The Fifth Quarter

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the beef tongue tacos we served at our wedding, and how our friend Bobby ate one, loved it, then nearly hit the floor when we told him what it was. Here's something I left out of that story: if you've eaten good beef tongue in the last few years, there's a decent chance it wasn't supposed to be yours. Most American beef tongues get boxed, frozen, and loaded onto a boat to Japan or South Korea, where people pay well for them and cooks know exactly what to do with them. The tongue on Bobby's plate was the exception. The rule is an ocean away.

And that's true for a lot more of the cow than the tongue!

I've spent my career on the parts of the animal most people never think about, which means I've spent a lot of time in slaughterhouses. A woman in her thirties isn't who most people picture on a kill floor, and I didn't expect to end up on one either. But I'm grateful I did. It's given me a front-row seat to the underbelly of our food system, and a literal look at how the sausage gets made. Pigs get scalded. Cattle get bled, the blood running into big buckets that get hauled off to rendering along with the hides. Every plant has a rendering room, where all the byproducts wait until the rendering company comes to collect them, and I can tell you this room is the worst thing I have ever smelled in my life. Picture a cat litter box, then multiply by 10x. Ammonia cranked all the way up. Warm, too, which makes it worse. A startling amount of the animal ends up in that room.

But not all of it, even at the small plant where I worked. Walk the floor and you'd pass an offal tree, one of those tall racks of hooks, with livers and tongues hanging off it. Every time I saw it I felt a little lift, because it meant those parts had been spared. Someone was going to eat them! They were going to their highest use, which is the thing I care most about.

That rack, though, held a tiny fraction of what came off the line.

A live steer weighs around 1,400 pounds. Slaughter it and "dress" it, which is the trade's word for stripping off the hide, head, feet, blood, and internal organs, and you're down to a hanging carcass of about 880 pounds. Trim that into the cuts you'd recognize at a butcher counter and you're left with roughly 570 pounds of sellable beef. That's about 40% of the live animal. It takes something like two and a half pounds of steer to put one pound of beef in your cart. [1]

Everything else, the other 60%, has a name in the trade. It's called the fifth quarter, or just the drop, because it drops off the carcass onto the floor. Hide, blood, bones, fat, and all the organs: liver, tongue, tripe, heart, kidneys, tendons, feet, ears, head.

Now here's the twist that took me a while to sit with. The operation that is best in the world at using the whole animal, nose-to-tail, nothing wasted, is the one I'd never hold up as a hero: the giant industrial packer.

Four companies, Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef, buy about 85% of the fed cattle in this country. In 1971 that number was closer to 25%. [2] My first boss at Walden, the founder and CEO Charley Cummings, sat me down early on and told me something that reorganized how I saw the whole business. The Big 4, he said, don't really make their money on the steaks. They make it on the drop, and specifically on selling the drop overseas. He wanted me to understand it because he believed it was the key to whether a whole-animal company like Walden could ever turn a profit. He was right that it mattered. I just didn't yet grasp how far out of reach that money was for anyone our size.

USDA's own economists put it bluntly. In a report on local meat processing, they write that large-scale packers "earn most and at times all of their net revenue from byproduct sales; they may even lose money on the sale of meat at times." [3] Read that twice. The meat we eat in this country is often a loss leader. The money is in the fifth quarter. And the reason they can pull that off, the same report says, is that they "operate at a large enough scale to refine different parts into useable products and to sell in large enough volumes to access valuable international markets." [3]

That last piece, the international markets, is where nearly all of it goes, and the map can get extremely specific. Beef livers get shipped to Egypt, which takes around 60% of what we export. Beef lips, almost all of them, 99.9%, go to Mexico, along with hearts and tripe. Tongues and short ribs sail to Japan and South Korea, where they're prized. More tripe, tendons, and stomachs move to China. [4] Hides go to China above all, which bought more than twelve million American hides in a single recent year, about 65% of everything we export. [5] Add it up and variety meats alone, the organ-and-offal category, were worth about $1.1 billion in exports in 2024 and made up more than a fifth of the volume of beef we ship abroad. Averaged across every steer slaughtered, exports add around $415 of value per animal, and about $44 of that is variety meat that Americans, by and large, won't touch. [6]

Which brings me to the irony sitting at the center of all this. The industrial system I've spent my career pushing against is, in fact, the finest nose-to-tail operation on earth. It wastes almost nothing. Every organ, every hide, every ounce of fat gets refined, boxed, and sold to someone somewhere who values it. The system that treats the animal as a commodity is the one that uses, if you can call it honoring, every last piece. It just does it for a customer eight thousand miles away, and never for the family down the road.

