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College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences

CFAES
January 16, 2015 - 10:52am -- Anonymous

One strategy for small scale beef producers to increase income per head is to sell beef directly to the consumer.  This marketing strategy is often termed freezer beef.  Perhaps the easiest way to sell freezer beef is to use a processing facility that is fully inspected in order to sell the meat to the consumer.  In this case the buyer of the beef has to go directly to that processor to pick up their meat.  No license is required to sell meat directly with this method.  However, if you want to take the meat from the processor to another site (including your farm, home, farm market, farmers market) then a license is required and you need to work through the health department.

Typically one of the questions direct beef marketers have is how to price their product.  Recently the OSU Extension Beef Cattle Letter included a good resource from Michigan State University that provides help with pricing freezer beef.  The site is available at: http://tiny.cc/msuemeatmarketing  and includes spreadsheets to help with pricing both grain fed and grass finished freezer beef.