NSA Vision for Sheep Farming Says Domestic Market Growth is Vital - But Who Will Lead the Charge?

The National Sheep Association/NFU’s recently published vision for UK sheep farming identifies domestic market growth as critical to a healthy future.

Quite right too. The Vision paper says that domestic lamb consumption has plummeted by nearly two thirds since 1990, and that relying on a buoyant export market, dependent as it is on currency values, will not save us.

What is required, says the paper, is that “we” have to persuade UK consumers, particularly younger ones, that lamb is a tasty nutritious source of food. They suggest that innovative cuts, more branding, and new products will help. (More ready meals would be good too as lamb is woefully underrepresented in this huge, fast growing and youth appealing market segment.)

Th paper also points out that price is key. It is no accident that after years of decline the volume of lamb bought from supermarkets grew by 14% in 2013 due to an average 5% drop in price.  But prices are volatile, retailers are fickle, and the price of lamb could accelerate once again.

Lower prices if achievable, and new brands and products will help, but they will not be enough, and the Vision paper ducks two major challenges.

 For starters, who are the “we” who will lead the charge to grow the domestic market? Who precisely is accountable for growing an industry? Is it the Association, the NFU, retailers, processors, levy bodies, or perhaps farmers? Unless there is clear accountability for setting and delivering the growth agenda then nothing will happen and this critical contributor to achieving the Vision will drown in a sea of many words, much opinion, but little action.

The second challenge is what should be done.

The investigation needs to go deeper than price reductions and innovation. Whoever is going to lead the industry growth charge needs address the biggest problem with lamb, and that is fattiness. According to work done by EBLEX, 57% of people say that lamb tends to be fatty compared with 28% for beef, and that number may well be higher among the young.

All players in the food chain have a role to play in understanding what makes lamb fatty, and then working to address the problem.

Why, for example, does New Zealand lamb as presented in the shops contain around half the fat of British lamb. Is it the NZ lamb diet, or overly fat lambs being so heavily penalised that the farmer will not submit them to the NZ abattoir, or perhaps carcasses arrive in the UK with much of the fat trimmed off.

Processors and retailers need to be much stricter about removing excess fat from the product. Consumers buy with their eyes and will shun a product where they can see superfluous fat, or even worse buy and once home realise that much of the product will be consigned to the bin. It is flabbergasting to note from Tesco’s website that they quote fat content as bought, and then with the fat cut off by the consumer. Why should the consumer have to pay for something they will not eat!

Thirdly, more attention needs to be paid to offering lower fat alternatives just as they do in the beef market where it is possible to buy mince with fat levels ranging from 5% to 20%.

The NSA and the Vision paper’s co authors the NFU are confident that sheep farming can expand, but without a clear champion focused on understanding and delivering what the consumer wants domestic sales will continue to drift downwards, taking the livelihoods of many in the sheep meat food chain with it.