Mystery Meat—For The Birds

Growers have told me, “The sale barn is where people buy lambs; it’s also where I sell ’em.  That’s marketing.”

Unfortunately, it’s not.  Most sale barn buyers are packers’ middlemen.  Their financial ability to buy live lambs rests almost entirely on the success of grower (not packer) marketing efforts.

In a way, we do “market” to processors.  In marketing to processors, our lambs must please processors.  They must be meaty and big.  A meaty carcass makes each and every stroke of the butcher account for more salable product.  Big size means fewer animals harvested for the same daily meat totals; it’s less bleed-out time and fewer man-hours per ton of harvested meat.  Fewer meat hooks need be occupied (more tonnage per unit of cooler space).  Alas, big meaty carcasses haven’t stopped those itty-bitty cuts of foreign lamb from horning in on our supermarket sales.

In focusing on “big” and “meaty,” we can’t afford to give two shakes of a lamb’s tail for flavor.  This allows cheap foreign lamb—grown to please their packers—to slowly win over what should have been our repeat customers.  We aren’t serving the American buying public if our main concern is how cheap we can grow it, and how cheap it will be for packers to process it.  Foreigners—with their cheaper currencies, cheaper lands and cheaper labor tend to win cheapness battles.

Remember:  We’re in the sheep biz, not the cheap biz.  Lamb is not a low-cost poor man’s meat.  People who can afford it make buying decisions based on their degree of confidence in it.  The most common reason cited for buying less lamb is flavor—it’s the new “mystery meat.”  And mystery meat—even if “cheap, cheap, cheap”—is for the birds.

In The Land Of The Blind…

From the foregoing observations we deduce that the wide variety in flock products’ character causes marketing difficulties.  Unless agencies stir up eager consumers for each wool type, and unless packages of sheep meat get identified by flavor traits, there can be little gained in trying to promote any of it on a mass scale.  Each wrongly or non-identified product cuts the chances of holding loyal customers.

No association can gaze into a crystal ball and see how my flock’s meat tastes, nor can it know from year to year if any given type of wool’s supplies will be sufficient to fill U.S demand.  If not, then its promo benefits America’s competitors.

Promotion agencies and officials must therefore grope in the dark no matter how experienced they may be in promotion because they can’t MARKET it.

I may not be an expert textile-worker, but if I’m at least acquainted with what my wool is best for, I have vision where the officials are blind—they have no idea what I’m producing.

The same holds true for my flock’s meat flavor.  I don’t have to be a butcher to rate it against other lamb or mutton as gamy or mild.  Personal experience with my products gives me at least a little hands-on vision of what I can offer to the public, while faraway “experts” can’t help but be blind to it.  If stores don’t sell lamb in my region, then I have a market all to myself.  Even if officially-promoted lamb is available, I still have the market all to myself, because none of that lamb’s flavor is knowable.

Likewise, if I grow wool that’s best  for a specific use, my tiny spark of dim vision is way ahead of the total blindness of an agency or official trying to promote it from afar.  Thus, mass promotion can’t possibly compete against flock marketing.

Remember:  In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

What’s So Hard About Mass-Marketing Lamb & Wool

In the past, when I’ve pointed out that for many decades this nation hasn’t really marketed flock products, some folks mistakenly thought I was pointing the finger of blame at them or at their cherished institutions.

Let me be clear:  It’s no association or official’s fault that U.S. sheep products are so hard to mass-market.  Our nation’s lamb and wool varies so much in character from breed to breed and in growing methods that these products are nearly indefinable, and thus not readily mass-marketable.  This is starting to become true of the global sheep biz too.

For example:  The term “wool” means a lot of contradictory things.  There is a separate sheep-sourced fiber for each of the following uses:

• Heavy mattress-stuffing
• Plaster reinforcement.
• Firm, resilient, durable carpets.
• Silky-smooth tapestries
• “Bouncy” outerwear.
• Non-springy weaving warp.
• Felt of all descriptions
• Non-felting wool comforter fill.
• Delicate, no-itch undergarments and baby-clothes.

These highly-varied uses can be further categorized into sub-classes produced or modified by myriad husbandry and handling practices. Yet customers (wrongly) know all wool is the same—it all itches (wrong), it all shrinks (wrong), and it smells (definitely wrong—plastic textiles are what that makes you stink).  For garments and furnishings, wool is today’s supreme comfort textile, but the public doesn’t know it.  Why?

Well for one thing, we can’t promote all wool one way.  Ethically, a promo campaign paid for by all growers must benefit all growers.  It won’t help most U.S. growers if we promote wool as if it all provided “soft, next-to-skin comfort,” because most U.S. flockmasters don’t grow that kind of wool.

So we just shout “buy wool!” and hope some buyers get the kind they like.

Similarly, we also can’t in truth claim “U.S. lamb is mild-tasting,” though we’ve all seen promos that claim just that.  The first trial pack of gamy lamb bought by a new buyer heeding that call wins only an enemy.  There are even absurd, self-cancelling sales pitches saying things like “savor the rich, mild flavor of our lamb….”  C’mon, which is it, rich or mild?  If it can’t be defined, it can’t be marketed.