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.

Sheep shows solved the problem of bringing breeding stock choices to a wide range of buyers and the problem of getting lots of potential buyers to view each grower’s products.  But the decline of consumer preferences as the basis for show judging has, as we saw in my last two blogs, had unintended consequences.

In addition, occasionally showmen have turned to crossbreeding in purebred shows.  A cross of two very similar-looking breeds is still a crossbred sheep, which nearly always has more vigor and growthiness than either parent breed.

Now, the only two reasons why purebred sheep are raised at all are because on the one hand purebreds are the only way to guarantee particular product qualities, and because a true crossbred can only be produced by crossing true purebreds.   And as stated, crossbreds grow better than purebreds.  If not produced from purebreds, the often falsely so-called “crossbreds” are just mongrels, sometimes of far poorer quality and less vigor than purebreds.

One crossbreed dating back to at least the 1830s involved the use of the Lincoln breed, a sheep developed in England’s richest grain districts.  The Lincoln was crossed by some showmen with the Cotswold breed, a sheep derived in bleak grasslands.  The Lincoln makes excellent growth if fed very well on grain and grass or hay.  The Cotswold, if purebred, usually can’t handle the grain load required by the Lincoln, but will thrive and grow to great size where the Lincoln would starve to death.  However, the cross of these two breeds will grow larger than either purebred parent breed by the time the show season starts, thereby helping win prizes.

Lincolns and Cotswolds look so much alike that even expert growers sometimes have difficulty distinguishing between them.  So crosses of these two breeds (and even purebreds of one breed shown in shows for the other breed), have won prizes, helping sell breeding stock.

Many other “show crosses” have been made by crossing breeds like the Columbia with the Corriedale, Columbia crossed on Dorset, Hampshire with Suffolk, the latter two breeds with Oxfords, etc., etc.

So much crossing has been carried out in order to win shows and sell breeding stock that genetic diseases like Spider Lamb Syndrome, once confined to a single pure breed, have now “somehow” showed up in quite a few breeds.

Worse yet, when innocent buyers unknowingly go to crossbreeding showmen to buy breeding stock, they may end up taking home crossbreds-sheep that can’t adapt to the living conditions once considered normal for the breed.

There was a time when only top contenders were allowed into shows, the flocks having already been judged at the farm by traveling judges.  That method didn’t last long, because of its cost.  At least in those days folks knew the whole flock was good, not a place where show winners were “made” instead of “born.”  And they could see what was being fed as well as other management methods.

Sheep treated like little darlings with high-cost rations and cushy environments don’t often take kindly to usual sheep husbandry such as grazing on lands too rough to plow, or too steep, dry or rocky for much else.

Today, “right on the farm” is still the best place to buy or sell top sheep. But it’s not always possible.  Showmen rightly want the best price for their very best animals, and will reserve those for shows where many bidders will be running the price up.  Then too, it’s expensive going from farm to farm in a spread-out country like the U.S., hoping the next place will have the “perfect” sheep at the right price.

So for better and for worse, shows will probably always be needed in some capacity as long as there is a sheep business.

One problem in the U.S. sheep industry is the difficulty of securing uniform meat products for retail meat sellers.

Around 30 years ago, we added a new “breed” of sheep to our sheep farm.  Developed in Virginia, this new breed started as a cross between two other breeds.

This race of sheep was great for production:  They mostly had twins, bred any time, had o.k. carcass conformation, thrived on easy grass-based production, had calm nature, produced fine fleeces, and were easy to shear—no leg and head wool.

But their flavor was so gamy that our family would not eat the meat from them.  We made money selling them, but took little satisfaction growing a mere commodity that was useless to us.

We later got a ram of the Lincoln breed and crossed it on those ewes.  Amazingly, it drastically cut the gaminess.

Still later, we ended up with a Lincoln look-alike, Cotswold sheep.  Our Lincolns hadn’t thrived well in our grass-based mountain husbandry.  Cotswolds worked out so well—reliably tasting much to our liking—that we got rid of all other breeds on our place.  We see from this that each breed has a unique “fit,” though it may or may not suit other locales or husbandry methods.

At last count, the U.S.A. had 65 breeds of sheep.  The gamut of meat flavor differences in these breeds is enormous.  Growers repeatedly tell me they don’t care about taste, saying “When I’m paid for flavor, I’ll start worrying about flavor.”

Decades ago, Britain’s Malcolm Cooper and Robert Thomas observed in their highly acclaimed book Profitable Sheep Farming (page 33):

“With more than 40 pure breeds and many more two- and three-breed combinations and all the variations there are in husbandry and nutrition it is not surprising that there are frequent complaints of the lack of uniformity in the home-produced lamb as compared with New Zealand imports.  In the latter country there are fewer breeds, mostly with a similar conformation, producing export lambs.”

Top customers buy lamb today because they liked it yesterday.  If it tastes different each time, you lose that buyer.  This may explain why America’s official lamb promotion has sold 8 lbs. of foreign lamb for each U.S. dollar spent on it, without boosting American lamb sales:  The public tries “ours,” then drifts over to “theirs.”

How to win despite backfired promotions?  Stick with a breed whose flavor you prefer, then never vary.  This proven formula works wherever tried, and your customer base stays loyal.