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

Food Shortages

I'm in Oregon today speaking at the Azure Harvest Festival and a question from the audience during a Q&A stimulated a lot of discussion: "What do you think about the possibility and preparation surrounding food shortages?" David Stelzer, founder of Azure Standard, answered that the issue is not food volume, it's food nutrition. That was an interesting answer that has a lot of merit. As a nation, we are overfed and undernourished. This is the crux of the MAHA movement and the epidemic diseases we see in our country. At Polyface, we know the pastured meat and poultry we produce is far superior in essential phytochemicals and other nutrients due to the carotenes, exercise, and stress-free habitat we offer. You can taste the difference, feel the difference in texture, and measure it empirically. Perhaps my most poignant affirmation was our cat test. We purchased meat from the supermarket and offered our own for the four cats. They wouldn't touch the conventional meat (ground beef). Even though two plates and four cats would be much easier to accommodate if they spread out, all four crowded around the plate with our meat, eating it all and licking it up, before later sniffing and gingerly eating the supermarket counterpart. Since cats don't understand TV ads or USDA propaganda, they know what's good and what's not. We encourage anyone dismissive of food differences to ask their pets: you can trust them far more than doctors and experts. Yes, I get the nutrient deficiency angle on the shortage question. But I'd like to explore it a bit further. Right now, the world throws away more human-edible food, as a percentage of production, than at any time in human history. The planet is awash in food. Some 40 percent gets thrown away because it has a slight blemish, exceeds the sell-by date, or is tainted in some way. We have a fundamentally segregated food supply rather than an integrated one, and that creates a lot of unusable waste. The vulnerabilities of our food system, I think, are much more subtle. When I was in Uruguay two years ago, speaking at a conference, one of the other presenters was from Germany and showed a soil map of the globe. Not a single commercial agricultural region had a stable or positive soil trajectory. Every single area on the planet is losing soil; some faster than others, but globally our soil depletion continues without any sign of abatement. This is not a good trajectory. As much as the technocrats promise food without soil, that's not the way to bet. Soil is the skin of the earth. When it goes, famine results. The main difference now compared to centuries ago is that we have the capacity to move food around. Nobody starves due to a lack of food on the planet; they starve due to socio-political unrest and dysfunction. But what happens when massive areas can't grow anything anymore? Even being able to move food around doesn't help when there isn't enough. The soil trajectory does not look good. But at Polyface, we're building soil. Areas covered with shale (layered rocks) half a century ago now have a foot of soil on them. That's not the 3-5 feet that 150 years of inappropriate tillage eroded, but it's a build-back start. In addition to soil loss, as a planet we're seeing hydrologic decreases. The Oglala aquifer, which undergirds the irrigated agriculture in five states, has dropped more than 100 feet in the last half-century. At its current rate, it will be unpumpable in about 50 more years. Imagine if all those circular irrigation pivots in Nebraska and Kansas shut down. What then? At Polyface, we keep building ponds to inventory surface runoff. By definition, surface runoff occurs when rains come too fast at once or too much at one time for the soil to absorb it. Holding that and using it strategically in a drought is a way to reduce flooding during rain events and grow grass when it gets dry. This is one of the most landscape resilient techniques we can implement. Finally, major animal and plant diseases threaten the world's food systems like never before. African swine fever, hoof and mouth disease in cattle, and bird flu in poultry appear to be getting worse and covering larger areas. Why? We believe it's because chemicals and factory farming compromise the immunological systems in both plants and animals. Monocrops and chemical fertilizers wreak havoc on immune systems, opening the planet's food systems to new levels of fragility. In contrast, at Polyface, we believe happy animals and biodiversity offer the best antidote to immunological deficiency. Stress from unsanitary conditions, mono-species density, or dietary deficiency (rations or fertilizer) invites disease. Nature uses disease to cull the weak. Predators pick off the stragglers. This is the way biology works. But at Polyface, we keep these vulnerabilities at bay with compost fertilization, pasture rotations, and lots of species diversity, including pollinators and wildlife. Here's the point: the basic long-term vulnerabilities in the planet's food systems could all be reversed with practices Polyface uses every day. Looked at another way, the entire food shortage question could be answered if eaters and farmers implemented these ecological and immunological protocols, working together to rather than completely separated. We don't need to fall into an abyss of starvation. If we all simply began eating food from farms that build soil, increase water, and stimulate immunity, we could deliver a hospitable, abundant planet to our children. Reversing these trajectories wouldn't take much time or money. It takes intentionally-minded folks who connect the chain of sustenance from their plate to the planet. Polyface patrons do that. Thank you. Let's heal the land together. Joel

A buyer's guide to butchery

More from the blog

Food Shortages

Choosing Your Farmers

The Crisis Beneath Our Feet

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