On the Lamb : Back to the Lamb : Farming: As lamb ranchers find it harder and harder to make a profit on the traditional market, niche farmers--small operators who raise baby lamb without antibiotics--are discovering a whole new flock of lamb lovers.
It’s just about bedtime.
Fleck knows it. She’s a sheepdog and she’s been watching the shadows grow long on the damp green hills that surround Mendocino County’s Eagle Rock.
The lambs know it. Bathed in the late-afternoon sunlight, they’ve spent a lazy day in the clover-filled pastures.
The coyotes know it too.
Fleck paces about, stopping only to pull herself into a tight shotgun position, aiming herself like a missile with her laser sights locked onto a cluster of sheep on the southwest ridge.
Greg Hoyt, head of the 2,000-acre Eagle Rock Ranch, looks at his dog and laughs.
“She’s starting without you, dear,” Cathy Hoyt says. Fleck inches toward the field. A few lambs start wandering down the hill toward the ranchers on their own.
“Come here, Fleck, come here!” Greg Hoyt looks out from under his gray corduroy baseball cap. It’s time.
His quiet voice rises to a shout: “Get out! Get out! Get out! Out!”
Fleck tears out to the left, making a huge circle around the sheep on the southwest pasture. The lambs and ewes start to attention, and then it begins. The sound of hoofs and bleating accelerate and the hills suddenly become alive with rushing streams of sheep.
“Hey! Hey! Get back! Get around!” Greg shouts to Fleck. She’s cut off a lamb and two ewes who stand impassively, watching the commotion. Fleck backtracks and gets the stragglers moving. But she’s missed another pair on the hillcrest. “Get around!” he says again, speeding up his cadence to the pace of an auctioneer:
“ Getaround-getaround-getaround-getaround-getaround! “
In an era of high-tech farming, the Hoyts’ nightly routine is a decidedly low-tech way to protect a flock from predators.
Now on the northwest hill, Greg rubs his hands together briskly. He cups them around his mouth. He cries out. “Heeeeeeeeeeeylup! Heeeeeeeeeeeeeyoh! Heeeeeeeeeeeylup!”
Translation: “Hey, sheep.”
“All the ranchers have yodels,” Cathy explains. “But we didn’t have any cultural yodels in either of our families. I’m from the Bay Area; Greg’s from the San Fernando Valley. We thought of ‘hey sheep’ because we knew we could remember it. It’s highly scientific.”
The Hoyt call echoes through the valley. The sheep bleat back in response, but they barely budge.
During the late summer, when the grass is dried and gone, the call signals dinner. But the grass is good these days and today most of the sheep could care less about food.
Greg smiles: “They’ve been eating all day at the best restaurant in town.”
It used to be that sheep ranchers in Mendocino County saw their flock up-close only one or two times a year--maybe at lambing and during shearing and weaning. The Hoyts, however, believe in a more personal approach to farming. Where ranchers traditionally lose contact with their lambs after they are sold at auction and fattened in feedlots, the Hoyts, who see their lambs through the whole life cycle, avoid auctions altogether.
“We used to raise commercial lamb,” Greg says, “But we were disappointed because when it came time to sell, we’d have these good-sized lambs, but they weren’t considered finished. We’d spend the whole year raising them, protecting them from predators, keeping them free from disease, and then our fate was decided in the auction ring in a matter of a couple minutes. The price we’d get depended on the market, if everybody was happy that day. It had nothing to with the quality of our lamb.”
Now the Hoyts raise baby lamb--smaller lambs than the commercial market will usually deal with--and sell it direct by mail order to home cooks throughout the state. Last year they sold 65 out of 75 lambs (a large commericial ranch might run 10,000-head flocks); this year they have 100 lambs to sell. The most they want to raise on the ranch is 200 to 300 lambs.
“Just about everything I learned in college was thrown out the window when we decided to raise lambs the natural way,” says Greg, who majored in animal science at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
The Hoyts don’t use antibiotics. They don’t use hormones. Their Eagle Rock Gourmet Lambs feed on grass and milk only. “The lamb is just lamb,” Cathy says.
They breed their lambs, born in January, to fatten up by spring, earlier than commercial breeds, so grain-feeding isn’t necessary. “Everything we do depends on the grass,” Greg says. “When the grass dries up, the lambs are sold.”
For all their work, their lambs are considered oddballs in the industry.
“If we were to take our lambs to auction . . . “ Greg says.
“They wouldn’t know what to do with them,” Cathy responds.
“We would get less per pound,” Greg says, “even though our lambs need no fattening and the quality of our lamb is, I think, better. The industry wants a million carcasses that all weigh 50 to 60 pounds. Anything below or above that and you’re docked. The difference between a 40-pound carcass and a 60-pound carcass is mostly fat. And that fat comes on during the feedlot cycle.”
