Buy It From the Farm — Stop paying supermarket prices for meat

The problem

You'd buy direct from a farm. Nobody will tell you what it costs.

You've thought about it. Everybody has. Then you start looking into it and you hit a wall — and it's always the same four walls.

Wall one

The price is quoted in a unit you don't use.

Farms quote by "hanging weight." Nobody mentions that it isn't what ends up in your freezer, or that a second bill is coming from the butcher. People budget twelve hundred dollars and meet a very different number at pickup.

Wall two

You can't find the farms.

Search online and you get whoever paid for advertising. The operation that's quietly sold twenty freezer beeves a year since 1994 has no website at all — and it's the one you want.

Wall three

You don't know what to say on the phone.

So you don't call. Or you call, feel like the fourth person that week who didn't know the terms, and hang up without ordering anything.

Wall four

It's a lot of money to get wrong.

A thousand dollars and up, due in two payments, for meat you haven't seen. One wrong box on a form you've never filled out and a third of it sits in the freezer until next winter.

All four come down in about forty minutes of reading. That's the whole reason this book exists. Not to convince you the grocery store is out to get you — it isn't. To hand you the numbers, the words and the phone script so you can go do the thing you already wanted to do.

II.

The math

What you pay at the store. What you pay at the farm.

One quarter of beef, worked all the way through — the animal, the kill fee, the butcher's bill — against what the same meat costs in the case this year.

At the grocery store

Per pound · U.S. average, 2026

Beef steaks$12.30

Ground beef$6.89

RoastsPriced cut by cut

Every cut priced to its own margin

Bureau of Labor Statistics average price data — steaks January 2026, ground beef July 2026.

Buying a quarter direct

The whole bill, nothing left out

The animal — 190 lb at $5.75$1,092

Kill fee, split four ways$31

Butcher, cut and wrapped$179

What lands in your freezer115 lb

Your price, every cut$11.32

Worked example built on USDA 2026 benchmarks. Your county will differ — the book includes the worksheet to run your own.

That's the whole argument. Your steaks come down. Your roasts come down hard. And the ground beef costs you more than the store does this year — cattle are scarce and everything is dear. I'd rather tell you that here than have you find it out after you've paid.

So the book works out which households come out ahead and which ones don't, before you spend anything. That's Chapter Two, and it's the chapter most likely to save you a thousand dollars by talking you out of it.

III.

What's inside

Fifteen chapters that turn "someday" into a phone call this week.

Sixty-six pages. No filler about how food used to taste better. Every figure verified in August 2026 and listed in the back with its source, so you can check my arithmetic yourself.

By the time you close it, you can do all of this.

Work out your real cost per pound in four minutes — before you send a deposit, using the farm's own numbers.
Find farms near you that don't advertise — the free federal and state directories, plus the three phone calls that actually turn up the good ones.
Make the call without sounding green — ten questions, in order, with what each answer tells you about who you're dealing with.
Fill out the cut sheet so you eat all of it — the one page that swings your take-home weight by thirty pounds and decides whether you get roasts you'll never cook.
Know which door you're buying through — and why a farmer saying "I sell live animals, not meat" is a good sign, not a red flag.
Buy pork, lamb, chicken, eggs and vegetables the same way — including the smaller, cheaper first purchase to learn on if beef is too much.
Store it so none of it goes to waste — freezer space per purchase, what it costs to run, and how long each cut actually keeps.

Before you spend a dollar · 2 chapters

Whether this is even a good deal for your house.

01The Two Sides of the Counter

02When It Pays, and When It Doesn't

Meat — the big one · 4 chapters

The purchase everybody wants and nobody explains.

03Hanging Weight: The Number Nobody Explains

04Inspected, State-Inspected, Custom-Exempt

05The Cut Sheet

06Hogs, Lambs and Goats

The rest of the cart · 3 chapters

Eggs, dairy and produce, bought the same way.

07Chickens and Eggs

08Dairy, and Where I Stop Talking

09Vegetables, Grain and Flour

Doing it · 6 chapters

From "I should look into that" to meat in the freezer.

10How to Find the Farms

11The Phone Call

12The Freezer

13Keeping It

14The Calendar

15Your First Year

IV.

Straight answer

Who should buy this, and who should keep their money.

I'd rather lose the sale than take forty-seven dollars off somebody and send them out to spend eleven hundred more on something that was never going to fit their kitchen.

Buy it if

Your grocery bill has gone somewhere you don't like and you want a real lever, not a coupon app.
You've thought about a quarter or half of beef and stalled because nobody gave you a straight number.
You buy steaks and roasts at retail. You have the most to gain here, by a wide margin.
You have a freezer, or room to put one.
You'd rather hand your money to somebody whose name you know than to a supply chain you can't see into.

