When everyone else had gone, it only took 15 minutes for the Doc to get that little white “invisible” thorn out of my eyelid.  He later confided to me that he couldn’t see the thorn at all; it was so tiny and blended in too well with the eyelid’s color.  He located the thorn by following the blood trail of the scratches on my eye surface each time I blinked.

      For this, I paid over $300.00.  I was awed by his amazing skill and grateful, resolving to be more careful with hay.

      What does all this have to do with meeting demand for sheep?  Plenty.

      Everyone I saw in his office looked over 50 years old.  In fact, the vast majority of all medical treatments involve senior citizens.  As we saw in a previous Scribblings report, senior citizens are one of the two most important and profitable buying classes of local gourmet lamb.  They tend to have more digestion problems than younger folks and they have way more spending money.  In fact, if you want to locate people who need—not just want—lamb, head for the doctor’s office.

Have you been to your local eye doctor or hearing specialist lately?  What about the dentist?  If not, you’re missing a way to get professionals to sell sheep for you.

      Some years ago, while handling hay in a swirling wind, I got a tiny little horse nettle thorn caught in my eyelid, which raked and scratched the surface of my eye every time I blinked.

Anyone who has ever had to put up with these horse nettles in the hay (also called sand briers or Sodom apples) knows how troublesome its thorns are.  No part of the plant except the root and the tomato-like fruit is free of the thorns.  The thorns easily break off and stay in your flesh like a barbed splinter.  Sheep eat these plants to a certain extent but it’s far from their first-choice forage.

      After several days of being unable to retrieve that little thorn stuck under my eyelid, my eye surface began to become opaque—like a lamb’s eye does when it has an in-turned eyelid (entropion).

      Overcoming my “sheepskate” tendencies, I finally went to an ophthalmologist to see if he could get it out.  His secretary squeezed one last appointment into the end of the doctor’s busy day, so I sat around the waiting room with at least 10 other people ahead of me, while I read the latest sheep!  (Reading sheep! in waiting rooms is a good way to pique folks’ curiosity, often striking up a conversation that can lead to profitable retail sales.)

Sheep meat has been growing in popularity among Spanish-speaking people for decades.  A few years ago, labs were testing public reactions to flavor and breed of sheep meat in Spain, and they concluded the following:

Both pre-slaughter factors [breed and liveweight] should be taken into account in the specifications of quality labels in an attempt to offer consumers a product with homogeneous characteristics, which could help to increase consumer loyalty, especially if the product is similar from one purchase to the next.—Dept. Animal Prod. & Food Science, Univ. of Zaragoza, Spain, Aug 31, 2004

The cost of doing business in sheep boils down to 3 things:  Land, labor and the capital.

      Land can be had cheaper by either renting, or by the traditional method of grazing marginal land no usable for anything else.  Or land can be made more productive via fertilization, rotation, irrigation, etc.

      Labor can be cheapened by taking advantage of guest worker programs, or (better) eliminating labor costs altogether via easy-care breeds, better fencing and better equipment.

      Two conventional ways to cheapen the cost of capital are:  (1) Think big; economies of scale in theory allow ever-cheaper production, which lets us chase ever cheaper lamb prices; or (2) Get a piece of Middlemen’s Pie, taking over more of the steps between you and the consumer, by selling direct to consumers or at least to retailers.

      Consumer satisfaction means more than just low price, however.  A race to the bottom price is less profitable than a race to most preferred product.  Follow the monkey:  It will do just about anything for the taste it prefers, but may just throw that cheapest product back in your face.