If the idea of killing your food just doesn’t appeal to you, fear not: there’s a different way to live off the land—without doing the dirty work.

Farmers Cate and Mat Eddy sell pork and beef bundles from their farm, Ridgeland Harvest, in Viroqua, Wis.

According to Mat, the Eddys’ experience with meat bundles began when they started raising pigs and experimenting with different ways of selling the pork.

“People just don’t really know how a pig gets butchered,” Mat says. “You can’t have all pork chops and loin roasts.”

In a pork or beef bundle, customers receive an assortment of meat, cut, smoked and prepared in different ways. The bundles are available in 15, 20 or 25 pounds. The most common bundle is the 15-pounder, says Cate, because that’s about all the meat that a family can fit in its freezer at one time.

“With the pork, everybody’d get ham, everybody’d get bacon, and some sausage, and fresh cuts of pork chops and some roasts. It’s just a mixture of different cuts. And the same thing with the beef—they get steaks, hamburger and roasts,” Mat says.

As the popularity of the bundles increases, they’ve had to offer them only to Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) members. Even then, the 2009 pork bundles were sold out by early fall.

The beef and pork bundles are not certified organic, Mat says, because the process would raise the price of the meat astronomically.

However, the cattle are raised on a pasture and fed locally-grown grain—“nothing feedlot style,” he says.

The Eddys offer one delivery of pork and three deliveries of beef throughout the season. Before it’s delivered to customers, however, the meat is slaughtered, processed, smoked and packaged at Kickapoo Locker Service in Gays Mills, Wis.

James Chellevold has worked at the Kickapoo Locker Service for 38 years, but the business has been in his family since 1941.

“We custom butcher for people,” Chellevold says. “They bring ‘em in live to us, we slaughter ‘em under state inspection, we cut ‘em up and package them for ‘em and then they come pick ‘em up and take ‘em home,” Chellevold explains. “We smoke all our own hams and bacons and weiners, Polish sausages, jerky … you name it, we probably make it,” he says.

Ridgeland Harvest sends about six to eight pigs and two to four steers per year to Chellevold.

“He can look at an animal and tell you how much it weighs, how many steaks will come out of it,” Cate says.

“I’ve been here for so long, it’s just about an average,” Chellevold says. “On an average half of beef, you get six sirloins, you get six round steaks, you get about 16 T-bones and porterhouses together, and about 14 rib-eyes.”

Chellevold also says customers appreciate locally-raised meat because they know where it’s raised and are more aware of the butchering process.

“You know where it’s coming from, you know that there’s probably no drugs in it,” he says.

According to Mat and Cate, eating locally-raised beef decreases fuel costs that are tied up in our food system.

“What I think a lot of people don’t realize is that they are shipping cattle from all over the place,” Cate says. “There’s a lot of fossil fuel involved in eating meat.”

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