The Value of Good Meat
A lot changes when you source good meat close to home…
Have you Herd… about the small scale difference?
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- Superior Nutritional Content: Animals raised in accordance with their nature (e.g. rotationally grazed sheep, sufficient space for rooting pigs, etc.) and with high-quality diets are happier and healthier animals. Healthier animals are more nutrient-dense than their less-healthy counterparts. Furthermore, meat loses its nutritional content with prolonged cold storage. Instead of moving through a national or regional supply chain, your meat goes directly from farm to butcher to you. Because our sense of taste is designed to work as an indicator of nutritional quality, when our meat is more healthful, it's also more delicious.
- Avoiding Toxins: Animals tend to store toxins they have consumed in their fat. This is particularly problematic when we eat high-fat animals like pigs. Eliminate the risk by limiting your meat intake to animals who have been fed with clean, healthy food themselves. Industrial preservation of meat also often introduces artificial ingredients like nitrates, nitrites, fillers, and glues. At Village Herd we only use salt for preservation, unrefined sugar for flavoring some cures, and dried or fresh spices that you could find in your garden for sausage.
- Reduced Health Risk: The small scale model mitigates risk compared to a centralized industry. Remember when lettuce from one foreign farm caused a cyclospora outbreak in 20 states, affecting 12.5k people and hospitalizing over 500? Or when 12,000 lbs. of bacon were recalled from a Canadian packer? Such widespread misfortune is impossible when we source from small farms. Firstly, small scale production is more disposed to careful and individual management than industrial assembly-line-style production. Second, at Village Herd we handle one animal at a time, so your meat is from one single animal. Compare that to ground meat at the grocery store which may originate from well over 100 animals. If meat from one was contaminated anywhere along the processing chain, the entire batch would also be contaminated.
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- Reduced Emissions: American industrially farmed beef is driven an average of 3 hours (or 150 miles) just to get to the slaughterhouse, then it travels to the packer, then gets distributed nationwide. Beef from Argentina, or lamb from New Zealand obviously travels much farther than that. In contrast, with our on-farm slaughters, your meat doesn’t travel at all to the slaughter. Plus it’s in your freezer in under two hours of transit time (or 100 miles start to finish). That’s a lot less fuel used to get your freezer stocked.
- No-waste Butchery: While there are good ways - like composting - to dispose of unwanted trim without wasting it, we believe that the highest use of an animal’s harvest is to nourish people. That’s why we provide 100% of the hanging weight to you by default: because all of it is good for you, whether as roasts, sausage, organs, fats, or broth. And even if you don't want to eat that trim, your dog, cat, or chickens certainly will!
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- Bred for Taste: Swine at modern factory farms are bred for pure mass and rapid growth, with little consideration given to meat or fat quality. Heritage breeds, often favored by homesteaders and small scale farmers, were bred for generations to be as delicious as possible, and you cannot get their meat from a grocery store. Discover your favorite flavor of pork, lamb, or goat through Village Herd!
- Intentional Butchery: Beyond the influence of the method of raising livestock, there are two other factors that can greatly impact the quality of your meat, the first of which is the method of slaughter. At Village Herd, we complete all slaughters on-farm while the animal is in its familiar surroundings. Conversely, when livestock is shipped to a slaughterhouse - the standard for industrial operations - the animals are stressed by the transit itself and oftentimes lack of food, water, and clean air throughout. This stress ultimately makes your meat tougher and drier. At Village Herd, we prioritize the end product - the meat on your table - by tailoring the actual method of dispatch to the animal's nature, allowing for a swift, peaceful death. We've butchered pigs that are still lounging on the ground from a belly rub from their farmer only moments before! Where else could you find such intentional care in the slaughter?
Finally, the second factor that maximizes meat quality is freshness - with our turn-around rate, you can’t get any fresher than our meat, unless you process it yourself!
- Time-tested Tradition: We offer traditional, salt-cured products - bacon, prosciutto, guanciale, fenalar, and salo the way your family ate it three generations ago. We have refined our recipes for well-loved, regional sausage flavors: Mexican chorizo, German bratwurst, Italian salami, and many others. Taste the wisdom of tradition that developed over generations of villagers feeding their families good food.
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- Savings for Your Wallet: Buying meat shares is buying in bulk, so you'll save a ton of money as compared to buying individual cuts. For example, compare our $12/lb on your lamb share to roughly $20/lb from Costco for a leg of lamb.
