05/25/2026
I came across the following response to a post from someone looking for beef at $6/lb. This fellow regenerative farmer had the following response. I want to share it because it gives insight into the fight that we are waging to restore the health and vitality of our soil and thus our food. Our values here at barefoot livin Farms align with with this farmer is saying.
"$6/lb hanging weight is honestly tough for a small regenerative operation once you fully run the math.
On our last steer, that would have been about $4,032, plus roughly $1,200 in USDA processing costs.
That steer yielded around 420 lbs of finished product including bones, fat, and organs after about 18 months of raising the animal. So once you factor in processing, that $6 hanging weight works out to about $12.50/lb of finished beef, to the buyer.
On our side, that same $6 has to cover feed, minerals, pasture management, fencing, hauling, fuel, infrastructure, equipment, labor, and potential loss spread across a year and a half. And for us, it doesn’t.
People sometimes assume local bulk beef should automatically be cheaper, but the reality is that many small regenerative farms are trying to figure out how to make it work at all. Trying to make a living inside a system that was never really designed for this scale or production model is incredibly challenging. We simply cannot compete on price with industrialized commodity beef.
The industrial system has spent decades optimizing for cheap output and scale efficiency. Small regenerative farms are usually optimizing for entirely different outcomes: soil health, pasture quality, animal welfare, lower chemical dependence, nutrient density, and long-term resilience.
Those goals create a very different cost structure, and eventually the pricing has to reflect that reality.
Wishing you luck in your search though. Hopefully you are able to find a local farm that can make the numbers work for both sides.
Hale Haus Farmstead
We are a small regenerative farm based in Dunnellon, Florida. We raise Angus and Wagyu beef, Meishan pork, pasture-raised chicken, and a flock of colorful laying hens. Our livestock are fed certified organic grains and rotationally grazed, our poultry are raised on pasture in mobile chicken tractors moved daily, and our pastures are never sprayed with glyphosate, herbicides, or chemical fertilizers. Our hens are fed certified organic, corn- and soy-free feed, and all of our animals are raised with an intentional focus on long-term soil and ecosystem health."
