About
Circle I Beef
This is who we are! I’m Donald Garcia and I am a retired general superintendent for a masonry company and have previously served as an assistant pastor at Calvary Chapel New Harvest in Los Lunas, NM. Both my wife, Irene, and I were raised in Belen, and we’re still here. After many years of unsuccessfully getting someone to cut our fields, we decided to raise beef and let the cattle do the cutting! We started out with one heifer, had her bred, and since then we have been breeding and selling our beef for a number of years on a small scale capacity.
At Circle I Beef, we strive to provide the best tasting, all natural, grass fed beef from our fields to your freezer. We do not use any growth hormones or steroids. Once you have tasted our beef, you will never go back to store-bought, hormone-laden meat. The difference is truly remarkable!
Our Bulk Beef is butchered and processed at a local processing plant in Belen. When you buy in bulk, you are actually saving your hard earned dollars and feeding your family healthier meat. Our steers and heifers are spoiled as we humanely treat them as God’s creatures with the utmost care and compassion and feed them with quality grass, alfalfa, and winter wheat. Buy local and don’t depend on foreign countries for your beef. At Circle I Beef, you know what you’re getting and we look forward to serving you with the tenderest, healthiest, tastiest beef you have ever eaten!
Our Retail Beef is USDA inspected, approved and stamped at a USDA processing plant in New Mexico. Our USDA beef is hung for 21 days prior to being processed, individually vacuum wrapped for a better flavor.
So “whether it’s in bulk or just what’s for dinner”
Your satisfaction is our goal!
live
This is what the animal weighed on the hoof, or when it was alive. The live weight for our Premium Angus steers usually average around 850 lbs.
Hanging
The Butcher
This is the weight that the butcher gives us after the animal has been taken back to the butcher shop to hang. The weight difference from live to hanging is from loss of blood, head, hide, hooves, viscera, lungs and heart. The hanging weight is usually about 60% of the live weight. So, a 850 lb animal would have a hanging weight of 510 lbs (estimated). (A half share would then be 255 lbs, and a 1/4 would be 128 lbs). This is the weight we base our per lb charges on.
Final
Take-home
This is the weight of the meat that each customer will bring home. This weight is usually about 60-65% of the hanging weight. So for a 128 lb quarter share, the final weight would be about 85 to 90 lbs (estimated). The weight is lost in 2 ways. About 4% is water weight lost during the 10-14 day period that the carcass is hung (or “cured”). Then about another 30-35% is lost during the cutting process. This amount is variable based on 2 factors – one is the amount of fat in the meat, and the other is the cuts that a customer requests. Keep in mind that higher fat means more loss. (Our grass-fed beef animals tend to be lower fat, so the loss tends to be closer to 35%.) Also , the more boneless cuts requested by the customer, the lower the final weight. (Note that the lower weight doesn’t mean that you are receiving less meat – rather, you are receiving fewer bones). What does this mean as far as actually per lb costs? It depends on the per pound price as well as the cuts that a customer requests
