Your Cost Per Pound Is Roughly Three Times What You Think
By the time an animal becomes something you can sell, you have lost weight twice: once on the rail and once on the cutting table. Pay $2.50 a pound live and a saleable pound can cost you $7.72.
- Two separate yield losses, dressing and cutting, handled properly
- Cut and wrap billed on hanging weight, which is how plants actually invoice
- Presets for beef, pork and lamb, every figure editable
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Where A $2.50 Pound Becomes A $7.72 Pound
A 1,200 pound animal at $2.50 live, 62% dressing yield, 65% cutting yield, a $100 kill fee and 85 cents a hanging pound for cut and wrap. Ordinary figures, and the gap is still three times.
744 lbs
hanging weight, after dressing
484 lbs
saleable weight, after cutting
40%
of the live animal, sold
$7.72
true cost per saleable pound, against $2.50 live
The mistake is not bad arithmetic. It is carrying the live price forward in your head and never converting it into a cost per pound of the thing you actually sell. Two yield losses and a cut-and-wrap charge sit between those two numbers.
Seven Figures You Already Have On A Kill Sheet
Start from a beef, pork or lamb preset and change whatever does not match your animal. The presets are common starting points, not authority.
01
Live weight and price
What was on the scale, and what you paid or the animal is worth to you.
02
Dressing yield
Live to hanging. Around 62% on beef, higher on pork, lower on lamb.
03
Cutting yield
Hanging to saleable. The second loss, and the one most often forgotten.
04
Kill fee and cut and wrap
The flat charge, plus the rate per hanging pound. Not per pound you take home.
05
Your average sell price
Blended across the whole animal, not what steaks fetch.
Out
Cost and margin per pound
Plus margin per animal, and the multiple between the live price and your real cost. That multiple is the number worth arguing about.
Useful if
- You sell meat direct, by the cut, the box or the share
- You are about to set next season's price list
- You buy animals in and have them processed elsewhere
- You are quoting a wholesale or restaurant account
- You have never separated dressing yield from cutting yield
Probably not, if
- You sell live animals and never take them to a plant
- You already cost by primal with a full yield test per animal, in which case this is coarser than what you have
- You want a valuation or a grading opinion. This is neither
7 monthsfrom opening to break-even at Delicacy Meats
A client this applies to
“We used to be limited by external processors. Now we can flow products faster and deliver better quality to our customers.”
– Dave Stolzfus, Dutch Meadows
Dutch Meadows and Omar King built their own USDA plant with no prior processing experience and broke even seven months after opening. The books were set up so profitability could be read quickly rather than waiting for a year-end report, which is the same discipline this calculator applies to a single animal.
Read what happened