Sheep Ranchers Count On American Muslims To Keep Lamb On Menu

Sheep ranchers, feedlot owners, and processors in states like Colorado, Nebraska and Illinois are banking on America becoming a more diverse place.

Specifically, they want American Muslims to buy more of their lamb.

Today, the average American eats roughly a half pound of lamb per year. That number has been dropping for decades. Compare that with the more than 50 pounds of beef and almost 90 pounds of chicken each American eats every year. Megan Wortman, executive director of the American Lamb Board, the industry's producer-funded promotional arm, says lamb is saddled with perception problems.

"We've lost a couple generations that just do not have any experience with lamb, or they've had a really bad experience with lamb," Wortman says. "The grandmother who overcooked it, and it was tough and brown and dull and gamey. They put mint jelly all over it."

Arash International Market is one of a handful of grocery stores in Aurora that sell halal-certified meat, including lamb.

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A report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Marketing Research Center puts it bluntly: "The majority of U.S. residents do not consume any lamb." For the most part, growing ethnic populations in the Northeast and on the West Coast have kept the American lamb industry afloat, the report notes.

After a market crash in 2012, the American Lamb Board set its sights on creating new demand in Muslim and Latino markets. In 2013, there were an estimated 5.7 million American Muslims with $98 billion in spending power. The board's hope is that some of that money is being spent on locally raised lamb.

To put its plan into action, the lamb board is now giving ranchers and retailers lists of "do's and don'ts" for marketing lamb to Muslim consumers — for example, avoid showing women in hijabs on packaging — and rolling out a website specifically targeted at the growing group of consumers. They board will eventually be advertising pasture-to-plate lamb in cities with large Muslim populations like Detroit, Chicago and New York, Wortman says.

In the meantime, even without targeted advertising and marketing, small-scale lamb buyers and processors are seeing a boost while the face of America changes. In Fort Collins, Colo., Abdel Himat sits on the bright orange benches of the Centennial Livestock Auction every week for the lamb sale.

"We're looking for good lambs," Himat says. "Good meat on them. Good size. One hundred pounds or less, that's what the ethnic market wants, which is different from what the American likes. They like them bigger, more fat on them."

The auction is fast-paced, with an auctioneer barking prices into a loudspeaker. But for Himat, it's all second nature. He started at the auction after leaving his native Sudan 16 years ago. Back then he was the only Muslim buyer here, taking home about 20 lambs a week. Now he has competitors, and he buys hundreds of lambs at auction.

Abdel Himat spends each Wednesday buying lambs and goats to satisfy the demand for the meat along Colorado's Front Range.

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"The younger they get and the smaller they get the higher [price] they get. The older they get and the bigger they are, the cheaper they are," Himat says.

He essentially acts as a lamb broker. He buys the young sheep from Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming ranchers at the auction, arranges for them to be slaughtered and processed to Islamic standards known as halal, and then drives the meat to about a dozen ethnic and international grocery stores in metro Denver.

Some of the lamb Himat buys ends up at Mehran Diba's Arash International Market in Aurora, Colo.

"This is the meat department we have. This section is part of lamb, lamb ribs, lamb shoulders, lamb neck, lamb legs," Diba says.

Although on this day, almost the entire section is empty. A rush on lamb wiped out the case. Diba says the demand for lamb sometimes outstrips his supply. After Easter he had to send his buyer 500 miles away to a Montana auction house to keep his store stocked.

"It's not that easy. Montana, Wyoming, wherever we can find, he goes," Diba says.

There's often not enough lambs, or at least not enough cheap ones, at auction to fill his meat case at busy times of the year. His customers are looking for a very specific type of lamb, one that's lean and small. Many of his customers also ask that it be halal-certified. All those attributes run contrary to the production model many American ranchers use, fattening the animals on feedlots to grow larger and, subsequently, more profitable.

Without changes to the production of lamb to cater to a more diverse set of consumers, U.S. sheep ranchers will have a hard time competing with lamb-producing powerhouses like Australia and New Zealand. To adequately serve the growing Muslim and Latino markets, the way ranchers raise sheep will need to change, says Anders Hemphill, vice president of marketing with Superior Farms, one of country's largest lamb processors. Same goes for processors that slaughter and butcher the animals.

Each week the Centennial Livestock Auction in Fort Collins, Colo., sells sheep and goats to the highest bidder. Many of the animals end up in the meat departments of the Front Range's international and ethnic grocery stores.

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"What we're really starting to see is a new generation of younger sheep ranchers who are coming in and they're very eager to better understand the market and really bring things to market that are going to be applicable to different consumer segments," Hemphill says.

Rancher A.J. Nelson, who helps run Cactus Hill Ranch near Windsor, Colo., agrees. His family's been raising sheep since 1918. Nearly all the sheep in Nelson's feedlot end up in processing plants that are halal-certified, bound for grocery stores in the Northeast and on the West Coast.

"Marketing it towards the Muslim and Mexican communities, that's definitely the way to do it, if you're gonna want to sell it in any real volume," Nelson says.