Tualco Loop Beef

Thanks for explaining that so nicely Laurabeth Roundy

“Hanging” carcasses in the drip cooler, to come down to temp, before they are moved over to the age cooler to dry age for 14-18 days
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Q: Why Is Pricing Based on Hanging Weight Rather Than Take-Home Weight?

A: Many consumers wonder why farms and butchers charge based on the hanging (or carcass) weight instead of the final take-home weight of the meat.

The reason lies in the variability of custom processing. Each customer has different preferences when it comes to how their meat is cut up. For example, one customer may request all bone-in cuts, while another may prefer all boneless options. One customer may ask us to leave all of the fat on, and then the next customer asks us to trim every cut lean. If a customer or producer would like their beef dry aged for longer, it is going to lose about a half a percent a day of its weight in moisture.
These choices significantly affect the final take-home weight, even though it could be the same animal, which is the same amount of labor for the farmer and for us.

Hanging weight provides us a standardized and consistent basis for pricing. Although the concept of hanging weight may be less intuitive for consumers, it allows farmers and processors to fairly cover our costs and set our prices from there.

One topic I could get up on stage and talk about for an hour without any preparation at this point would be “carcass weight” to “take home weight”.

Most customers of farm direct beef do not have a good grasp on what “hanging weight” is, so I have started using the lingo “carcass weight” in lieu of “hanging weight”, as it seems to intuitively make more sense to them.

One of the most important parts of sales for beef producers is to understand all of the variables that affect take-home percentages, have a notion of what their estimated take-home product will be, and fully fully make sure their customer understands how the industry works with purchasing a portion / share of a live animal and how that translates to take home meat that is nicely wrapped up and in a box. 

Once a week I have a “where is the rest of my meat?” comment, and it always makes me feel bad. I know that our shop does everything possible to protect the integrity of that carcass and get customers as much take home meat as possible, but I do feel bad for customers with unmet expectations. That experience is going to sour them against purchasing farm direct, and we are looking to bring more people into the fold of purchasing beef directly from local farmers, not have them be disappointed in the experience.

As a customer, if you want the maximum value from your carcass: select every single cut, take the dog bones, ask us to package fat. You will notice on our data spreadsheet below that the more hamburger a customer gets the lower their take-home percentages. This is because there is no bone in the cut, and we have to trim it up carefully to ensure nothing gross goes into the grind, so there will be less weight to take home.

As a producer of beef know the variables of: quality of the slaughter job, feed, genetics, age, carcass weight, and dry age time will all effect how much meat comes out of the carcass.
We have seen everything from 38 to 67% cut out, and that is without doing anything different on our end. Those variables that we cannot control are affecting the take home weight. 

One variable that we can control is the dry aging time and making recommendations on how long to age beef for.
If there is a young, lean bull with zero fat cover, that beef is not going to age well.
If there is a 1000 pound carcass that was grain fed with a nice fat cover, that beef can age away for days and days and be better for it.
I could launch into each one of those variables and explain how they affect the cut out rates, but I am already pretty wordy here as is. Maybe in another post.

If you are a producer of beef looking to grow your herd, wanting to maximize the take home product for the customer and looking to have them be well educated so they are happy consumers of local beef, always feel free to reach out.
I would love to talk to you about how to set yourself up to have satisfied educated customers, with nice cut out percentages from the beef. 

“Where is the rest of my meat?”

Here is just a quick reminder that “hanging weight” DOES NOT EQUAL “take home weight”.

Most beef that go through our facility are aged for 16 to 18 days, unless they are smaller or don’t have much fat cover and then we age them for 10 to 12.
During that duration, the meat tenderizes and gains flavor, but the exterior ages.
In the cutting room, all of that age is cut off and disposed of.

On average 15 to 20% of a cow’s weight is made up in bones. We package up soup bones and dog bones, but there are other bones that are disposed of.
We count soup bones in take home weight (because they do have meat on them) but dog bones are not weighed or counted in the percentage.

Also, a lot of the take-home percentage variation is based off of how fat a cow is.
If a cow has a lot of fat cover on it, it is going to age well and taste amazing, but we have to cut off and dispose of that extra fat. Kidney fat alone can weight 10 lbs per half.
We have beautiful looking beef come through our facility the only have a 52 to 54% cut out percentage because of how much fat cover they have.
We are happy to package it up and send it home with customers who want it but don’t put that weight towards the take home percentage either.

