Rockdale Locker

10/31/2026

10/12/2026

Tenley is one of our boxers! She does a great job keeping our freezers organized!

🎉 October FFA Member of the Month – Sophomore
💙 💛Tenley Thole! 💙 💛

09/26/2026

Locker Hogs Available!

Get your freezers filled up for the cold season ahead! Custom processing at Rockdale Locker in Maquoketa October 22nd or November 18th.

This group is 100% BERKSHIRE pork, confinement free hogs. Raised right here in Eastern Iowa!

$2/ lb hanging weight, customer also pays processing to the locker. Limited spots available. It’ll be about 6 months until our next batch of feeder pigs are ready to process. Don’t wait get on the books asap🥓💕

09/25/2026

09/18/2026

Proud to support these kiddos!

Mile 8 with Laura Weirup and Ella Gibson running on vibes.
Sponsors are April Gibson and Rockdale Locker

09/18/2026

Don’t let the cold weather keep you from your favorite Rockdale Locker brats!

We sliced some precooked brats and added all of our favorite comfort foods for a potato and sausage chowder.

09/16/2026

This is a really good post about burger grinding and why it’s not always possible to meet every special request.

Well, let’s talk about this request.
(As always, no hard feelings towards this customer who simply doesn’t know what they don’t know, and thank you for letting me use your request to help educate the broader customer base and their producers.)

I never knew when starting a custom exempt processing business that hamburger would be such a source of contention.
This is such a tough business overall because of the amount of misconceptions and consumer confusion we are up against.

First off: every custom beef order contains hamburger.

With our cut sheets, 1/4 beef orders are typically 35–40% ground beef *if the customer takes every cut*.
1/2 beef orders are around 25%.

Next: we cannot control the fat content of the ground beef. It is ground 1/2 beef at a time, and the result is specific to the animal itself and the cuts selected by the customer. We do not batch grind more than 1/2 beef at a time, so there is very little wiggle room to manipulate the fat content.
Regardless, custom exempt beef is not tested or labeled for fat percentage.

With those two widely misunderstood points addressed, back to this specific cut sheet special request: the entire 1/2 beef trim and all non-selected cuts are ground together. We do not weigh out and grind specific cuts individually.

For this particular customer, they selected to package the short ribs, so their grind will contain 0% short rib.

The chuck will make up a significant portion of their grind, but exactly what percentage? 🤷🏼‍♀️

A brisket from a 325 lb half of a grass-fed carcass weighs roughly 5 lbs, so it might account for 5–8% of the ground beef.

The remaining trim from the carcass makes up at least half of the ground beef.
The exact percentages? We will never know, as we are not going to take them time to weigh out various bits of meat that go in the grinder.

That is simply how custom exempt whole carcass processing and the resulting ground beef works.

09/14/2026

Thank you to Maquoketa Livestock Exchange for trusting us to process your donation animal!

09/11/2026

Bringing home the bacon!