Dear interested parties (pardon me if you are not interested) and supporters of North Branch Farm,

The time to reserve our beef and pork for your freezer is NOW! 

We will be sending two cows and five pigs to the butcher on July 16^th, and they’ll be arriving back to us in a more edible form about two weeks later (exact date TBA, somewhere around July 31).  We’ll have two more rounds of beef cows going to the butcher later in the year, around September 9^th and November 4^th.

A little bit about our meat animals:

Our beef is exclusively grass fed.  Our beef cows are Devon and Angus, and they are healthy, happy critters.  In the summer they graze and fertilize our fields while we busily make hay.  In the winter we put a fence around all the hay, some cozy pieces of forest, and a corner of a stream, and they live outside straight through the cold months.

Our pigs are raised on organic grain, which is processed locally by Maine Organic Milling; a portion of the grain is also grown in Maine.  The pigs live outside on an oak-wooded hillside where they root for tubers and munch acorns.  They have access to food and water 24/7 and can often be found napping in a pig pile in a shady spot on hot afternoons.

We have chosen not to certify any of our meat as organic because of the extra record-keeping, and because we feed our pigs a small amount of kitchen scraps, which are not always from certified organic food.

Continue reading if you think you might be interested…

The numbers—our 2013 meat pricing:

Our prices are per pound for the meat you get, cut and packaged.  Much of the meat that is sold “on the hoof,” by the half or whole, is sold per pound based on the hanging weight—just to give you an idea, if we were charging based on hanging weight (which includes all organs, bones, and sometimes the head and feet) our prices for beef and pork would both be around $3.00 per pound.  To keep things simple, though, we just charge you for the meat that you actually take home.  You can reserve your whole, half or quarter animal with a $100 deposit.

Beef:

$5.50/lb. for a whole animal, usually 240-260 lbs.

$6/lb. for a half, about 120-130 lbs.

$7/lb. for a quarter, around 60-65 lbs.

When we sell beef by the cut at farmers’ markets and the like, our lowest priced items (burger and stew) go for $6/lb. or more.  So buy in bulk and get your tenderloin for the price of burger!  Get together with friends and buy more bulk and save evenmore!

Pork:

$6.50/lb. for a whole pig, probably 150-160 lbs.

$7.50/lb. for half a pig, probably 75-80 lbs.