🥩 Local food · Johnson County, Texas
Know where your
food comes from.
Most of the meat in an American grocery store passes through so many hands that nobody at the counter can tell you where the animal lived. Some of it never lived in America at all. Buying from a farm down the road is the simplest way to know — and it does more good than most people realize.
The economics
Where your food dollar actually goes.
11.8¢
of every grocery-store food dollar reaches a farmer
USDA's own Food Dollar Series puts the farm share at 11.8 cents in 2024. The other 88 cents go to processing, packaging, shipping, wholesale, retail, and advertising. Buy a share direct and that split flips — you pay the farmer for the animal and the butcher for the cutting, and that's the whole bill.
~85%
of fed cattle are slaughtered by just four meatpackers
A handful of companies run most of the country's meat supply. When one plant goes down, shelves go empty — the whole country saw it in the spring of 2020. A small farm and a local butcher are a second supply line that doesn't run through a single chokepoint.
1 county
is where your money stays when you buy here
Your lamb share pays a Johnson County farm, a licensed Texas butcher, and the feed store, fence supplier, and vet those businesses use. Money spent with independent local businesses keeps circulating close to home instead of leaving for a corporate headquarters in another state — or another country.
The resource case
Sustainability, without the slogans.
How it was raised matters more than how far it traveled
We'll be straight with you: "food miles" are a small slice of food's footprint — research puts transport at roughly a tenth of it. The bigger levers are how the animal lived and what it ate. Our sheep eat forage — pasture and browse on rotated paddocks, hay when the grass is dormant — and never grain, not even to finish. No feedlot, no manure lagoon. The animals spread their own fertilizer and the pasture grows back.
Whole-animal buying wastes less
Supermarket meat is sold cut-by-cut, and the parts nobody buys get rendered, discounted, or thrown out. A share is the whole animal: roasts, chops, ground, shanks, and bones for stock if you want them. You choose the cuts with the butcher, so less of the animal ends up as waste.
Less packaging, less cold-chain
Imported lamb crosses an ocean frozen, then goes through a port, a distributor, a warehouse, and a store cooler before it reaches you. Ours goes from pasture to a Texas butcher to your freezer. Fewer stops, fewer trucks, a lot less plastic and cardboard.
Pasture is a resource you can see
Well-managed grazing builds soil, holds rainwater, and keeps land in grass instead of subdivisions. Buying from a working farm is one of the few ways a family can directly pay for open land near DFW to stay open.
More on how we farm: regenerative agriculture, in plain words.
Know your meat
One animal, one farm, one butcher.
A package of ground meat from a big processor can hold meat from many animals, raised on different farms, sometimes in different countries. Nobody is hiding anything — the system is just built for volume, not for answers.
A share works the other way around. You reserve one animal. You know the farm it was raised on, the pasture it ate, and the licensed Texas butcher who cut and wrapped it — because you talk to them yourself. If you want to see the sheep before you buy, come out and see them.
That's the whole point. Not a label on a package, but a farmer you can call.
Questions worth asking any farmer
- Where was the animal born, and where did it spend its life?
- What did it eat — especially in the last few months?
- Who processed it, and are they licensed and inspected?
- Can I come see the animals and the pasture?
- If something goes wrong, who do I call?
A good farmer is glad to answer every one. Ask us.
Reading the label
How US meat is labeled — and why "American" may not be.
About 71% of the lamb eaten in the United States is imported, mostly from Australia and New Zealand. Beef and pork don't have to tell you their country of origin at all. And most of the reassuring words on a package mean less than they sound like. Here's a plain-English decoder.
"Product of USA" / "Made in the USA"
What it means: Since January 1, 2026, USDA only allows this on meat from animals born, raised, slaughtered, and processed in the U.S.
The catch: Before 2026, imported meat that was simply repackaged or further processed in a U.S. plant could carry it — some of that stock may still be in freezers. And the label is voluntary: no label tells you nothing either way.
Country-of-origin label (COOL)
What it means: Required at the store for lamb, goat, chicken, fish, and fresh produce.
The catch: Congress repealed mandatory origin labeling for beef and pork in 2015 after a trade dispute, so a steak or pork chop needn't say where it came from. Even for lamb, the rule skips anything processed (cooked, cured, smoked, seasoned, or mixed), restaurants, and small stores.
"Natural"
What it means: No artificial ingredients or added color, and only minimally processed.
The catch: It says nothing about how the animal lived, what it ate, or what country it came from. A feedlot animal from overseas can be "natural."
"No hormones added" (pork and chicken)
What it means: True — but federal law already prohibits hormones in all pork and poultry.
The catch: Every package of pork and chicken in the store qualifies. The label has to say so in the fine print, which is easy to miss.
"Grass-fed"
What it means: The company told USDA the animal ate grass and got its label approved.
The catch: USDA dropped its formal grass-fed standard in 2016, and labels are approved on paperwork, not farm visits. "Grass-fed" doesn't always mean "grass-finished" — plenty of animals eat grain for their last months.
"Pasture-raised" / "Free-range"
What it means: "Free-range" poultry has to have some access to the outdoors.
The catch: How much access, for how long, and on what ground isn't defined. "Pasture-raised" has no federal definition at all.
Labels are a starting point. Knowing the farmer is better.
FAQ
Questions about local meat and labels
Is the lamb at my grocery store from the United States? +
Does "Product of USA" mean the animal was raised here? +
Why does the origin of beef and pork no longer have to be labeled? +
Is buying locally raised meat more expensive? +
How do I know where Cross Timbers Homestead meat comes from? +
Fill your freezer from a farm you can visit.
Pasture-raised St. Croix lamb, born and raised in Texas, from our place in Cleburne to a Texas butcher to your table.
Sources
- USDA ERS — Food Dollar Series
- USDA FSIS — Voluntary "Product of USA" labeling final rule (2024)
- USDA AMS — Country of Origin Labeling (COOL)
- American Sheep Industry Association — lamb imports
- USDA FSIS — Meat and poultry labeling terms
- Weber & Matthews (2008) — Food-miles and the relative climate impacts of food choices
Figures are current as of 2026. Lamb import share is for 2025; farm share of the food dollar is USDA's 2024 figure.