aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

The cow: #9

I have to tell you that for a city-slicker (gay, at that!) buying a country cow is no easy feat. A friend, involved in organics here, forwarded an email and asked did I want to.

I said yes.

I note that another friend has corrected me; what we bought, says he, is not a cow but rather a steer. Some say that by the look of him he is, in fact, a Black Angus steer. The guy who sold him to me, the guy who raised him on his land, calls him a cow. Cow #9. I will, therefore, continue to refer to him as a cow.

I did the planning for this project and was told that [CORRECTIONS INSERTED LATER] confused and understood that half a cow would probably weigh 400 pounds “hanging” (!) and yield 300 pounds of meat. We bought in for half, and planned to split that half with another couple. As those figures sank in - three. hundred. pounds. - I began to panic. That’s a lotta cow! I can’t say that I honestly eat that much meat.

We invited in a third couple.

I followed along the progress of the cow, and when he finally got to the abattoir he weighed in at 1048 pounds. Our half, at $2 per pound, was $1,048. The hanging weight of the whole cow. minus the head, hooves &tc., was 524 pounds. Next we had to tell them how to cut him up. Again, I can’t say that I ever really knew all the cuts of beef, where they came from, how much there was of what, or how to cut it up!

The three people at the abattoir were incredibly helpful; they took us into the office, sat us down, and walked us through… Inch and a half steaks. More roasts than cubed. Leave the sirloin whole. Pound to pound and a half packages of ground. Julia got the liver. (Next time maybe I’ll ask about other parts that the dogs might enjoy; this time I was just happy to make it that far!) The cow must hang in the cooler for at least a week, three weeks if you want it “aged.” Ours hung 10 or 12 days.

When I picked up the meat they hauled it to my car in brown paper shopping bags piled on a hand truck and loaded it into my trunk. Processing costs include a $40 “kill fee” (our half was $20) and then 33¢ per pound of processed meat. The total was $106.46. When I got home and looked at the receipt I saw that it had written on it, “1/2 524 = 262 lb.” Not wanting to cheat my friend, I returned to the abattoir and asked had they undercharged me?

He explained that the hanging weight of our cow #9 - after the head, hooves, skin, &tc had been removed - worked out to be half of the total weight of the cow (typically, he said, it’s about 60%). We were not undercharged. Each of the three couples has roughly 80 pounds of meat at roughly $4 per pound.

His receipt was right-on. The whole cow weighed 524, our half was 262. The people at the abattoir couldn’t understand where I was coming from saying that the cow weighed 1,048 pounds. The error was in an email from the guy who sold me the cow. In that email he absentmindedly quoted me the whole cow price, not the half, and because I had no idea what a half or a whole cow would weigh, I went from there. When I gave him the check he didn’t look at it until later then called and wondered, “didn’t you think that was too much???” Duh, NO! How would I know what a cow weighs???

All of us bought chest freezers but I’ll spare you that story. We plan to finish it off by fall. And buy another cow.