You raised one steer. Now three neighbors and your brother-in-law have each said "put me down for a share." That sentence hides a surprising amount of work: one carcass has to become four separate orders, each person wants their freezer filled a little differently, everyone pays a different amount, and the whole thing has to be settled before the animal is even processed.
Most of the advice online is written for the buyers — how much a quarter weighs, how big a freezer they need. This is written for you, the seller. Here's how to split one animal among several buyers without overselling it, without a deposit-and-balance spreadsheet, and with one clean list you can hand the processor.
Three decisions before you take a single name
A split animal share is really three decisions, and the farms that get into trouble are the ones that skip straight to collecting money.
- How many equal pieces does this animal make? Not "a half and two quarters" in your head — an actual number. An animal sold as halves and quarters is cleanest when you think of it as a fixed number of equal portions. A common choice is eight: a whole is 8 portions, a half is 4, a quarter is 2. That number is the thing that stops you overselling.
- Does every buyer get the same cuts, or their own? This is the decision people underestimate. It is mostly a processor question, not a software one — more on that below.
- Fixed price, or by the hanging pound? A quarter at a flat $850, or a rate like $4.25 per pound of hanging weight settled after the scale. Pick one per animal; don't mix them.
Get those three straight and the rest is bookkeeping. Get them fuzzy and you'll be texting four people in November trying to remember who wanted the brisket.
The portion math that stops you overselling
Here is the single most common way a split share goes wrong: you tell four people "yes," then a fifth asks, and because it all lives in your head and a group text, you say yes again — and now you've promised more animal than exists.
The fix is to decide the animal's total portions first and let every reservation count against that number. On an eight-portion steer:
| Share size | Portions it claims | How many you can sell |
|---|---|---|
| Whole | 8 | 1 |
| Half | 4 | up to 2 |
| Quarter | 2 | up to 4 |
| Eighth | 1 | up to 8 |
A buyer can mix them — one half (4) plus two quarters (2 + 2) uses up the whole animal — but the total can never exceed eight. When you run this in TallyTill's Animal Shares tools, that's exactly how it behaves: you create a lot (one animal, one processing date, a set number of portions), define your share sizes against those portions, and as buyers reserve, the remaining count draws down and simply stops at zero. You cannot promise a ninth eighth.
The cut-sheet conversation nobody tells you to have
This is the part that trips up first-time sellers, and it has nothing to do with software.
A processor cuts a whole animal to one specification unless you've arranged otherwise. If your four buyers each want something different — one wants everything ground, one wants thick ribeyes and no roasts, one wants the organ meats and soup bones, one wants it all boneless — you are asking the butcher to run four cut sheets on one carcass. Many processors will do this quarter-by-quarter for an extra fee. Some won't, or can't that week. A few will quietly cut it one way and leave you to explain the difference.
Decide this with your processor before you sell a single share, because it changes what you can honestly promise your buyers:
- One shared cut sheet is simplest and cheapest. Everyone gets a proportional share of the same cuts. You collect one set of instructions and the division is even by design. Great for buyers who just want "a freezer full of good beef."
- Per-buyer cut sheets let each household customize, but only if your processor supports split cutting — and it usually costs more and takes longer.
TallyTill supports both by giving every reservation its own free-text cut-sheet note — what that buyer wants done with their cuts — which prints on both the pickup sheet and the processor list. What it cannot do is make a processor cut four ways; that's a conversation and a line item at the butcher, not a setting. Be honest with your buyers about which model you're offering. (For collecting those preferences without an email chase, see our guide to the beef share cut sheet.)
What each buyer actually takes home
Your buyers will ask two questions before they commit: how much meat, and will it fit in my freezer? You should be able to answer both in one breath, because a buyer who's surprised at pickup is a buyer who argues about the bill.
Start from the animal, not the share. A roughly 1,000 lb live steer dresses out to about 600 lb hanging (around 60%), and the packaged meat your buyers carry home is roughly 60–70% of that. So a whole animal is somewhere near 400 lb of take-home beef, and the shares divide from there.