Because here's what happens to that same fifth quarter when it comes off an animal raised by a small farmer doing everything right. It gets rendered and dumped.

That's not a guess. It has been the reality for most of my job. At Vermont Packinghouse, the farms we worked with were almost all small, and almost none of them had anywhere to send the offal. At the plant level, we tried to change that. We really tried. We looked at aggregating the offal from all the small farmers together, pooling it into a volume big enough to sell. And even pooled, it was too small to matter to a buyer. It's a double whammy. The farmer has no market, so he doesn't bother saving the parts himself. The processor can't build a market either, because the scale simply isn't there. So the liver and the tongue and the tripe that a giant packer would have turned into revenue in Cairo or Osaka go into the rendering bin instead, and the processor pays to have them hauled away. Which really means the farmer pays, since a small plant has to price disposal into what it charges for the kill.

The value I did see captured was small and specific. Marrow bones, because some customers like to make their own broth. Liver, which has a devoted following for its nutrition. That was about it. Tendons, knuckle bones, meaty bones, kidneys, tripe, tongue, hides, hooves, feet, ears: I never saw a real, reliable market for any of them. Every so often a small pet-treat maker trying to do things the honest way would offer to buy some, but the buying was inconsistent, never enough to plan around.

For the big packers the drop is most of the profit. For the small ones, and I'm quoting the same report, the drop "either generates little or no revenue or is a cost." [3] A cost. Small plants often can't even gather enough volume to cover what the renderer charges to come collect it. Hides that were worth real money a decade ago now sell for somewhere between one and ten dollars apiece, when they sell at all, and many plants just throw them out. [7]

And it isn't for lack of trying harder. Selling offal into those export markets requires each individual plant to be certified and listed by the destination country. China approves specific facilities by name. [8] It requires cold chain, containerized freight, and standing relationships with foreign buyers. It requires volume, always volume. There are also rules, sensible ones left over from the mad cow scare, that require certain parts of older cattle, the brain, the spinal cord, the skull, to be stripped out and destroyed at the plant's own expense. [8] Every one of these is a fixed cost that a giant spreads across millions of animals and a small plant swallows whole. The same certifications, the same markets, the same logistics that make the Big 4 rich on the drop are exactly what lock everyone else out. This isn't rigged by a villain. There's no one bad guy to point at. The system itself is the problem, and, as tends to be the case, it punishes the people doing the right thing. I say that as someone who's moved from the finance side, where Charley first showed me the numbers, to the operating side, where I've learned just how hard that market access is to win without scale. I know firsthand how much would have to change for the rules that work for the Big 4 to work for the small and medium players too. There are early signs of movement. This summer the USDA rolled out a program it calls SPUR, promising up to $500 million to small and mid-sized beef plants to keep them slaughtering through a severe cattle shortage, with the Big 4 deliberately shut out of the money. [9] I don't want to be cynical about that. It's the right instinct, and for a lot of plants it's the difference between staying open and closing their doors for good. But it's a lifeline, not a fix. It keeps the lights on. It does nothing to get that plant's offal into a container bound for Osaka or onto a shelf in Boston, so the fifth quarter still lands in the rendering bin. Keeping the good actors alive is the floor, not the goal.

There's one more thing to mention about building your economics on the fifth quarter. If the value of the American cow's other half is set in Beijing and Cairo and Osaka, then it isn't really under our control at all. Early in 2025, in the middle of a trade fight, China let the export registrations for 489 American beef plants quietly lapse and put retaliatory tariffs on our beef. Within a month, our beef exports to China fell by nearly 70%. [10] Just like that, a chunk of the value of every animal evaporated, not because anything changed on the farm or the kill floor, but because of a diplomatic spat an ocean away. It took more than a year to sort out.

What does that mean? We've built a meat system so dependent on selling our leftovers to China that when China sneezes, the price an American rancher gets for his cattle catches cold. A food system whose math only works if a foreign government stays friendly is not a stable food system. It's a bet. And the people who lose that bet first are the ones with the least cushion, the small farmers who never got to play in that market to begin with but feel every tremor of it anyway.

