Beef Supply
Why Is Lamb More Expensive Than Beef?
Is it because of supply and demand in the U.S. or are lambs more expensive to bring to market than cattle?
My experience supports the suggestion that there are regional variations. For example, in the New York City area lamb is plentiful. The supermarket near my mother’s house has really nice looking leg of lamb for $2.99 a pound this week. Meanwhile, when I go to supermarkets in Middle America, I sometimes don’t see any lamb at all or there’s just a token quantity of wilted lamb way down at the end of the meat case. Which is not to say that, even at my mother’s supermarket, lamb comes anywhere close to commanding as much shelf space as beef, chicken or pork. No way.
Also, every Costco I’ve visited in North America — and I’ve visited a lot of them — has had lots of lamb, typically from Australia.
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I suspect the answer lies in Maggie’s question about raising lamb; lamb graze. Maybe, unlike cattle, lamb aren’t able to transition to a grain based diet and that would mean that they need space and lots of it. That makes it expensive. We just had a salesman come and give a talk at school (NECI) which outside of it’s sales-like-sleaziness told me a lot about the American lamb community. It’s small, it costs a lot, and it’s targeted at a very premium market: restaurant and grocery. New Zealand has more lamb than people (watch the movie Black Sheep, it’s a riot) and so their cost is low. We have more people than lamb.
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Isn’t it a numbers game? I would not be telling you anything you did not already know if I were to mention that relative both to incomes and to other expenditures food is cheap in North America, and meat even more so. As to lamb, I think there are a few factors you touched on which contribute:
Sheep might well transition poorly to agri-business’s model of how animals ought to be raised [in wire cages]. They graze rough, tough land fairly well, but that’s not what Meat Inc. wants.
Sheep are smaller animals, and the per head processing cost is higher than kine, likewise the per pound cost.
Lamb, and it’s grown up relative mutton*, actually tastes of something, and in the mass-market of North America it seems to me that can be an alien concept.
Our nearest speciality farm raises a herd of sheep. If I remember then I’ll ask the farmer the next time I’m out there if the sheep are significantly harder to keep on their feet than the deer or boar.
*Lamb, at least as I knew it, means meat from an animal slaughtered around 6 months, mutton is from an animal a couple of years old or older. The term ‘hogget’ covers the ground somewhere in between, but I don’t recall ever seeing it used in a butchers descriptions.
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I have a feeling that seasonality may come into it too – the meat industry seems to think that nobody wants to eat anything but lamb, preferably spring lamb that is just a few months old.
The question is: are they correct? Is consumer pressure or marketer pressure the reason why I can’t remember when I last saw something labeled as “hogget” (12-24 months) even in a New Zealand butchery/supermarket.
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I think it comes down to the simple facts of cost, demand and regional influences. It saddens me to hear everyone’s reports about the lack of lamb throughout our country because it is such a delicious meat.
I live only 90 miles from one of the larger lamb processors in the West, yet I can rarely find their lamb products in my local supermarkets. The lamb that we do find in our supermarkets usually comes from a mega-producer and I don’t know if it came off a ranch in Eastern Washington or a farm in Wisconsin. And the variety of what we see in our supermarkets consists of lamb shanks and tough shoulder chops with the occasional leg or loin chops thrown in around holiday periods.
I rely on Costco to always have racks of Australian or New Zealand lamb available and it is usually in the $10-$12 dollar a pound price range. I find an 8-rib rack of lamb affordable and more than enough for two people. Costco also sells nice, thick-cut lamb loin chops and boneless leg of lamb.
I do feel a tinge of guilt buying foreign lamb at Costco because I live in farm and ranch country and one would think that local lamb is readily available. Sadly it is not easily found in the local markets. If we are lucky, sometimes a local farmer will sell lamb at one of our farmer’s markets, but unfortunately due to our weather, (we had 7″ of snow on Friday), the farmer’s markets won’t open until later in April. I can buy a whole lamb direct from a local farm, but even with my voracious appetite that’s a lotta lamb for one guy.
Out West, we’ve seen the production of lamb and the consumer’s taste for lamb decline for many years. The decline in supply has resulted in a rise in the cost of producing lamb. There is a difference in how sheep and cattle are fed and raised, but the higher cost of lamb seems to be more affected by supply and demand than the issue of how sheep are raised. As you all know, beef prices are rapidly rising. Beef tenderloin in the market here yesterday was $18.99 a pound.
My Great-Grandfather and G
Beef Australia 2012
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