Pastured Meat in Virginia

I’ve heard from many people that meat from animals raised in pastures (free-range, grass-eating, no hormone injections, etc) purchased straight from the farmer is not only much cheaper than supermarket meat, but also tastes much better too.  In Minneapolis, we did take advantage of CSA programs (which I highly recommend, for the same reasons), but we were never able to get pastured meat, primarily because we never had the freezer space.

You see, when you buy meat from the farmer, it’s only really economical for them to sell it to you in large quantities – for example, 1/8 cow (one of the smallest units of beef) is about 55 pounds.  Some places only sell units as small as 1/4 or 1/2 cows.  So you really need a dedicated freezer to house all the meat once you buy it.

Now that we’re moving to a real house in Virginia Beach, we have room for a chest freezer, which means 1/4 cow won’t be hard to store.  So I went to eatwild.com (highly recommended) to find the closest pasture, only to find a huge list without any easy way to figure out where in the state they were actually located and what they had.  Thus, I spent half an hour producing the following…

BEHOLD!  A Google custom map displaying all locations to buy pastured meat in Virginia!

By the look of it, the best places for us in Virginia Beach will be Holly Grove Farm (beef and raw milk) and Full Quiver Farm (chicken, turkey, eggs, beef and pork).  Lovers Retreat Farm (beef, goat cheese, duck eggs, goose eggs, guinea eggs) is a little further, but I bet will be worth it.  There are a few places that have lamb as well, but it looks like they’ll be a longer drive…