Les Oesterreich, general manager of Dixon’s Superior Packing, the nation’s second-largest lamb processor, points out that the leanness of Hoyts’ lambs is a luxury that commercial producers can’t afford. “Without that fat cover,” he says, “lamb wouldn’t have the shelf life to make it to the supermarket meat counter.” (Eagle Rock lamb is slaughtered, cut, flash-frozen and sent to the customer in a span of less than a week.)
Ironically, the Hoyts’ unorthodox methods have helped them survive in an increasingly tough market. Americans eat less than four pounds of lamb a year apiece, according to Oesterreich. And it’s getting a lot harder to make a profit on sheep ranching alone.
For many smaller ranchers, a good year means losing only $5 dollars for every lamb they raise. A lot of California ranchers raise cattle as well as sheep in order to stay in business. Many other ranchers are simply giving up.
Ten years after they started ranching in Ukiah, the Hoyts are among the few sheep farmers left in Mendocino County.
“There used to be about 12 sheep ranches along our road here,” Greg says. “Now we’re the only ones left.”
But they certainly aren’t the only ones bucking industry practices. The Hoyts and others like them, especially in Sonoma County, have found that there’s a huge potential market for lean, mild baby lamb. And no one proves that potential better than Bruce Campbell.
While the Hoyts’ business is growing steadily, they still must work other jobs to stay ahead--Greg works as a general contractor; Cathy works in a specialty plant nursery. Campbell, however, of Healdsburg’s CK Lamb--it stands for Campbell Kids, a remnant of a time when he and his siblings dominated 4-H competitions--makes a good living on baby lamb alone.
Campbell sells lamb from his own ranch and lamb from other farmers who grow lamb to his specifications (no antibiotics, for example). His buyers include several restaurants throughout the state (Spago, Granita and Cafe Caper in Southern California) and a few high-end Bay Area supermarkets. He expects to sell 750 to 800 lambs this year from his ranch alone. Last year, he sold a fencing company he ran for years to devote himself full-time to lambs.
“My truck is my office,” he says. Parked in front of the Roseland paint store in Santa Rosa, Campbell, who’s on the road 10 hours some days, checks in from his mobile phone.
“First of all,” he says, “I think lamb fat is different from beef fat: It’s disgusting, bottom line.”
“Lamb fat? Ugggh !” his wife Nancy agrees in a later phone call.
Like almost everybody in the lamb business you might talk to, Campbell brings up World War II and the boys in the Pacific. “They were served mutton,” he says. “That’s why so many Americans think they don’t like lamb. The taste and smell they tend not to like is fat .”
Campbell latched onto the growing desire for mild, lean baby lamb that started with the chefs of the California-cuisine movement. “French-trained chefs learned to cook with milder lamb,” he says, “and I think the French influence in cooking, particularly on the West Coast, is what drove chefs to a leaner product . . . as opposed to a lamb chop that can knock you down.”
The taste for a mild lamb has spread to a small, but increasing number of home cooks dissatisfied with the lamb they find in most grocery meat cases. (To meet year-round demand, Campbell doesn’t run on a seasonal schedule like the Hoyts; during the dry months he has the lamb on a corn-and-alfalfa diet that is antibiotic free.)
“The last three or four years--actually, the last seven years--the lamb market has been abysmal, but somehow, we’re making money,” he says. Between his own lambs and the lambs he selects from other farmers, Campbell now sells more Sonoma County sheep than anybody else. “If we keep growing at the rate we are now,” he says, “we’re going to be selling almost 50% of them soon.
“People in the industry are slowly starting to realize,” he says, “that in order for people to buy more lamb, there’s got to be better--leaner--lamb available.
“Most of ours are slaughtered at 100 to 105 pounds (compared to an industry average of 115 to 140 pounds) which yields a carcass of 40 to 50 pounds. For our lambs, that’s the ideal weight. They’re muscled up enough so there’s a nice loin chop and a nice leg, but there’s not too much fat. They’re kind of like people--you know how when we get to be about 22 or 23, we stop growing and start broadening? With lambs it’s the same thing.”
Campbell’s biggest problem now is that his business might be growing too fast. “This morning I had requests for 40 loins at one place and 20 at another--that’s 60 more lambs a week,” he says. “The temptation is to say yes to everybody, but you can’t just manufacture these things. In order for a lamb to be ready on the 20th of June, a lot of stuff has to be done in January. We’re still a one-horse operation.”
The son of a retired veterinarian who once did most of the sheep work in Sonoma County and a 4-Her practically since he could walk, Campbell, who spent his 20s judging livestock shows throughout the western United States, at first seems an unlikely candidate to break tradition with the industry.
