What's your experience with beef butcher bills.

I took a 4 year old cow in to have it butchered. All hamburger. I side weighed 420 and the other side was 424 lbs.
end result was 483 lbs hamburger. The bill was $456.00
How does this price compare to butchers in other parts of the country?

My guy charges 60.00 to kill and .56/lb to cut and wrap. Your yield seems a bit light but it is all burger so there is no bone. I've never believed that raising my own beef was cheaper but am convinced it is a better (and known) quality.

I think I paid $.58 hanging last time +$50 kill fee. Seems like you're getting charged a little less than that.

I can get a whole beef cut and vaccum packed for 50 cents a pound but it would probably be more if they boned it out for straight hamburger. Did you get the heart and ox tail and the ribs and neck bones and soup bones?, there is a lot of good eating that won't get ground up for hamburger.

Last fat steer we had done was around $375. Wasn't quite as heavy as your cow and we had all the regular cuts,not just burger.

Last steer that I took i'm guessing weighed around 1,200. Cost close to $700 and i'm betting I didn't get a third of the meat. He's the only butcher around here though.

Our butcher charges $40 slaughter fee plus $.52 per pound hanging weight for butchering. I have not asked if there is any difference if it was to all go to hamburger. That would mean your animal would cost $479 for butcher fees there.

I have found raising mixed-bred calves that the 65% live to hanging is pretty close for most angus-based calves. I was under the impression that 80% of hanging weight would end up in the freezer, but of late, that has been questioned by several folks. When I look at their butcher tickets, I see what LAA was alluding to, that most families are passing on the stew meat, soup bones, tail and for sure the offal.

Your cow would have been about 1300 pounds live weight, 844 pounds hanging weight at 65%. The hamburger you got is 57% of the hanging weight. Could there be another 194 pounds of packaged meat if you had gotten everything? Yes, I believe there could be, but you certainly don't want any bone ground into your burger, nor liver and tongue!

(quoted from post at 06:35:06 01/03/17) Our butcher charges $40 slaughter fee plus $.52 per pound hanging weight for butchering. I have not asked if there is any difference if it was to all go to hamburger. That would mean your animal would cost $479 for butcher fees there.

I have found raising mixed-bred calves that the 65% live to hanging is pretty close for most angus-based calves. I was under the impression that 80% of hanging weight would end up in the freezer, but of late, that has been questioned by several folks. When I look at their butcher tickets, I see what LAA was alluding to, that most families are passing on the stew meat, soup bones, tail and for sure the offal.

Your cow would have been about 1300 pounds live weight, 844 pounds hanging weight at 65%. The hamburger you got is 57% of the hanging weight. Could there be another 194 pounds of packaged meat if you had gotten everything? Yes, I believe there could be, but you certainly don't want any bone ground into your burger, nor liver and tongue!

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I typically get about 65% hanging then 65% packaged. A little over 40% of live weight comes home. Mine are pretty much straight Angus.

Last steer that I took i'm guessing weighed around 1,200. Cost close to $700 and i'm betting I didn't get a third of the meat. He's the only butcher around here though.

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Many people are much better at guessing live weight than I am, so without a scale I worry about using that as a reference. Almost all butchers have a scale for hanging weight, so I like to use that as the reference.

Even so 1300 lbs at 65% is 845lbs hanging. As mentioned before, IF you can maximize and take every bit of useable meat at 80%, you would be 590 pounds or so, 45% of live weight. Take out 50 pounds of offal, and 30 pounds of soup bones/tail/shank etc, and you have under 40% of the live weight.

That sized carcass at our butcher would be under $500, but we are a long haul from Kansas

I tend toward less fat on my animals than usual, and I don't push them really big, either. I see that my butcher cuts the meat pretty lean, and I know families are not eating as much red meat today as decades ago. I like to have all my halfs be around 300 pounds hanging weight- about a 900 pound live weight. Each year, the customer gets about 200 pounds of meat in the freezer, enough to eat all year, maybe run out of hamburger and steaks. That way they can be forced to buy store burger and compare quality, and maybe buy store steaks at $11/lb and recognize some value in my product. I charged $2.75 per pound hanging last year, with butcher fees and an average yield of 70% from hanging, they spent $4.79 per pound for every cut!

Unfortunately, that means my only profit is that pile of free fertilizer behind the barn, BUT that is worth several thousand dollars in replacement fertilizer, and I think it works better!

Its a known quality IF you send it to a honest slaughterhouse,never send anything to a place that also sells meat.

