Steer FB94946 — PGWR MR KIKUHANA 105L1

“Wagyu” is not a protected term on an American label. A steak can be sold as Wagyu with a single Wagyu grandparent, or with none at all if the seller is careless, and nothing about the word obliges anyone to prove it. That is why the number matters more than the adjective: a registration number is a claim that can be failed.

There are three ways to check this one, in rising order of effort:

1. Read the certificate below. It carries the registration number, the registered name and the pedigree behind them.
2. Take registration FB94946 and member #3602 to the American Wagyu Association. Both are the association’s records, not ours, and we have no way to edit them.
3. Come and stand next to him. He is alive, he is twenty minutes from Punta Gorda, and the feed and health records are open to anyone considering a share. Arrange a visit — there is no obligation and nothing to sign.

Marbling is deposited over time. Fat inside the muscle is the last thing an animal lays down, well after it has finished growing frame and muscle, so the length of the finish is most of what separates a Wagyu carcass from a Wagyu pedigree. Genetics set the ceiling; days on feed decide how close the animal gets to it.

Commodity beef in the United States is typically finished in a few months. Much of what is sold domestically as Wagyu runs somewhere in the range of 200 to 400 days. FB94946 has had more than 500 consecutive days, which is the reason the marbling claim on the rest of this site is worth making at all — and the reason he costs what he costs to raise.

He has also never carried a growth implant, never had antibiotics in his feed and none routinely, and never been given a beta-agonist. He was born here, has had the same handlers his whole life, and has never been through a feedlot or a sale barn. The full husbandry position, including where we deliberately stopped short of the absolutes competitors use, is on how we raise them.

At an estimated 840 lbs hanging, a quarter share is about 147 lbs of packaged beef and a half is about 294 lbs. All in — beef plus processing at cost on a single bill — a quarter runs $2,300–$2,350 and a half $4,600–$4,700. That works out to about $16 per pound of beef in your freezer.

The invoice itself is still calculated per lb hanging weight against the actual figure the processor reports, because what changes hands is a share of the animal. The per-pound number above is the honest translation of that into the unit people compare.

One carcass with several owners is cut to one specification, so every share of FB94946 comes back as the Ranch Standard Cut:

• Ground beef, 1 lb packages — about 65 lbs in a quarter, 131 lbs in a half
• Steaks — ribeye, NY strip, sirloin, filet, flank, skirt — about 28 lbs in a quarter, 56 lbs in a half
• Roasts — chuck, rump, brisket, round — about 42 lbs in a quarter, 84 lbs in a half
• Short ribs, stew meat, soup and marrow bones — about 12 lbs in a quarter, 23 lbs in a half

Worth noticing how little of that is steak. Most of a share is ground beef and roasts, which is exactly where fullblood marbling earns its keep — the everyday cuts are the ones that change most against what you would otherwise buy.