How it works and what it costs

• Local delivery in San Antonio, Midland/Odessa, and Dallas. We will bring your order to your home in northwest San Antonio because we are often in this area anyway. Our associates at Lady of the Land deliver in the Midland/Odessa area. We make deliveries to Austin, Dallas, and Houston several times a year when we have enough orders to cover the costs at a current price of $50/order for delivery.
  By delivering to you, we can get to know each other so we can try to meet your needs better.
• Bulk orders In San Antonio, we can deliver bulk beef for $75 per order.
  In Austin, we can deliver bulk beef for $150 per order. The traffic in Austin is horrible.
  In Dallas, we can deliver bulk beef for $200 per order.
  In Houston, we can deliver bulk beef for $150 per order because it's far away from where we usually go.
  For everywhere else, shipping of 100 to 400 lbs is too expensive. We encourage you to come visit the farm to pick up the meat!
• Shipping by UPS/Fedex.
  We now use double-corrugated cardboard containers with robust insulation and gel packs to help ensure that your order will arrive frozen.
  Conventional guidelines say that your order is safe to eat as long as the meat is simply cold to the touch but we like your order to arrive frozen solid. We have tested the above configuration with ambient temperatures in the 80s and found them satisfactory for up to 31 hours.
  The wonderful advantage is that a 24" by 16" by 16" box can now hold 28 lb of meat, compared with 20 lb with the Styrofoam and enough dry ice for 3 days shipping. With further testing, it may be that we can ship 30+ lb meat by proving that we need less gel pack mass to last 24 hours.
  Therefore, effective Oct 1, 2024, we are using UPS Ground for 1-day zones and UPS and Fedex Next-day Air for UPS 2+ day zones.
Update Oct 1, 2024: We are eschewing use of dry ice and Styrofoam containers in favor of Next-Day Air shipment for UPS 2+ zones.
But this is outragenously expensive!!!!. Yup. It sure is. But we have found that some customers find the shipping price per pound to be acceptable. In a recent shipment, the meat price was about $500 and the shipping about $250 for 28 lb meat, so the shipping price per pound was about $9. Our hope is that if we can show sufficient volume of shipments, UPS and/or Fedex will offer us better discounts, as they seem to be doing for our competitors.
For UPS 1-day zone: UPS Ground. $65 for 1-day delivery, with orders up to 28 lbs. If your shipment is larger each box will incur the same delivery charge. The online store will show you the number of boxes for delivery to your location. This rate is high but reflects our actual costs.
For UPS / Fedex Next Day Air: to the coasts, about $265 for overnight by noon and about $235 for delivery by the end of the day, for orders up to 28 lbs. Deliveries closer to the middle of the country should be less. We are working on upgrading our website to show you the exact price to your location. If your shipment is larger each box will incur the same delivery charge. The online store will show you the number of boxes for delivery to your location. This rate is really high but reflects our actual costs. Please note that we are setting up the online store so you cannot pay until we confirm the shipping fee. We will contact to you confirm the fee, and you will be able to edit your selections to bring the weight to one that works for you.