I don't have a tidy fix to hand you at the end of this. What I have is the reason I get up and do this work, and a good part of the reason Brent and I started Offcuts Kitchen. It comes back to that offal tree in the small-scale plant, the livers and tongues hanging where I could see them, saved.

Here's why it matters more than a nice image. A regenerative food system only works if the math works, and the math only works if the farmer doing it right gets paid for the whole animal, not 40% of it. You cannot ask someone to raise cattle the hard way, on grass, at a human scale, in a way that actually heals the land, and then hand them a system where more than half of what they harvested is a disposal bill instead of income. If the people doing it right keep eating the loss on the fifth quarter, we don't get more of them. We get fewer. And then we really are cooked.

So I want more of the animal to end up on that rack and less of it in the rendering room. I want the fifth quarter of a cow raised well in New England to feed a family in New England, not to be the cheapest thing in a shipping container bound for the other side of the world. It's the same thing I said about the tongue at our wedding. An animal a farmer raised should make human food, and it should feed the people closest to where it was raised.

That's a long way off. The rules that made the giants rich on the drop would have to bend to fit the rest of us, and so far they haven't. But I think it starts with people simply understanding how the thing actually works, because most of us have no idea. I certainly didn't, once. If you got to the end of this and thought, I had no clue it worked like that, and I'd like to understand it well enough to help the farmers doing it right, then that's the whole reason I wrote it.

Sources

1. University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension, "How Many Pounds of Meat Can We Expect From A Beef Animal?" https://beef.unl.edu/beefwatch/2020/how-many-pounds-meat-can-we-expect-beef-animal/ ; USDA Economic Research Service, Meat Price Spreads. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/meat-price-spreads/
2. USDA Economic Research Service, Amber Waves, "Concentration in the U.S. Meatpacking Industry and How It Affects Competition and Cattle Prices," January 2024. https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2024/january/concentration-in-u-s-meatpacking-industry-and-how-it-affects-competition-and-cattle-prices
3. USDA Economic Research Service, Report No. ERR-150, "Local Meat and Poultry Processing," June 2013. https://ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/publications/45094/37949_err-150.pdf
4. U.S. Meat Export Federation via Michigan State University Extension, "Variety meat exports provide value to the U.S. beef industry." https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/variety-meat-exports-provide-value-to-the-u-s-beef-industry
5. The National Provisioner / Steiner Consulting, April 2025. https://www.provisioneronline.com/articles/118665-value-for-us-beef-from-exports-to-china-difficult-to-replace-through-domestic-sales-alone
6. U.S. Meat Export Federation / Beef Checkoff, "U.S. Beef's Global Rise," https://www.beefboard.org/2025/07/18/us-beef-global-rise/ ; USMEF export statistics, https://usmef.org/export-data/export-statistics/latest-export-results
7. Drovers, "Cattle Market Factors We're Not Talking Much About," https://www.drovers.com/news/industry/cattle-market-factors-were-not-talking-much-about ; Friesla, "Waste Management Options for Small Meat Processing Facilities," https://friesla.com/blog/meat-processing-waste-management/ ; Derrell Peel (Oklahoma State University) via CalfNews, https://calfnews.net/industry-issues/beef-byproducts-more-than-drop/
8. USDA FSIS China Export Library, https://www.fsis.usda.gov/inspection/import-export/import-export-library/china ; USDA FSIS Specified Risk Material Resources, https://www.fsis.usda.gov/inspection/compliance-guidance/specified-risk-material-resources
9. USDA, "Secretary Rollins Announces Program to Support Small- and Mid-Size Beef Processors," June 30, 2026, https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2026/06/30/secretary-rollins-announces-program-support-small-and-mid-size-beef-processors ; Agri-Pulse, "USDA plans aid for small, mid-sized beef processors amid cattle shortage," https://www.agri-pulse.com/articles/24930-usda-plans-aid-for-small-mid-sized-beef-processors-amid-cattle-shortage
10. USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, "China: SCTC Announces Retaliatory Tariffs," https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/china-sctc-announces-retaliatory-tariffs-us-agricultural-products ; The Beef Site, "US meat exports at risk as China lets registrations lapse," https://www.thebeefsite.com/news/us-meat-exports-at-risk-as-china-lets-registrations-lapse ; Drovers, https://www.drovers.com/news/ag-policy/china-strikes-back-u-s-beef-now-faces-56-tariff-pork-81

Hero photo: Jared Benedict (redjar), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.