One day at a Time

[cowman]

When I was young and attending Olds College there was a teacher there who was a real advocate for the sheep business. He was a big part of the push to build Lambco(later Canada West). Anyway he had it figured out that the sheep business was in a position to expand and become a major player in the meat business. I clearly remember him saying that the Canadian government needed to step in at that time and protect and support a fledgling industry if they hoped to succeed!
Olds ran a fairly extensive sheep program at that time and they put a good number of the lambs through their own slaughter house. I believe the "in Demand" cuts were sold to the Federated co-ops or something? Anyway what was left over went to the cafeteria to be made into lamb stew. They sold it cheap and it was very tasty!
I had never ate lamb in my life until I went there(my Dad was one of those old army boys who never wanted to taste mutton again!) and I've never lost my taste for it! Unfortunately very few restaurants serve it regularily so the opportunity to eat it are few and far between. I'm not much of a cook so I don't buy it at Safeway.
Saw a cute bumper sticker several years ago..."Eat Alberta lamb....50,000 coyotes can't be wrong"!

[cakadu]

The support for the sheep farmer has never really been there. I recall many years ago when asking the federal government about tarrifs against lamb (and goat meat too). The response was something to the effect of not putting tarrifs in place until such time as the industry could show that they were able to fill the domestic demand themselves.

With the statistics being given in terms of exported lamb, I guess we aren't really managing to take over the domestic supply first.

Another nail in the coffin came when there was the problem with scrapie down east and all of a sudden there were problems with getting anything over a year processed - no place to send the offal. Now we see the same thing all over again, we're being charged to get rid of the offal, as all the other species are too.

Changing peoples tastes and educating them on how to properly cook lamb (or any other new product for that matter) is very costly - in fact it is one of the most expensive things you can attempt to do. Personally, I think once people are served lamb that is cooked properly they change their minds about it.

One other thing that really hurts sales is if you try to sell it and don't eat it yourself - big problems. I don't know of too many lamb producers that don't eat their own products, but when goats were all the rage a few years ago, there were many that were raising them that would not eat them. Good selling tool, don't you think?

I'm not exactly sure what the answer is - cohesion amongst producers would likely go a long way. What we may have to do is get more grassroots people sitting on the various sheep boards, just as you are attempting to do with the cattle boards. There may be some very valuable lessons and learnings coming in the next few months.

[grassfarmer]

I must admit to that failing too Cakadu, we used to get about 800 lambs a year killed, largely shipped to France and I think i've tasted lamb twice in my life. Just can't stand the stuff - like venison it's not worth eating to me!!
We had huge problems selling lamb in the UK as we faced a demographic time bomb with no-one under 50 eating lamb. To be fair a few trendy lamb adverts on TV in recent years got a lot of new young urban consumers interested. It was a case of using sex to sell lamb - and sex always sells!

[cswilson]

Using sex to sell sheep somehow a vision of rubber boots came to mind lol.