Why buy Half A Cow?

One of the questions I receive through our website is…

Can I buy a smaller quantity than a 1/8th or 1/4 ?

You might have wondered this yourself when browsing our website. Why don’t all the farms just do a beef box, surely they would sell more!

Well you’ve just hit on the core problem Half A Cow was created to help solve!

The first problem is… the cow!

Did you know that not every part of the cow is the same? The “prime cuts” that sell for mega dollars in the supermarket are actually specific parts of the cow. You can’t turn a brisket into an eye fillet no matter how hard you try! (personally I like brisket better!)

This means that if you’re dividing a single cow between 10 or 20 orders, the amount of “fillet steak’ is going to be well.. almost none!

The best way to ensure that everybody gets a “fair share” of all the cuts is to sell a mixed quarter, or even a mixed eight, which is all the cuts from a “side” of beef (or HALF A COW < see what I did there? ) between 1, 2 or 4 people.

This brings us to our second problem for most farmers…

Continuous supply!

When a smaller farm is looking to supply a wholesaler, butcher or local supermarket, they are asked to supply animals all year round… which makes sense. No point going to the butcher and not having any meat to buy!

Unfortunately, for most farms, it’s not possible to supply consistently all year round, and in the quantities that would be feasible to those businesses.

Many of our farms only have a “run” of beef or lamb once or maybe twice a year, especially if they are only grass fed which relies on the weather and a good season to properly ‘finish’ cattle to the ideal weight.

Our platform gives these smaller farms an option to ‘sell’ direct to you, in a way that helps address these farming realities.

The other side of the process is the butcher…. You know the old saying, time is money? Well the same is true for butchering. The more people who are ‘splitting’ a side of beef, the more work is needed to properly and equally portion the side.

This work is generally charged to the farmer in a $/kg arrangement, and can become prohibitively expensive when the divisions of a side are increased beyond 2. (i.e. a 1/4 of a cow, or ‘mixed quarter’)

So that’s where we come in!

As we continue to run our current website, we’re building out V2 to better match the needs of farmers and customers.

We want to help customers keep their costs down, while making premium locally farmed meat available to as many people as possible!

By buying a 1/4 of a cow, and splitting it with a friend (or investing in a bigger freezer!) you’ll get farm to fridge beef, direct from a local farm and processed by a local butcher.

This means that instead of your beef potentially coming from another state, thousands of km away, it might be from the farm just around the corner!

But it also means you’re helping a local farmer who simply has no other viable way to ensure a consistent, known, and fair price for their beef and lamb!

Traditional sales methods rely on strong purchaser demand at sale yards or stock agents. The farmer is generally “offered” a price which they can choose to take or leave. Sounds great in theory, but there’s no way for a farmer to know a price before spending money and time hauling their cattle to a cattle yard.

The costs go beyond the economic, with many farmers reporting a loss of condition (weight) of their livestock due to the travelling and stress of the experience. If a farmer is offered a bad price then do they run the risk of coming back later… Costing more time and money.. .or just take the bad price and hope to recover it at a later sale?

Our mission is to help as many farms in as many places establish their own farm brand, build a following of loyal customers, and ultimately help them to become independent of the sale yard system!