Search "beef share pricing" and every result that comes back is written for the person buying the beef: what a quarter costs, how big a freezer you need, what hanging weight means for your grocery bill. Useful if you're the customer. Useless if you're the farmer trying to decide what number to put on the reservation page.
Setting that number is harder than it looks, and it's where small farms quietly give away margin. The reason is simple: the weight you paid to raise, the weight the processor bills, and the weight your customer carries home are three different numbers — and if you price against the wrong one, you can run a sold-out season and still make less than you would have hauling the steer to the sale barn.
This guide is the seller's side. A repeatable way to turn your true cost and your animal's real yield into a per-pound rate — or a flat per-share price — that pays.
The three weights hiding inside one animal
Before any dollar figure, get the weight cascade straight, because your whole price depends on which rung you bill from.
A live steer drops through two big losses on its way to a freezer:
- Live → hanging (carcass) weight. After hide, head, organs, and blood, the hanging carcass is the "dressing percentage" of the live animal. University-extension figures put grain-fed cattle around 60–64% (UMaine Extension), and grass-fed, which grows slower, closer to 53–58% — several points lower.
- Hanging → take-home packaged weight. After aging, deboning, and trimming into cuts, the buyer takes home roughly 60–70% of the hanging weight. The rest is bone, trim, and moisture that never reaches a vacuum bag.
Put numbers on it and the drop is dramatic:
The industry standard — and what most farms quote — is the middle bar: hanging weight. That matters for one reason that trips up almost everyone, which we'll get to. First, the formula.
Build your price in four moves
Pricing a share isn't a guess or a copy of the farm down the road. It's four decisions in order.
Move 1: what does one animal have to earn?
Add your genuine cost to raise the steer — feed or pasture, the calf or the year of grazing, vet, water, your time — and then add the profit you actually want, not what's left over by accident. Call that your target revenue per animal. In the worked example above, that's $2,400. Yours will be different; the point is that it's a decision, not a residue.
Leave processing out of this figure. It's a real cost, but it belongs on its own line (Move 4), not folded into the price of the meat.
Move 2: pick the weight you'll bill on
Two honest options, and they decide who carries the risk of a heavy or light animal:
- By the hanging pound. You set a rate; the final bill is that rate times each buyer's actual share of the carcass. Tracks your cost most closely, and the buyer pays for exactly what their animal weighed. The trade-off: the dollar figure doesn't exist until the scale produces it.
- Flat price per share. A half is $1,600, a quarter $850, full stop. The buyer knows the number the day they commit; you absorb the weight swing. Simplest to collect early.
Pick one now, because it sets the denominator.
Move 3: divide — and match the denominator to the weight
Here's the move that pays for this whole article.
Divide your target revenue by the expected pounds at the weight you're billing on. If you bill hanging weight, divide by expected hanging pounds:
$2,400 target ÷ 744 hanging lb ≈ $3.23/lb → round to $3.25/lb hanging weight.
A half of that steer (≈ 372 hanging lb) then bills at $3.25 × 372 = $1,209 for the meat, plus its share of processing on a separate line. A quarter is half of that.
For a flat share, do the same division against a conservative (slightly low) expected hanging weight, then split by portion: if you'd collect $2,400 across the animal, a whole is $2,400, a half $1,200, a quarter $600. Basing it on a low estimate protects you when a steer comes back light — the share still delivers the value the buyer expected.
The mistake that halves your margin
Now the trap. The three weights make it dangerously easy to size your rate against take-home pounds while billing on hanging pounds — or the reverse.
Say you want to clear about $4.85 for every pound of beef that lands in a customer's freezer. If you type $4.85/lb into a by-weight lot that bills on hanging weight, you've badly overcharged: the buyer takes home only ~67% of hanging weight, so they're effectively paying about $7.25 per take-home pound — and your sold-out season turns into refund conversations and no repeat buyers.
Flip it, and it's worse for you. Set a rate you think reflects hanging weight but that you actually derived from take-home pounds, and you under-collect on every single share.
The fix is the discipline in Move 2 and 3: decide the billing weight first, size the rate to that exact weight, and say so in writing on the reservation page. "$3.25 per pound, hanging weight" removes the ambiguity that causes both errors.
Keep processing on its own line
Processing and packaging are real money — farms commonly see around $0.75/lb of hanging weight for standard processing, plus $0.25–$0.50/lb for custom cuts and vacuum sealing — but they are not your meat price. Two reasons to itemize them separately rather than padding your rate:
- Honesty reads as fairness. A buyer who sees "Beef, $3.25/lb hanging × 372 lb" and "Processing, $0.85/lb × 372 lb" trusts both numbers. A single inflated $4.10 rate invites the question you don't want.
- It protects your margin if processing changes. When the locker raises its rate mid-season, you adjust one fee line — not your headline price, and not the quote you already gave July's buyers.
A quick sanity check against selling by the cut
Before you commit, compare shares to the other way to move an animal: cutting it up and selling individual cuts at retail. By the cut, a blended $7–$12 per take-home pound is realistic, which grosses more per pound than a share — but you carry freezer inventory, packaging, labelling, slower turns, and the risk of a freezer full of shanks nobody wants. Shares move the entire animal at once, with cash committed up front and nothing left in the freezer. Most small farms run shares for the cash-flow and the zero-inventory, and sell by the cut only to clear what the shares didn't claim. Price shares knowing that's the trade you're making.
Where TallyTill fits
You can run the math above on paper. TallyTill's Animal Shares tools exist so you only do it once and never reconcile it by hand:
- You set the rate (by weight) or the flat price per size when you create the lot, and type your own option labels — Whole, Half, Quarter, or "whole hog split two ways." Nothing is beef-specific.
- On a by-weight lot, nothing is charged for the meat until weigh-in. You enter each carcass's real hanging weight off the processor's sheet, and each reservation bills once — rate × weight — with no deposit to subtract and no estimate ever stored. The full workflow is in Selling Beef Shares by Hanging Weight.
- Fees sit on their own lines — flat, or per hanging pound — exactly as this guide argues they should.
- Step-by-step setup, pickup sheets, and the no-prices processor list are in the Meat & Animal Shares manual.
Honest limits, so there are no surprises: cut instructions are a free-text note that prints on the pickup sheet, not a structured cut-sheet that talks to your processor's software; and you build lots and weigh in from the Portal on a computer, not from the till. The till comes in only at pickup, as one way a buyer settles their balance.
Get the number right the first time
A beef share is one of the few farm products where a single mis-set figure follows you through an entire season. Decide what the animal must earn, pick the weight you'll bill on, divide against the pounds at that weight, and keep processing on its own line. Do that and a sold-out lot actually pays like one.
When you're ready to stop running it out of a spreadsheet, create a free TallyTill account — the Stand plan is $0 per seat with no card required — switch on Animal Shares in your CSA settings, and build your first lot with the rate you just worked out. Set the price once; let the scale and the software do the rest.