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When we broke down that 1,200 lb steer last month, the scale reading stopped me cold
Last month we took in a grass fed steer from a guy out in Fairview, and when I put the two hind quarters on the rail scale they came out to 412 lbs total. That number caught me off guard because I had the hanging weight penciled at closer to 390 from the live weight. I went back and checked my ticket three times, thinking I wrote something down wrong, but the math held up. What surprised me more was that the yield was around 62 percent, which is high for a smaller animal raised on nothing but pasture. My boss Ray has been cutting for 23 years and he just nodded like he sees it every other week. I think what threw me is that I had it in my head that grass fed always runs leaner on the rail, and this one proved me wrong. Anybody else seeing bigger yields from pasture raised beef in the last couple seasons, or did I just get lucky with this one?
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mary_west28d ago
Ran into the same thing with a bull we did back in March. Live weight was right around 1,150 and I figured maybe 600 hanging, but the rail scale said 690. Ray told me the same thing he told you, that it happens, and honestly the fat cover on that bull was better than any grain fed I've handled this year. The guy who raised him does rotational grazing and moves the herd every day, so I wonder if that has something to do with it. We have been getting more of these pasture deals lately and the numbers keep surprising me. Makes me want to start keeping a log book on all of them.
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