The Canberra Times is delving into the rising price of lamb across Canberra.
Lamb cutlets are approaching $50/kg at butchers in the swankiest ACT suburbs and the shortage of sheep meat may push prices up further.
The extra cost is due to a scarcity of sheep Australia-wide, which is good for farmers in the region watching lamb prices continually break records and approach a whopping $200 a head at saleyards.
If it’s no longer going to be a cheap option should we get more creative in how we cook it?
No better time to become a vegetarian, you know it makes sense!
Go on, go vegetarian, JB, you’ve most likely been toying with it anyway.
Scarcity of sheep in australia…. WHERE????
no longer… ?? since when has lamb been cheap?
slow cooking, cheap cuts – you know it makes delicious sense…
Chicken. it tastes like, well, CHICKEN!
Poor troll is poor.
My partner and I call them self-propelled roasts instead of lambs. NOM NOM NOM
Plenty of places will do a whole free-range organic lamb for a couple of hundred bucks, butchered to your requested cuts, ready to freeze. Even if they’ve gone up a bit lately it still beats paying $20 a kilo for chump chops. Ask around the farmers markets – Ando Organics is one that springs to mind. They do goat too – mmmm, Jamaican goat curry.
I remember nearly falling over when I visited the Costco near the Pentagon and saw glistening packages of premium cuts of Australian lamb at half the price it was back home.
Lamb was cheap? Oh.
Woody, what aspect of these “free-range” lamb farming practices differs from the usual?
NB: the last 5 generations of one half of my family tree have been lamb farmers. It’s quite possible that we’ve been living up to your ridiculous buzzwords all along. Should have doubled the price!
Woody Mann-Caruso said :
Really? In the mid nineties lamb of any sort seemed pretty expensive in North America, if you could find it.
indigoid said :
I think the key word in WMC post is ‘organic’
The free-range lamb is far superior to the battery lamb where the lambs are packed in those cages… and forced to lay lamb chops around the clock.
Free range-lamb? But is it also dolphin-friendly?
I only eat inorganic food.
Spoono said :
Vegetarians are trendy mental defectives who are skinny, gaunt, unhealthy and wimpish. Meat is vital for proper development of the brain – vegetarians have much lower IQs and intelligence levels than normal people. Vegetarian parents are far more likely to produce children with autism, cerebral palsy, spina bifida and cystic fibrosis. Hitler was a vegetarian.
Ari said :
I certainly like toying with vegetarians.
Vegetarians are trendy mental defectives who are skinny, gaunt, unhealthy and wimpish. Meat is vital for proper development of the brain – vegetarians have much lower IQs and intelligence levels than normal people. Vegetarian parents are far more likely to produce children with autism, cerebral palsy, spina bifida and cystic fibrosis. Hitler was a vegetarian
Of course.
colourful sydney racing identity said :
Carbon based? I would hope so.
What’s called organic food by the trendies and the Mac brigade (look at moi, oi’m different) has its place. But I don’t think that lamb is one of them. From what I’ve seen a farmer round here would have to try pretty hard to render his flock ‘non-organic’, unless you’re one of the looney brigade who think that a bit of fertiliser every few years to make up for generic soil deficiencies renders food inorganic.
Woody, what aspect of these “free-range” lamb farming practices differs from the usual?
HTFWIK? Do I look like a sheep farmer? That’s just what’s written on the signs, and what happens to be sold where I shop. I’m not making any special claims. Get non-free-range non-organic for all I care. Not that I know where they are. Even Jordo’s whole lamb is organic, and a steal at $8.90 a kilo, so a bit over $200 for a whopping 25kg carcass custom prepped. Go there if farmers markets and tie-dyed hessian makes you uncomfortable.
So long as it is not biodynamic™, witchcraft makes food taste funny.
Ando Organics is one that springs to mind. They do goat too…
I was speaking with the guy from Ando about a month ago. He said the goats were proving difficult to manage so he was dropping them. Not sure of the timeframe.
So long as it is not biodynamic™, witchcraft makes food taste funny.
It’s all the manure-stuffed horns. That, and the ash wafting over from the wicker man full of goats and Edward Woodward.
I’ve tended to buy lamb by the side, already cut. Typically costs about 45 bucks, and you get quite a few (20 or more) chops, including some cutlets, as well as a roast, a shank, and some other bones (the dog loves them). I bag the meat in small quantities and put it in the deep freeze. Ends up costing around 5 to 6 dollars per kilogram.
Given the almost criminal cost of our national meat we should emulate the hero in our (quasi) national song.
Whose that jolly jumbuck, you’ve got in your tucker bag…
You know it makes sense.