If an animal has ever had an injury and has scar tissue, you definitely do not want that in your burger, so it is cut out and disposed of as well.

(At the end of the processing week we are left with these barrels of scraps that are very costly to dispose of. We have been incorporating the disposal fee into our process cost but starting Jan 1, 2025 we will need to add a small disposal fee to each 1/4 of a beef order to help cover the growing cost of this side of the business.)

As a custom shop, we obviously want everyone to get as much product back as they possibly can. We do everything we can on the processing side to salvage and save as much consumable product, and age animals for the appropriate amount of time, but as it stands, about 40% of every hanging beef goes to the scrap barrel.
If you are going to raise and sell beef, please help your customers understand this, and we will do our best to help our consumers understand as well.

This is good information!

Photographed here is a very average take home 1/4 of a beef.

Weekly we have customers that have no idea what to expect regarding take-home product.
Not to make anyone feel bad, but I have had people show up in a minivan asking if they have enough space to pick up a quarter of a beef.
I always feel a little bad when somebody is expecting a huge haul and I am the one to dash their dreams and am like: this is it.

This is a weekly occurrence, unfortunately, and I have to smile and remind people that I have in fact, put an entire processed beef in the trunk of my Honda Accord before.

Let’s do a little math.

Let’s say a 18-24 month old “in condition” steer comes to us, weighing 1400 lbs on the hoof : live weight.

We estimate about a 46% loss from “on the hoof” to “on the rail”, which would make the “hanging weight” for that beef’s carcass 756 lbs.

After aging for two weeks and being processed, a customer can expect (-/+) 60% of the hanging weight (after we cut off the aged exterior, fat, gristle, bones, etc) in take-home product weight, which would be 454 lbs of meat.

Back to the quarter customer, that would make their take-home product weigh 113lbs, which is roughly like the three boxes of meat shown above.

(Obviously, there is a huge variety there. We have processed an entire beef that weighed 300 pounds hanging and have also processed an entire beef that weighed 1700 pounds hanging. The age / feed / breed of an animal are going to change these numbers; this is just one specific example that’s pretty common for an average steer raised to be butchered in condition.)

As I always say, an educated customer with realistic expectations is a happy one.

Truthfully, one of the hard things about this industry for me is we work with dozens, up to 100, customers every week, and a lot of them have never had experience buying directly from a farm before and have no idea what to expect when having a portion of an animal custom processed.
There’s only so much time I have available on a weekly basis to help new processing customers understand the process, so our goal as a processor is to present as much information as we can upfront here on Facebook and on our website, so that farmers and therefore their customers really understand the process start to finish and what they are going to get and what is reasonable and what isn’t.
Like I was saying, it is unreasonable to expect to fill a minivan with 1/4 of a beef, but if you didn’t really know what you were buying, and you had never done this before, how would you know?

I would love to see more new consumers purchasing meat farm direct and farmers raising the animals to sell to them, and that involves a real team effort of getting out into the community and helping educate and reaching consumers on what to expect.

SOLD-We are butchering on Saturday (August 17) and I have 1/2 share available. Message me for details if interested ☺️

Send a message to learn more

I have beef shares available in May. Message me if interested. Grass finished

Good information 🙂

A nice graphic regarding realistic expectations on take home product when purchasing beef farm direct.

I have beef shares available. We sell 1/4, 1/2 or whole. Being done on March 2, processed the 18th or 19th of March and ready for pick the end of that week. Message me for pricing. Yummy grass finished beef.

We are butchering on Saturday (Feb. 3). I still have 1/2 share available. Yummy grass finished beef. We use North Fork Packing for butchering and processing. Message me for more information

We will be butchering again on Saturday, December 30. I still have a few shares left. If your interested send me a message. Our beef is grass finished, raised her on our farm.

We are taking orders for September. We sell 1/4, 1/2 or whole shares. Message me for more information if you are interested.

Scheduling a butcher date for January. We still have one steer available. Selling by quarter, half, or whole. Price is $3.25 lb (hanging weight). Our animals have been weighing 700-800 lbs. We use Silvana Meats in Stanwood for processing. You will have to pay a cut & wrap fee to them. These are YUMMY grass fed angus. Message me if interested. This has been sold but I am taking orders for March when we will be butchering again