- Dependable Pricing: Local farms are not affected nearly as much by supply chain issues or macroeconomics as the centralized industrial farms. Our prices are more stable, because our supply is more stable.
- Strengthening our Local Resources: Good farmers who steward the land understand the importance of not allowing their resources to leave the system. Sheep eat grass, sheep poop on grass, more grass grows. When soil runoff and “waste streams” carry valuable resources - like top soil and manure - off of the farm, farmers need to spend more to replace the resources lost. The same thing happens with money. When you buy through Village Herd, your money supports our local resources: two local families - one that is able to raise animals and one that is able to butcher and process them. If we do not support and protect these resources, we will lose them, and they will be replaced by more expensive, lower-quality options (i.e. multibillion dollar corporations). When you invest in our businesses, it makes higher quality goods available to you at better prices.
- Stick it to the Man: The biggest four meat packing corporations control 70% of the pork market, and 80-85% of the beef market. Their near-complete control over the market allows them to control supply and, therefore, prices to a high degree. When you get your meat from Village Herd, you completely exclude them from our economy and begin to transfer control back to local small operations.
| Village Herd | Butcher Box | Good Chop | Local Large Regenerative Farm Store | Grocery Store | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meat Source | Hyper-local | National | National | Hyper-local | International |
| Owner | Local | Large Corp | Large Corp | Local | Depends |
| Price for Pork | $9/lb meat share | $5.45-30/lb for cuts* | $10.26-42.67/lb for cuts** | $11 - 22/lb for cuts $8.80 for whole hog share*** |
$1.99 - 5/lb for cuts |
| Delivery | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Freezer Space Required | ~2**** - 8 cu ft for whole hog share | ~1 cu ft | ~1 cu ft | ~7.5 cu ft for whole hog share | N/A |
Village versus…
*Minimum and maximum per pound rate for all pork medium box ($180 total)
**Minimum and maximum per pound rate for all pork medium box ($160 total)
***Calculated per pound rate based on estimated yield (70%) and price per pound
****Estimated space required per quarter of a Share Squared quarter (see below)
Freezer Space saving methods
Share squared
A new way to stagger your deliveries with no additional fee. With Share Squared, we coordinate with other customers to give you staggered delivery of fresh halves or quarters of your whole animal. Here’s how it works when sharing four ways:
You and three other customers each order a whole share of the same animal type (lamb, goat, pig, etc.). Village Herd can help coordinate between strangers if needed. You can still customize your harvest as normal. You pay the regular deposit.
Village Herd brokers the sale of all four animals, but instead of each receiving 100% of one, each customer buys 25% of all four.
The first animal is harvested, each quarter is processed according to your instructions, and is delivered to the appropriate customer. Each customer is billed for ¼ of the hanging weight, plus extra for specialty items
A few weeks later (exact timing agreed upon beforehand) the second animal is harvested, processed, and distributed. Each customer receives a different quarter than the previous round. Each customer is billed for ¼ of this hanging weight.
Repeat for the remaining two animals and the remaining two quarters, until every customer has received every part.
With Share Squared, instead of meat waiting in your freezer for weeks, meat is delivered only days old, when you need it. Your freezer only holds a fraction of your share at a time. You can still order cured and specialty goods - though these items may be delivered at a different time to account for curing and/or preparation.
With halves, this process is only repeated once, and only split between two customers.
Lard (left) is shelf stable and can replace butter and oil in your kitchen. Rillettes (right) are also shelf stable while encased in lard. Think of them as spreadable pulled pork.
Fresh Meat Delivery
With Village Herd you can discover the experience of never-frozen meat within days of harvest. No slime, no sourness, no freezer burn, no dryness. Only the juiciest meat you can get! We will deliver the freshest meat you’ve ever had:
free on your first order
free when you include organs in your order (organs are never frozen)
for a rush delivery fee on any other order
Traditional preservation
We cure meat the old-fashioned way, the way our forefathers stored their harvests before chest freezers were invented. How did they do it? With sea salt and smoke. No Insta-Cure #2, no nitrates, no soy protein concentrate. The resulting meat is shelf stable and delicious. Bacon, guanciale, prosciutto, leg of lamb, salami… All can be kept on your counter or hanging from your rafter until you finish them, which means they never have to occupy your freezer.
Not everyone has a chest freezer ready to receive 200lbs of pig, or even 50lbs of lamb. At Village Herd we offer totally unique solutions for you to receive all the benefits of meat shares without needing so much freezer space.