How Many Burgers Can Be Made From One Cow

Americans consume a considerable amount of beef per year. While ground beef gets used in plenty of recipes, it's highly likely that most of it will become burgers. This begs the question: Just how many burgers can you get from a cow? Well, there is a theoretical answer to that, and one that more realistically reflects how ground beef is actually made. But if you want your whole cow to make nothing but burgers, you could get over 2,000 quarter-pound patties with just one.

The average weight of a beef cow is between 1,100 and 1,400 pounds, but not all of that will become meat. First, after slaughtering, the broken-down carcass is stripped to just the meat, some bone, and lots of excess fat. According to Pennsylvania State University, the standard carcass weight is about 63% of the cow's total weight. So, if the animal weighed in at 1,250 pounds, somewhere around 790 pounds would be harvested from the animal. However, even less than that becomes usable meat.

From the carcass, South Dakota State University estimates that between 55% and 75% of that ends up as retail beef, the kind of meat that gets turned into ground beef, steaks, etc. If you average that at 65%, you're left with just around 515 pounds of boneless trimmed beef from one cow — or about 2,060 burgers using a quarter pound measurement as standard. Of course, that is the maximum number of burgers you could get, assuming you threw every cut of beef into the grinder. In reality, the average ground beef yield from a cow is much less.

Cuts of beef are classified into larger sections called beef primals, and only some of them are commonly used for ground beef. Most comes from lean beef trimmings. These are the little bits of leftover meat that butchers have after they have broken down large cuts into smaller, specific steaks and roasts. The amount of beef that is trimmed and turned into ground beef is going to vary, but as much as 40% and 50% of that meat will end up becoming ground beef. So, this would yield around 1,000 quarter pounders from the average animal the way they are normally butchered.

Of course, you could probably get more than that. Several other cuts get turned into ground beef as well, and you've probably seen them labeled that way at the grocery store. Options just labeled "ground beef," are usually a mix of different cuts, but chuck, round, and sirloin (the three largest primal cuts) are also made into ground beef by themselves. Ground chuck, which comes from the fattier area around the shoulder, is typically packaged as 80/20 beef, while ground round and sirloin (which are leaner) come from around the rear legs.

Round is usually labelled 85/15 ground beef, with sirloin designated 90/10. The fattier chuck is usually considered the best of those for burgers because it will be juicier and more flavorful, but together those sections make up around 60% of the usable meat on a cow. As it turns out, while we love our steak, most of the cow will become ground beef — and that means a lot of burgers.