This is helpful to keep in mind when you're looking at our available inventory. There are some items that will sell out quickly due to demand.

As you do your online shopping, consider trying different cuts that are more in abundance, and definitely enjoy snatching up your favorite cuts that might be more rare!

One of my favorite hacks is to use roasts and just cut them differently depending on how I am cooking. I like to chop a roast into cubes to use in stews and soups. Or I like to slice them thinly to make fajitas or Philly cheese steaks. Get creative!! If you ever need inspiration for how to use a particular cut of meat, please email one of our farm team! We have so many great cooks among us. :)

Pork

Pork is similar to beef in its journey from farm to fork. The hanging weight is again about 75% of the live weight and the meat you get at the end is another 75% of the carcass weight.

Pigs have lots of yummy cuts to enjoy. A lot of pork also gets ground up to make our different varieties of sausages (both ground sausage and links). There are lots of cuts on pork that are very often overlooked though that have such great flavor and fat content.

Another pork product is their amazing fat that can be easily rendered to make lard which is such a healthy and awesome animal fat to use while cooking.

Some products like bacon ends, are similar to the popular (and oft snatched up!) bacon. I enjoy using bacon ends in recipes that need bacon to be diced because it saves me a step. I love frying bacon ends up with some caramelized onions and eggs to make a yummy breakfast scramble.

My other favorite pork cut is pork backbone. This is such a yummy and easy cut of pork that I had never heard of before I came to Polyface but it is now my go-to pork based meal. I love putting pork backbone into the slow cooker with a simple rub and letting it simmer all day. Usually right before I get finished cooking it, I like to add some barbeque sauce on top, then I can either shred it and use it as a pulled pork or eat the whole cut. It is so simple and easy!

I hope that these “insider” tips have been helpful to draw back the curtain a little bit and show you the process of a live animal going to the butcher then to our online inventory of yummy meats.

Maybe as you do your online shopping, you can now understand the “why” behind what you see! Try out one of my favorite cuts and try a new recipe. As always, this post is by no means exhaustive and we would love to answer any questions you have about our meat. Please reach out to our team!

Priscilla

Duplication

"How does this scale?" Whenever someone asks me that question, the underlying assumption is that production volume requires consolidation, concentration, and centralization. In other words, the only way to feed the world is to make bigger chicken houses in one place, bigger canneries in one place, bigger machines and bigger warehouses. I remember well being vilified by a Smithsonian historian at a food conference where he and I were both on a panel. When I dared to suggest bigger is not always better, he interrupted me and ranted for 10 minutes on why bigger is always better. "A bigger fort was always bigger than a smaller one. A bigger gun was always better than a smaller one." He went on and on about how historical accuracy and authenticity demands addiction to bigger. But biology is not forts and guns. It's not mechanical. Critters have an optimal size. As animal behaviorist guru Temple Grandin says, living things demand energy for three things: reproduction, growth, and immunological function. All three must be in balance. When anyone selects for only one of those traits, the other two suffer. That's why American dairy cows only have two lactations on average. When they milk as heavily as our one-trait genetic selection asks, they don't breed and have all sorts of sickness problems. Nature does not scale through concentration; it scales with duplication. If nature wants more oak, it doesn't make one big tree; it makes acorns. If nature wants more milk, it doesn't make a great big cow; it makes calves. If nature wants more tomatoes, it doesn't make a monster tomato plant; it makes a bunch of seeds that make more tomato plants. Nature scales with duplication. At Polyface, rather than having a chicken house big enough for 15,000 chickens, we have 170 little 120 square foot portable shelters holding 75 birds apiece and giving us cumulative capacity for 15,000. But they're spread out in modules, duplicated, to give us the production volume. We run pigs in groupings of 35-50. A Smithfield confinement facility might house 5,000 hogs in a bigger-than-football-field-sized facility. The stench is unbearable. By spreading these pigs out across the landscape in small groups we get the same scale without any of the ecological, immunological, or animal welfare dysfunction. This could even be said of farming in general. People see the massive corn, soybean, and alfalfa farms in the mid-west and wonder how we would possibly survive without those massive, single-species outfits. The fact is they aren't even producing food. Half the soybeans are exported to other countries; those markets are drying up rapidly with competition from other countries like Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. Nearly half the corn goes to taxpayer-subsidized ethanol. The alfalfa goes to Japan and Saudi Arabia to feed racehorses. By and large, all that production isn't even food. The fact is we don't need to produce all those commodities and even if we needed it all for food, we could do it in a more spread out, diversified platform. America has 35 million acres in lawns. We have 36 million acres housing and feeding recreational horses. All of this could be turned into duplicative production, like acorns for oak trees. My point is this: scale as commonly understood in modern American lexicon is completely anti-ecological. The real mechanism for scale is duplication. A more democratized production creating volume through multiplicative nodes is the way nature works. This is why farms like Polyface, with spread out infrastructure in repeated modules offers multiple advantages. Polyface can't feed the world by itself, and we have no desire to build an empire trying to. But thousands of Polyfaces can feed the world. Indeed, they're the only way to do it for the next 500 years. This is one reason why we invest heavily in germinating new young farmers. Our stewardship and apprenticeship programs are all about this kind of duplication. In fact, Aug. 21-22 we're hosting the Stockman Grass Farmer's Launching Young Farmers conference where we'll feature 8 of our graduates who were 20 years old, no money, no land, and at 40 are full-time farming without government subsidies. If you ever dreamed of bootstrapping a farming career, you should come. We still have room. It will be the most profound agricultural conference in America this year. Information is on our website on the education tab. For most of you, the fact that you keep us in business to duplicate production and the farmers who will carry these principles forward, indicates your heart investing in an authentic food and farming model. Thank you for making it all possible.

A buyer's guide to butchery

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