“Operations like ours didn’t exist 15 years ago so I learned the other side of the business originally,” he says.
But even when he worked within the system, he was shaking things up. His iconoclastic judging philosophy for livestock shows (he thinks good taste is more important than good looks) got him run out of the 4-H circuit. “And boy, after that show a few years ago, I better not ever show up in Turlock again,” he says.
Then Wolfgang Puck approached Campbell looking for baby lamb. From 1988 to about three years ago, Campbell sold almost all his lamb to Puck and his growing restaurant empire. “When I married Nancy, she said, ‘Does it occur to you that one guy is 90% of what you do? If he ever cancels, you’re in big trouble.’ ”
Since then, Campbell has grown and diversified, using his wife’s expertise as a former wine marketer. When they started selling their lamb in supermarkets (eventually, he plans to sell lamb in a few Southern California grocery stores), Nancy made a point of going to the meat departments and giving free tastes and recipe demonstrations.
“You know, the sheep producers did a study and found that only 4% of Americans eat lamb more than once a year,” Campbell says. “I mean, for somebody that’s into marketing, that’s the whole world! Ninety-six percent! There’s that ad the almond people have--you know, one can a week, that’s all we ask? Hey, listen, eat lamb twice a year and we’re home free! “
Of course, even Campbell must pay homage to the original baby lamb marketers, Bart and Pat Ehman. Currently more famous for their Rocky the Range chickens, the Ehmans were the first to carve out the market for naturally raised baby lamb.
“When Bart Ehman was selling lamb,” Campbell says, “he made the rest of us look like rubes. I mean, my idea of marketing used to be, ‘Here’s your lamb, thank you very much.’ ”
But even the Ehmans needed prodding.
“This young student named Mark Peel (now chef-owner of Campanile) showed up in Sonoma County asking lamb ranchers if they’d be interested in selling young lamb,” Bart Ehman says. “He told me he could sell them to restaurants in Southern California. There was Ma Maison, Michael’s--this was all pre-Spago. I remember how he told me one day, ‘We’re going to set the restaurant world on fire!’ I said, ‘Oh, sure, Mark. Right.’ But he’d order 10 lambs at a time and then load them in his truck and drive them to the chefs.”
“What we were doing was so different from what everybody else was doing,” remembers Pat Ehman, “that just about everybody in the sheep community--all the oldtimers, most of the bigger ranchers out of Mendocino County--said that we’d go broke. They had a real hard time understanding why anybody would want to sell a lamb that was only half the size of what they call a full-size lamb. They’d say things like, ‘That guy’s an idiot, look, he’s selling his lambs and they aren’t even full-grown yet.’ These were fourth- and fifth-generation sheep farmers. As far as they were concerned, what they were doing had always worked and there was no reason to mess with it.”
“The banks were so conservative,” Bart Ehman says, “that Mark would have to collect all the checks, deposit them and then wait because the bank would put a 10-day hold on them. It was a financial struggle for him and us.
“Then, all of the sudden Spago opened. We began to ship every week. Gerard and Virginie Ferry from L’Orangerie showed up one day and they became good customers.”
The Ehmans trademarked the name Sonoma Baby Lamb and started going through approximately 50 lambs a week. Seeing the Ehmans’ promising beginning, Sonoma County ranchers began raising their lambs to Ehman’s specifications. “People were able to make money in this county in the sheep business which was unheard of before,” Bart Ehman says. “Of course, that’s all we were doing--making a living.” When the Ehmans got into the Rocky the Range Chicken business, they made much more money (“People know how to cook chicken, but lamb scares them,” Pat Ehman says) and for the most part got out of the lamb business.
“Looking back on things now,” Pat Ehman says, “I learned that I always feel I’m on the right track when everybody else in the same business is against what I’m doing.”
For the Hoyts, who have worked with both the Ehmans and Campbell in the past, they’re content for now to make just a little money on lamb. “We’re not going to become millionaires raising sheep on this ranch,” Greg Hoyt says, “but it gives us a nice place to live, it’s a great place to raise the kids, I mean, heck, there are a lot worse places we could be.”
BACKGROUND
Spring lamb, in California, traditionally means lamb that is born in late December and January, and ready to be sold in spring. The climates in other states, however, dictate a different timetable. In Colorado, for instance, where the rainfall is lighter, spring lamb means lamb that is born in the spring. More and more, though, the term is losing its seasonal meaning. Many ranchers spread out their lambing to provide a year-round supply of meat. That’s why “spring lamb” is available in summer, fall and winter too.
From the Source
To order Greg and Cathy Hoyt’s Eagle Rock Gourmet Lamb, call or write for a brochure at: P.O. Box 241, Ukiah, Calif. 95482. (707) 462-6082.
