As you may or may not have noticed, when you go to the meat section of your local grocery store and peruse the section for lamb there usually isn’t a whole lot to choose from. I often see it next to ground buffalo. When you do find it, the cuts are typically a chop, perhaps a shoulder, ground meat and if lucky you may even find a rack. One consistency though is that whatever package you buy it will usually be stamped as “Australian” or “New Zealand”….not American.
Per the American Sheep Industry Association, below is a list of the top five states in the U.S. for the most sheep (2021 data):
Texas 730,000
California 555,000
Colorado 445,000
Wyoming 340,000
Utah 285,000
That’s a lot of sheep. To be exact, it is 2,355,000 necks that can be used for braising or to make a nice lamb stock. Not to mention there are 45 more states as well as Mexico and Canada which all have some population of our wooly friends. With sheep in all of these locations one would think we would be able to find a wide variety in our local grocery or specialty store but that is typically not the case. So where are they? Where do they go?
As in most numbers, there is usually more than meets the eye. The statistics above reflect the number of sheep in each state however Americans mostly consume “lamb”. What’s the difference? Well, lamb meat is from a sheep that is less than 12 months old (a “spring lamb” is around 6 months of age). A “sheep” is if the animal is more than a year old and therefore the meat should be labeled differently. Older than 2 years, sheep meat is then considered mutton which is a term you may have heard.
Needless to say, lamb meat and mutton are not interchangeable and many American palate are not accustomed to mutton. There are many reasons for that which we will get into in another post but the point here is that “lamb” meat is what most people in North America find to be succulent and is what they are seeking out for their dinner table.
So where do all the domestic lamb and sheep go? It seems complicated. According to the U.S. Meat Export Federation, the United States exported 2,225 metric tons of lamb meat. This was in 2022. That amount of metric tons equals 4,905,280 pounds of lamb meat that the U.S. sent outside of their borders in the year 2022. The USDA states that the per capita consumption of lamb (and they include mutton) in 2020 was just over a pound. Basic math tells us that with those figures and a population in the United States of 330 million that the country needs 330 million pounds of lamb meat to satisfy appetites. And that of course is if the demand for consumption stays stagnant and does not increase.
We haven’t been able to nail down a solid number of how much total lamb meat is produced in North America or the United States but we do know that the U.S. imports a large amount of meat. It is estimated that more than 50% of the lamb meat in the U.S. market is imported. Out of those imports, ¾ is derived from Australia with the remaining ¼ coming from New Zealand. Those locations are nearly 10,000 miles away!
I’m not sure about you, but driving across town can be an adventure for me so I can only imagine the journey that these lamb carcasses take getting from Down Under to North America. We are pretty simple around here so it makes much more sense to just get a nice cut of meat or carcass from a local rancher that knows their product. Our ranchers know where their animals have been, are familiar with the animal’s bloodlines and know what they have been consuming. I’ll take one of those.