Shipping policies

• Why do we need policies? As our business grows nationwide, we no longer have the luxury of meeting our customers face to face. This can lead to misunderstandings.
• Responsibility for shipments. We are responsible for getting your order to the shipper (UPS currently) with enough coolant to get the order to you frozen. We will refund your purchase price if the shipment is delayed through no fault of your own and it is not cold when it arrives. You are responsible for the shipment otherwise. This means that you are responsible for the purchase price if the address you provide is incorrect or you cannot receive the shipment in time as long as it was delivered or could have been delivered in time. You are responsible for additional UPS charges if you wish to redirect the shipment while it is en route.
• Problems with the order. If the meat is not delivered frozen or cold to the touch, you must notify us immediately so that we can follow up with UPS. The volume UPS handles is enormous, and it is very difficult to get information if inquiries are not made immediately. If we sent the wrong items or items are missing, please let us know and we will make it right.
• Problems with the package in transit. If UPS or Fedex damages the package in transit so that the meat is not frozen or the vacuum seal is broken, you must notify us immediately. UPS has specific requirements for filing claims that include at least seven photographs, and they also reserve the right to examine the shipping box and damaged contents. You may want to keep the damaged packages in a refrigerator or freezer in case they want to see them.
  The seven (or more) photographs are:
  • A photo showing each damaged item and how it was packaged inside the box
  • A photo of each damaged item
  • A photo of the packaging material used. If a styrofoam container was used and it is broken, please take several photos to show the location and details of the damage.
  • A close-up photo of the shipping label with tracking number (generally starts with 1Z)
  • A close-up photo of the box manufacturer’s certificate (round stamp on outside of box)
  • Two photos showing all six sides of the package (one showing top and two sides, another showing bottom and opposite sides)
  Once we receive these photographs from you and any other materials required for filing a claim for damages, we will be happy to refund your purchase price for the damaged items.
• Cancellation.We will refund all of your purchase price if you cancel before we leave the farm to ship your order. We will refund all but $67 if we left the farm for the nearest UPS Store, because that's it is far from the farm and that's what the IRS says the trip costs us. We will not refund any of the purchase price once we deliver your shipment to the shipper because it will then have been out of our control so we cannot restock the items you bought.
• Legalese. By having us ship you our products, you hereby consent to resolving disputes by binding arbitration under the laws of the Great State of Texas. (If you think this provision is not reasonable, free free to let us know and we will consider revising it.)

Why shipping costs so much

• Bottom line. Shipping is expensive and the costs are rising quickly. As of April 2022, we are currently absorbing about $30-$40 of the actual cost of shipping your order.
• How businesses calculate the shipping charges you see. There are 3 ways to charge the customer for shipping: show the full cost separately, hide the shipping cost in the cost of each product, or hide part of the cost and show part of the cost. We have elected the first option for now. When you see "low cost" or "free" shipping but really high prices for individual products, the company is probably including shipping in the product price and is probably not making the fortune it appears they would be making.
• What makes up the shipping charge The following figures were current in early 2021. The cost of insulated boxes is now $22-$25 (delivered) in May 2022. The components of the shipping charge are
  1. The insulated box, which in pallet-load quantities costs about $14-$18 depending on the size. The boxes themselves are priced at $6-$10 but they are shipped by freight (read: 18-wheeler tractor-trailer) and that costs about $8/box in early 2021.
  2. Dry Ice. This costs about $1.00 to $1.50 per pound, depending on the source. If you buy it in bulk, it is about $0.50/lb but you have to go get it at a distribution center and it disappears (sublimates) over a few days so you get to use about half of it. If you buy it at a retail store, they pay the costs of sublimation but you pay for the fact that they are taking that risk.
     The dry ice sublimates at about 5 lb/day, so a 3-day shipment require 15 lb plus a 5-lb safety margin to ensure that it arrives frozen. That amount of dry ice costs $20 to $30.00 in direct costs, plus the costs of driving to the source of the dry ice.
  3. Shipping. UPS Ground charges about $20-$50 for the size of boxes that hold 10-20 lb of frozen meat.
  4. Gel packs stay cold after the dry ice is gone, and can keep meat frozen for another 12-24 hours. We use about 6 to 10, at a cost of about $0.40 each.
  So the total cost of shipping a 3-day box is about $16 + $20-$30 + $50 + $3, or about $89-$99 depending on the cost of dry ice. 1-day delivery, with 5-10 lb dry ice, costs about $16 + $7.50-15 + $20 + $3, or about $46.50-$54.
• Alternatives to shipping. You can request our meat in San Antonio at Sasha's European Food Market at 8093 Callaham Road near the junction of I10 and Loop 410 (they no longer stock it but maybe they will again if enough people ask), visit our farm in Central Texas (call or email us), or meet us in San Antonio. If you live outside these areas and choose to drive in, you will soon discover why UPS, the freight company, and the dry ice distributor charge as much as they do for their services!