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.

If Dr. de Waal’s monkeys resent being paid too little, they would also resent the unfairness of having to give up more of that pay than some other monkey to buy the same or similar item.

      “Price injustice” occurs at the supermarket when American sheep growers find it hard to match low foreign production costs.   Those foreigners can graze their sheep year-round in fenced, unmanned paddocks.  They only actually handle their sheep 3 to 4 times a year.  Most American growers must winter the sheep laboriously on costly hay, silage and/or feed.  Our grazing land costs more than foreign lands, too.  About the only expense left for us to cut is labor costs, so we get our nation’s leaders to let foreign workers come and work for a fraction of what we’d have to legally pay Americans.  Elected leaders find this very cheery:  Cheap food equals more votes.

      Meanwhile, in towns and cities across America, happy shoppers (who don’t know better, but think they do) look at the price of local vs. foreign lamb, and often buy based on that perceived “price injustice.”  In doing so, they’re forgetting that:

• Foreign lamb production relies heavily on tons of predator poisons and livestock sprays and dips that townsfolk banned American stockmen from using.  Those bans were started long enough ago that today they forget to buy the American lamb they used to lecture us would be better without the chemicals.
• Only American sheep can help keep America’s wild lands and margins greener, more beautiful, healthier and freer of the invasive, non-native plants already destroying some regions’ ability to nurture wildlife.  Buying local lamb is a cheaper, tastier way than the usual chemical methods of dealing with these problems.
• The slight extra cost of American lamb helps pay for the production of the American wool that clothes our brave soldiers—family members and friends—with durable, comfortable, non-flammable, low-stink, super-silent apparel. This wool provides vital hygienic and anti-microbial traits amid all that nasty Third-World squalor while also shielding from the enemies’ fire-breathing weapons.

If they hadn’t forgotten these things, then they might very well go out of their way to pay extra for superior, meatier, fresher local lamb.

      So we have to remind them.

      And the best place to do that is face to face, while they’re paying us at least $250 per head. They get superb meat, fresher and cheaper than they ever could get at a store, plus a real live grower’s guarantee that this lamb will taste just like last time.

The minute a sheep rancher’s back is turned, some guy from the city shows up to offer the legally-hired foreign (H2A) herders more pay for easier—though unlawful—hours.  Just as with Dr. de Waal’s enraged monkeys, an agreed deal may no longer seem “fair” to a herder, especially with the allure of more money and fewer hours.  Indignance over “pay injustice” excuses some folks’ conscience into leaving a band of 1500 sheep just anywhere, undefended.  The ranch manager hits the next rendezvous point all stocked up with weekly supplies and mail only to find scattered sheep all over the place.

      It’s odd that a small flockmaster (who has no employees but himself) rarely pays himself a set wage—not even a wage that’s up to par with those foreign sheep herders.  Amusingly, his indignance at “unfair pay” is directed at everyone—the market, the packers, consumers, speculators—except his boss (himself).  Now that’s monkey-level anger for sure.

      But how could he pay himself wages if the folks paying him don’t come up with enough to cover it?

      Dr. de Waal says people everywhere often pass up big, low-investment gains—something he says rational beings wouldn’t do.  But it happens among humans repeatedly anyway, because if they get too small a chunk of the proceeds, it offends their sense of “justice.”

All over the world, people …refuse to play along if the split seems unfair.  …They thus forgo income that they could have taken, which is something no rational being should ever do.  A small income trumps no income at all.

I can’t see any other answer to low pay than to get higher prices.  Every new procedure or discovery allows us to grow our sheep cheaper, and everyone else grows them cheaper too, so the price goes down forever.  The monkey just keeps getting angrier at that.