Which Shipley Beef Share Is Right for You?
There are three share sizes and a whole-animal option. The decision is simpler than it looks, because one constraint settles most of it.
Four options, and one question that settles most of it: how much clear freezer space do you have, measured, today?
Start with the freezer
- A drawer or a shelf. The 1/8 share. 40 to 42 lbs, 19 cuts, and it ships frozen.
- A small chest freezer, or a full freezer shelf. The quarter. About 85 lbs, 23 cuts.
- A dedicated chest freezer. The half. About 175 lbs, 26 cuts, pickup only.
- More than one freezer, or a group of you splitting it. A whole beef or a side, priced by hanging weight.
Packaged beef runs roughly 35 to 40 lbs per cubic foot as a planning figure. Measure the space before you order, not after.
Then the household
A rough rule from our own customers: a 1/8 share feeds one or two people for a few months, a quarter suits a family of four for about half a year, and a half share is a year of beef for that same family. These are not promises, they are starting points, and how fast you get through it depends mostly on how often you cook ground beef.
Dry-aged, or not
Every share comes in both. The dry-aged version costs more because the aging ties up cold storage for weeks. If you have never eaten dry-aged beef, buy the smaller share dry-aged rather than the larger share not, and find out whether you can taste the difference before you commit a year of dinners to it.
“And it takes three years to make a steak.”
Gray Shipley
Three years is the lead time behind every share on this page, which is why we ask you to reserve a size rather than discover we are out of it.
Why we ask you to reserve rather than just buy
“Well, selling your own meat starts with who are you going to sell it to? If it's a restaurant, you have to have it consistently available 52 weeks a year. If it's a consumer, you have to either open a farm store or figure out how to ship online with packaging and dry ice and insulation, and, you know, UPS relationships or spend every Saturday at the farmer's market. And so each one of those just has barriers and costs and coordination and infrastructure. That's a lot for somebody that often is working two or three jobs.”
Gray Shipley
“We used to just kind of not try to outsmart God, let the animal do what it's supposed to do and stay out of the way.”
Gray Shipley
Shares are matched to real animals on a real schedule. Reserving is how both ends of that stay honest.
For the money, see what a beef share costs. For what turns up in the box, see what you get in a half share.
- Freezing and Food Safety, USDA FSIS
- Cold Food Storage Chart, FoodSafety.gov
Food-safety temperatures and storage times on this page are cited to the agencies above rather than to us.
Written at Shipley Farms in Vilas, North Carolina: a family cattle farm raising and dry-aging beef in the Appalachian Mountains, now in its fifth generation. No shortcuts since 1872.
Every quote on this page is Gray Shipley talking, the man who runs this farm. We sat down with him, turned on a recorder, and kept his own words. Hesitations are trimmed so they read on the page. Nothing else is added or reworded, except where Gray revised his own words in review.
Nobody knows this beef better than we do. On food safety we leave it to USDA FSIS and FoodSafety.gov, and we have linked their pages above. Reviewed 3 October 2026.
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