Don't buy it if

Your house eats ground beef and almost nothing else. This year the store beats the farm on ground, and the book says so.
You have no freezer space and nowhere to put one.
You want somebody to tell you the food supply is poisoning you. That's not this book and I won't write it.
You're looking for a way to get raw milk where it isn't legal. I don't tell you that, on purpose.
You want recipes. There isn't one in here.

What this book will not do

It won't tell you grocery store food is unsafe. It isn't. It won't tell you farm-direct food is cleaner or healthier — I don't know that, and nobody has shown me evidence for it. There's no medical advice, no nutrition advice and no diet plan in here. I'm a farmer, not a nutritionist.

What it does is narrower and more useful: it tells you what things cost, who grew them, and how to buy them without getting taken.

Who wrote it

Roy.

Roy in his machine shed in southwest Wisconsin.

Third generation on two hundred and forty acres in southwest Wisconsin. I milked cows twice a day for thirty-seven years and sold the herd in 2019 — the year this state lost eight hundred and eighteen dairy farms.

I still grow corn and soybeans here. They leave this farm as commodities and come back to you as syrup, oil and starch in packages I wouldn't recognize. Forty-four years of watching what gets paid for the raw material and what gets charged for the finished thing. That gap is the only expertise I claim.

Here's what I don't have: a milk check, an arrangement with any farm, processor or directory, and any reason to point you at one operation over another. There isn't a single farm named in this book, on purpose. Nobody paid to be in it.

What I want is for you to be a harder customer. Somebody who knows the terms doesn't get taken — and is also the customer the good farms would rather sell to.

"Somebody grew it. Somebody changed it. Nobody told you. Now you know."

VI.

Order

$47 once. No subscription. Yours to keep.

In your inbox within a minute of paying. Reads on a phone, a tablet or a computer, and prints clean at the kitchen table. The worksheets come as separate files so you can print just those, as many times as you like.

What you get for $47

Buy It From the FarmThe complete guide. 66 pages, 15 chapters, every figure sourced and dated.	$29
The True Cost Per Pound WorksheetFill it in before you send a deposit. Four minutes, and it settles the decision.	$12
The Cut Sheet WorksheetDecide at your own table instead of on the phone with the butcher waiting.	$12
The Phone Call, On One PageTen questions, printed. Keep it beside you and write the answers in the margin.	$9
Where to LookEvery free federal and state directory worth using, on one sheet.	$9
Price updates, freeI re-verify every figure each year. You get the new edition at no charge.	$14

Total value$85

You pay today~~$85~~$47

Get instant access — $47

Secure checkout · Pay once · Yours forever

The guarantee, in plain words

Read it. Run the worksheet with numbers from a real farm in your county. If it doesn't change what you'd have paid, write to me inside thirty days and I'll refund it — and you keep the files. I won't argue with you and I won't ask you to prove anything.

Visa · Mastercard · PayPal · Apple Pay — 30-day refund

VII.

Before you click

Questions people ask me.

Does this work where I live, or is it a Wisconsin thing?

The arithmetic is national. The rules aren't — meat, poultry and dairy sit under state law as well as federal law, and states genuinely differ. So the book doesn't list fifty states' rules and go stale in a year. It teaches the federal structure that's identical everywhere, then points you at the exact free state office to call for the rest. That call takes about ten minutes.

Is it really cheaper than the grocery store?

On steaks and roasts, usually yes, and by a wide margin. On ground beef in a year like this one, often no. The book hands you the worksheet to run your own numbers against your own store instead of trusting me or anybody's marketing. If the answer comes back no for your household, that's a useful answer — and you got it for forty-seven dollars instead of eleven hundred.

I don't have a big freezer. Is this pointless?

No. Chapter Six exists for exactly this: start with half a hog or a whole lamb, which fit an ordinary freezer and cost a fraction of beef. Chapter Twelve gives the cubic feet needed for each purchase so you check before you commit rather than after.

How much of my time does this take?

Reading it, about forty minutes. After that: one afternoon of phone calls to line up a farm and a butcher, four minutes with the worksheet, ten minutes on the cut sheet, and one drive to pick it up. Then you eat out of it for eight months.

Is there anything about raw milk in here?

A short section, and what it says is that the rules vary by state, that you should look up your own, and that I won't recommend it, make health claims about it, or tell anybody how to get it where it isn't legal. If that's what brought you here, I'd rather you knew now.

Does it teach home butchering?

No, and it won't. Every purchase in this book goes through a licensed processor, and the book explains the three legal kinds and what each means for you. Same with canning: it points you to the tested USDA procedures and doesn't invent a single time or temperature.

What format is it, and can I print it?

PDF. It opens on a phone, tablet, computer or e-reader, and it's laid out at 6 by 9 inches so it prints clean on letter paper. The four worksheets are separate files sized for a clipboard. No app, no DRM, no subscription.

What if it's not for me?

Thirty days, no questions. Send an email and the whole forty-seven dollars comes back. The files stay yours.

Stop paying supermarket prices for meat. Buy it from the farm instead.