You can still get good deals at Walmart. I get chicken leg quarters there regularly at less than $.50/lb. in 10lb bags. Find out when they mark down their almost expired meat and try to be there at that time. You can get some good deals like that.
Check ethnic markets. They always have good stuff cheap. Check with restaurants. Find out where they get their meats. See if you can talk them into adding some bulk stuff for you in with their order. Check out surrounding towns. It's not a big deal to ride 30 or 40 miles to get a good deal on mabye 100lbs of meat. Check with farmers in the area. Many will sell you a cow or a goat or pig. Some will even butcher it for you or will tell you where to take it and maybe take it for you. You just never know what kind of deal you can work out with a farmer who has livestock.
Put an ad on Freecycle or Recycle(yahoo groups) or on craigslist. In the ad ask for old meat from their freezer. State that freezer burned is OK. This works good particularly just before hunting season as hunters want to clean out last years stuff before going hunting again. I get LOTS of venison like this. Try wording ads differently from time to time. Ask all your friends about their old meat in their freezer. Be careful not to feed cooked bones when you get all that free stuff from freezers.
That should keep everyone busy for a while.
Ethnic markets??? Ha, I haven't seen one since I moved here. I'd have to drive hours to find one. We don't even have "ethnic" food. The closest thing to Mexican food is Taco Bell, and that's all freeze dried trash shipped in a bucket. There's Pizza Hut, don't know what they might give me. Maybe our gas station Subway will give me their leftover rolls and ham? The only store in town is Dollar General. We have an ice cream shop, don't know how helpful they'll be.
Each Freecycle groups rules are different, someone tried to offer leftover dried spices and had her post denied. Some don't allow food products to be offered or asked for. Someone tried to offer frozen salmon, there was a big fit about it, so no food is allowed anymore. I tried to give away a 20 lb bag of Iams cat food I was given for a foster cat, and that was turned down as well.
What do you consider a "good deal" on a half cow, how much do you pay a pound? I was told by a local farmer it would be $4-$ per pound, to me, that's a lot of money for dog food. My husband won't even pay that much for a steak for himself. We're not rich enough to do that.
Do you give your dogs raw pork? Doesn't that give them the runs? Or are your dogs immune to pork?
Another thing, in another thread someone was telling me how awful I was for feeding my dogs Taste if the Wild dog food, she said it contains cancer causing preservatives made out of the same ingredient as Raid pesticide. So I'm sure my dogs are all doomed to die of cancer because of this horrid food.
Yet you think it's ok for me to go to Walmart, stock up on chicken, beef and fish, processed in another state (or country for all I know) shipped to my store, and sits for a week. Meat that comes from unknown sources, filled with antibiotics, hormones, and who knows what else, then packaged in gas to preserve it for a few weeks or frozen to hide the smell.
I won't eat meat from Walmart, but you think it's acceptable for dogs to eat it?? Yeah, Walmart has some fine meat for sale, ask them for the old stuff, it must be healthy.
"Processors say treated ground meat can be sold for 28 days after leaving the plant, and solid cuts for 35 days. The agribusiness company Cargill says it has sold 100 million packages in the last year."
"In a firsthand look at the treated meat, a package of a conventionally wrapped rib steak and one with the carbon monoxide were both red when bought on Feb. 3 near Washington. They were then kept refrigerated. By Feb. 16, when they were photographed for the pictures that appear with this article, the conventional meat was brown, but the treated meat was still rosy. And as of yesterday, other treated meat bought at the same time was still red despite having been left unrefrigerated on a kitchen counter since Feb. 14."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/national/21meat.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
I suppose if people can eat old chemically preserved meat, injected with antibiotics and hormones, the dogs can too. After all, that's what dogs and cavemen ate hundreds of years ago.