O.T. - from hags to hogs to goats. Another (idiotic) off topic weekend post.
January 3, 1999
To the Beat of the Bleat, Ranchers Aim to Satisfy
the Demand for Goat
By KATE MURPHY
HOUSTON -- Like many other families across America, Salvador
Ortega's sat down on Christmas Day to a dinner featuring big, savory
helpings of the traditional holiday entree: roast goat.
Goat, not turkey or ham or roast beef, is the meat of choice for festive
occasions in Ortega's native Mexico. "We cook it on the barbecue with garlic,
hot peppers and spices," said Ortega, who owns La Michoacana, a small
chain of grocery stores in Houston that caters to Hispanic consumers and
sells more goat than beef. Mexican-Americans are among a number of
growing ethnic populations with a taste for goat meat -- when they can find it
in stores.
The problem of short supplies, however, is not going unnoticed by ranchers.
Some of them, seeing the booming demand for goat meat and the availability
of improved breeding stock, are starting to trade in their dogies for billies.
Meat goats are still a niche business. There are one million to two million meat
goats in the country, according to Frank Craddock, a goat specialist at Texas
A&M University -- too few for the Agriculture Department to bother keeping
detailed statistics.
Frank Pinkerton, a retired professor of animal science at Langston University
in Langston, Okla., who has studied the industry, estimated that consumers
bought about $50 million of goat meat last year, a figure dwarfed even by the
$653 million spent on lamb and mutton -- never mind beef, chicken or pork.
Though the goat herd has doubled in the last two years, Craddock estimated,
ranchers still cannot keep up with demand from meat packers and retailers
serving Hispanic, Asian, Muslim, Greek Orthodox and other ethnic
communities in the United States and abroad.
Abe Batca, who owns one of the biggest goat-meat packers, Halal Meat
U.S.A. of Paterson, N.J., said his company could slaughter and sell far more
goats to Muslim groceries and restaurants in the New York area, but is held to
1,500 to 2,000 a week by tight supplies. "I can't get any more than that,"
Batca said.
Before 1993, goat ranching in the United States mostly involved breeds like
angora that are raised primarily for wool. But the repeal of the Wool Act in
1993 ended generous subsidies to angora ranchers.
"Those guys had to find a way to stay afloat," Craddock said, so they crossed
their angora and Spanish farm goats with South African Boer goats, which are
more muscular. "They get to salable weight in a third of the time as other
breeds," said Rebecca R. Harris, executive secretary of the International Boer
Goat Association, a breeders' group based in Bonham, Texas.
The transition wasn't cheap. Purebred Boer breeding stock was suddenly in
such demand that it sometimes fetched $40,000 a head. As the domestic
population has grown, though, prices have pulled back to $1,500 to $3,000.
Seventy percent of the nation's meat goats are raised in Texas; they can live
on land there where sheep or beef cattle struggle or need supplemental feed.
"Texas is an ideal environment, because we've got a lot of woody brush that
goats thrive on," Craddock said, whereas cattle and sheep need grassy
pastures. Indeed, meat-goat producers even lease out their animals to clear
overgrown land at $100 an acre. "The place will look like a park when they're
done," Pinkerton said. Also, meat goats need no milking or shearing and rarely
require medication, so they are much less work for ranchers.
Those advantages and the steady growth in demand for goat meat have
attracted converts from beef-cattle ranching, including William Banker.
"The Boer really helped us out," said Banker, whose JABB Goat Co., with
5,000 head on 10,000 acres in Orange Grove, Texas, near Corpus Christi, is
now one of the nation's largest producers.
Boer and hybrid Boer nannies, as female goats are known, give birth twice a
year. The kids reach 60 to 80 pounds and are ready for slaughter after 3 to 6
months. Ranchers get 80 cents to $2 a pound for the goats; the meat will
eventually sell at retail for $2.50 to $6 or so a pound. Prices are highest when
demand peaks around the Christmas and Easter holidays and certain Muslim
holidays.
Most goat ranchers have a few hundred head, but new operations with more
than 5,000 head are proliferating. In Roxton, Texas, the year-old Continental
Chevon Co. has 6,000 head of its own and an additional 5,000 under contract
from smaller ranchers. "We aim to be the Tyson of goats," said Stuart Weiss,
a co-owner.
Weiss' ambitions extend beyond the Caribbean countries and ethnic groceries
in the United States where Continental has made sales so far. He said he was
trying to develop a "high end" market, by encouraging fine restaurants to put
goat on their menus and asking gourmet markets to place it next to quail and
venison in their meat cases.
Goat-meat fajitas can already be ordered at trendy restaurants in Dallas and
Houston, and roast goat shoulder is served at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif.
Goat meat may also have a future in health food stores, because it is organic,
free-range and lean, with only three-fifths the saturated fat of skinless
chicken, Weiss said.
The taste of goat meat is sometimes described as a cross between venison
and mutton or lamb. Because it is so lean, it can be chewy and tough if not
marinated a long time before cooking.
Steve Olsen, a livestock and meat marketing specialist for the Agriculture
Department, said the agency is working on a goat-meat quality grading system
much like those for other meats; the proposed standards are to be released for
public comment by the end of January, with a final version to be adopted in
the spring.
"If we do this right," Olsen said, "they might just start serving goat burgers at
McDonald's."
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company |