For all burger get a good grinder from Northern Tool and do it yourself not a big deal.

My grandpa, two uncles, and my father were meat cutters/butchers. I grew up around the meat business so I can tell you what I was taught. If you went to town and only bought what cuts were on sale, and only on sale, you could never raise a animal that cheap. Most stores have what is called a lost leader. This is something on sale at a price less than what it cost the store to offer it. They lose money on this item, but hope you will buy other things while in the same store that they can make a profit on. Anytime you have a whole animal ground into burger you will get charged more for processing than if you got the standard cuts. It all has to do with labor. Takes more time to bone out a whole beef than cut it up. Dad always said on English beef to use a simple rule of thumb for easy figuring. You lose 50% of its weight when hanging on the rail. You lose 50 again after you bone and cut it up. If you keep the heart, liver, tongue, soup bones, and ox tail you can yield a little better. This isn't exact math, but really easy numbers to remember. Holsteins you always lose more from live to box weight than Angus. I helped my Dad do hundreds and hundreds of farm kills.30 min. per pig, 45 min. for a beef. Dad was a man who was looking at his watch always so it became a game to see how long it took. Dad said he would break down and cut n bone out 1 head of beef each 8-9 hour work day while waiting on customers at the meat case. He said that cutting custom beef up during the day was a good money maker for the store. That extra 3 1/2 to 400 bucks per head each day wasnt bad money. He also said if he didn't have to wait on customers and was a little younger he knew he could cut n bone 1 1/2 head, maybe two each day. I did have a complete processing facility here on our farm years ago, but when Dad got old I had my fingers in to many pies so I sold it off. Prices for Kill, Cut and wrap have went up in the last 10 years. Al

I feed Holsteins steers and get them where they hang between 750 to 800 lbs. I use two different packing houses and the cost is between 325 and 350. That's doing all the normal cuts according to the customer's specs. I herd them out of the trailer and pick the finish product up about two weeks later.

Your price sounds rather high to me especially since they are just grinding everything into burger.

Keep in mind that you are charged by the pound for processing. The halves are almost ALWAYS weighted as their coming off the kill floor. Then they hang and cool off. While cooling off they dehydrate. This is called shrink. Beef cut the next day or two will lose 1-2 % for shrink. Aged beef loses even more. Longer they hang, lighter they get. When you buy beef on the rail the standard practice is the rear 1/4 costs more than a front. Most old time meat men will leave 1 extra rib in the rear. Meat man make a extra buck or two off of you. I am not sure about now, but 15 years ago we got 15 bucks just for the hide. 20 if we laid n salted it our selves. Al

I'm not very good at guessing weight either that's why I drive across the scales at the coop before I deliver. The local butcher tells people around here that 25% of live weight is normal.

Every old cow I've had butchered and put up for burger yields 50% of 50% live weight. I don't recall my bills, but my usual rule of thumb with a grinder only is that I have to charge someone 3.50 a pound to break even. That's with me owning the cow and figuring kill cow prices.

I only do it when I have to - bad legs, etc. If I'm taking the hit on a killer at the sale barn I might as well have the beef. People love farm raised hamburger as a gift or thank-you. I also trade that meat for labor on calf banding day, etc.

Peddling butchered meat is like peddling eggs - it's a slow road to riches. Selling a side makes it less painful. Anymore I will only custom raise for a friend or two when I am raising one for me.

In the Great Falls area butchering is $60 to kill, 60 cents per pound to cut, wrap, and freeze. I butcher mostly steers in the fall straight from grass. Most of my customers I have had for 8 years. Sometimes I wonder if it is worth the extra hassle. A cow for hamburger is not a real money maker in my estimation. Bud

That sounds about what I've paid in the past. It seems to average about $1 a processed pound when all is said and done on beef. Last spring I had a Jersey steer butchered. He was just short of a year old and only weighed in at 675. I told my wife we could feed him another 6 months and he might hit 800 (or maybe only 750) or we could take him in now. I was shocked when we hauled home just over 400 pounds of processed beef - I'm thinking someone else may have been shorted.

Porter Wagoner always said that buying meat was like buying a farm. If you buy meat you buy the bone and if you buy a farm you buy the stone. Porter was a meat cutter before he went to the Grand Ole Opry.

Thanks for the comments and advice. Sounds like it was fair. This was the first time at this butcher and the first time having a whole cow hamburgered. I usally have steers and have the sides cut up by what I have on my cut sheet by my regular butcher.