Growing Costs: The Value of Food

I'm going grass-fed. I promised.

My freezer is nearly empty of conventional meats. A pound or two of bacon remains. And some organic ground beef from Costco, which is New Zealand grassfed mixed with American organic grainfed. After that's gone, I'm all in.

I've found a vendor of quality, local, grassfed meats just one town over. They sell beef tenderloin for around $20/lb, but I'll be ordering the ground beef, stew beef, and mixed cuts of pork that average $5.50/lb.

I may have to close my eyes while entering my credit card number. I will try very hard not to think about conventional prices of $1.98 for ground round or pork shoulder at $1.79 or whole roaster chickens under $3.00 on sale.

This, after all, is simply how much food ought to cost. Unsubsidized, allowed to mature at a natural rate without being poisoned by a grain diet that would kill them in months despite heavy antibiotic loads, if they didn't go to the slaughterhouse first, livestock is not cheap to raise.

In fact, given the dinner I enjoyed last night, $5.50/lb for local, grassfed beef looks downright reasonable. Yesterday evening, I cooked up two, broiled lamb chops with mint pesto and side of sauteed summer squash and onions with thyme.

Simple, right?

Sure, if you picked it all up from the grocery. But I didn't. Those chops came from lambs born here at In the Night Farm. I grew the herbs and onion. The squash came from a co-worker's garden.

Cheap, right?

Hardly. Not even if you picked it all up from the grocery. Which I didn't.

Those chops came from lambs born here at In the Night Farm, remember? They were grass (actually, mostly hay) fed, which meant they took their time maturing to slaughtering size. Quite aside from the daily labor of caring for livestock, the monetary cost can't be ignored. Care to have a look?

Quality alfalfa/grass mix hay runs $125 a ton around here. That's about $0.0625 per pound. A sheep eats 5 pounds a day, for a daily feed cost of $.32. The sheep in question was 450 days old when slaughtered, and therefore consumed $144.00 worth of hay.

Well. That's not too bad!

But wait. I also had to feed my breeding stock -- one ewe and one ram. I'll only add in the price of one parent, since the lamb I'm calculating was a twin.

So, $144 in lamb feed plus $144 for its mama's feed (and that's assuming I didn't have to feed mama during gestation, which of course isn't true), for a total of $288 in feed.

Now, add butchering costs. I paid $207 for both lambs, so let's call it $103.50 for one.

$288 in feed plus $103.50 butchering = $391.50 for one lamb.

How much meat is in a lamb? About 40 pounds.

$391.50 / 40 pounds = $9.79 / pound.

Oh, my.

Is it worth it? To eat a healthy animal? A healthful animal? An animal I raised from birth, cared for daily through winter's snow and summer's blaze? An animal that, well-nourished, can provide real nourishment in return?

An animal that gave its life for mine?

$9.79 per pound.

That's value.
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