Freezer space is the other half of the answer. The common extension rule of thumb is about one cubic foot of freezer per 25–35 lb of cut-and-wrapped meat, so:
| Share | Take-home (approx.) | Freezer space needed | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quarter | ~100 lb | ~4 cu ft (a chest-freezer basket) | A couple or small household |
| Half | ~200 lb | ~8 cu ft (a small chest freezer) | A family, or two households splitting again |
| Whole | ~400 lb | ~16 cu ft (a dedicated chest freezer) | A big household or a buying group |
Tell buyers these are approximate and that boneless cuts weigh less than bone-in — fewer bones means fewer bones, not less meat. Putting the yield and the freezer figure in writing before anyone pays is the cheapest refund-prevention you'll ever do.
Bill each buyer once — skip the deposit dance
The classic way to sell a split animal is to take a deposit from each buyer, then chase the balance after weigh-in. It feels responsible. It's also where the math errors live: you collect $500 against an unknown total, the quarter comes back at $1,326, and now you're subtracting one number from another, per buyer, by hand — and your books show two unrelated line items you have to mentally staple together at tax time.
You don't need a deposit to get the two things it's actually for:
- Want the buyer locked in? A confirmed reservation already claims the portion and takes it out of inventory. Nobody else can grab it.
- Want cash before the processing bill? Sell the share as a fixed price and collect it in dated instalments, or in full at reservation. You get the money up front and a number the buyer understood from day one — with no final reconciliation, because there was never a variable weight to settle.
On a by-weight animal, the honest move is to charge nothing for the meat until the scale exists. Each buyer reserves, you weigh in once, and a single charge posts: their hanging weight times your rate. Processing, packaging, and delivery ride on their own itemized fee lines — flat, or per hanging pound — never buried in the per-pound rate. The full deposit-vs-weigh-in breakdown is in our companion guide, selling beef shares by hanging weight.
The legal detail that sets your dates
If you're selling custom-exempt (uninspected) meat by the share — how most small farms move bulk animals — the buyer generally has to own their share of the live animal before it's slaughtered. That's not a paperwork nicety; it's the thing that makes a split share legal in most states.
In practice it means one rule: reservations close before the animal is processed, not after. You're selling a live animal reserved ahead of harvest, not packaged meat sold after the fact. The Animal Shares tools enforce that ordering — a lot's reservations-close date must fall before its processing date — but confirming what your state and your processor require is on you, and the "Not for sale" labelling on custom-exempt cuts is the processor's job. Check your state's rules before your first lot; they vary more than you'd expect.
Pork, lamb, goat — same playbook
None of this is beef-specific. A hog split three ways, a lamb sold whole-or-half, a goat share — all run through the identical flow: one lot, a portion count, share sizes you name in your own words, fixed or by-weight pricing, reserve, weigh in, collect. "Front quarter," "Whole hog split two ways," "Sampler" are just labels you type. Smaller animals simply make fewer portions.
What this won't do (so you're not surprised)
Honest limits beat a feature list:
- It won't make your processor cut four ways. Per-buyer customization is only as real as your butcher's willingness to split-cut. The software carries each buyer's note; the knife work is a conversation at the shop.
- Cut instructions are a clear note, not an integration. Each reservation's cut-sheet field is free text that prints for you and the processor. It does not talk to a processor's scheduling system.
- It's a back-office job, not a till job. You create lots, take reservations, and weigh in from the Portal on a computer. The till only appears at the end, as one way a buyer can settle up at pickup.
Getting started
If you're running split shares out of a group text and a spreadsheet today, the one change worth making first is the portion count — because "I accidentally sold five quarters of a four-quarter animal" is the mistake that costs you a customer.
Create a free TallyTill account — the Stand plan is free, with no credit card to start — switch on the Animal Shares tools in your CSA settings, and build your first lot. Set the harvest date, type your share sizes, and reserve the first quarter before the animal ever leaves the pasture. (Curious what the paid tiers add? The pricing page lays it out.)
You raise the animal once. You should only have to divide it, and bill for it, once too.