As for “what aspect of these free-range lamb farming practices differ from the usual”:
Organic (with a capital O) farmers must not use any herbicides, and drenches (vaccines) may only be used when there is an identified problem affecting the animals on that farm, the vaccine must be suitable for that disease, and use must be stopped immediately the problem has been resolved. So contrast this with “normal” agribusiness where animals will be given broad-spectrum drenches on a regular basis as “preventative” medicine (and thus killing all the dung beetles and earthworms on the property, leading to salination and wind/rain erosion).
In the meantime, spraying your paddocks with Roundup to prepare them for crops renders the paddock – and subsequently anything grown or grazed on it – non-Organic, and will require at least two years of rehabilitation to become eligible for Organic certification. Use other means to control weeds, such as planting cover crops and turning them in before planting your crop seed (ie: never leave the soil bare).
To deliver an Organic cut of meat to a customer, the entire chain from paddock to shopfront has to be certified Organic: no pesticides or herbicides used except to treat actual problems, strict control on what chemicals are allowed to be used in the feeding, raising, slaughtering and butchering processes, and ethical handling of the animals from birth to slaughter.
Organic farming is basically using modern knowledge to do old fashioned “animal husbandry” as opposed to the modern trend of “agribusiness.”
Apart from the obvious raising of crops or animals, Organic farming is about keeping records – part of an Organic certification is complying to the relevant Australian Standards of documenting the processes on the farm, and tracking compliance to those process.
You can find some information about Organic gardening on the COGS website: http://www.cogs.asn.au/organic-principles/growing-organically/ while the 114 page Australian Certified Organic Standard can be found through the Biological Farmers of Australia website: http://www.bfa.com.au/index.asp?sec_id=135
Hope this helps someone.
PS: The Australian Organic Standard was recently amended to become the Australian Certified Organic Standard, since “Certified Organic” can be trademarked while “Organic” cannot (for the obvious carbon-chemistry reasons amongst others). Thus when you are out shopping for high quality produce, look for “Certified Organic” with the sprouting seed logo (see aforementioned BFA website for details). There are plenty of dodgy operators in the food industry who are using “organic” as another buzzword just like “free range” or “new! improved!” – where “free range” means “our chickens have more than 1 square metre to run around in!”
But that’s a different rant, for a different day.
Apologies for the double post – this one’s about cooking lamb, rather than “what is organic”
I’ve found that when it comes to cooking meat nicely, there are two options that never fail to satisfy me: one is roasting the meat on the barbecue (I have one of those Webber Genesis jobbies, foolproof roasting at its finest) or cooking my meals in a pressure cooker.
If you have an iOS device, look up “Epicurious” for some really awesome recipes – it is also a web site of course: http://www.epicurious.com/ – you just can’t beat an iPad as a cookbook replacement (it’s a blimmin’ library, a cornucopia of recipes via Epicurious, Google, Australia’s Best Recipes, whatnot. Now all we need is an ePub version of Margaret Fulton’s and we’ll be set).
Its just meat u can get all the vitamins and minerals u need from Beef, Fish, chicken and so on…..i wouldn’t recommend becoming a vegan though. Every vegan i have know has had health problems or just needs a cup of cement in there diet.
Gone fishing..
There were these two cannibals munching on a clown. One said to the other. “Does this taste funny to you?”
Grass is organic? If lambs eat grass then why are not all lambs organic by default?
johnboy said :
You’ll certainly make yourself popular with us by publishing stories like this and comments like that!
If lambs eat grass then why are not all lambs organic by default?
Surely all lambs are organic?
Otherwise they’d be synthetic, which means they are tofu or soy.
Of course, they could be plastic, but they’d melt when you roasted them.
Not that I eat lamb as I’m a vegetarian thus I’m apparently a trendy mental defective who is skinny, gaunt, unhealthy and wimpish with a much lower IQ and intelligence level than normal people.
It must be true, I read it on the internet, somewhere….
This entire story makes me literally angry with rage!
Johnboy, if you want to be creative in how you cook why don’t you stop to ask yourself why you think it’s necessary to turn your body into a bizarre graveyard, a bizarre animation device for the walking dead? Why are you a flesh devouring zombie???
BimboGeek said :
Could be worse – ever seen a chick angry with desire?
BimboGeek said :
It makes me ‘literally angry with rage’ that you presume to speak for ‘us’.
The canberra times is clearly about 3-4 months behind the times….
Hint 1: do not buy cuts of meat. Buy beasts. Get deep freezers to store it.
Hint 2: Do not buy meat in supermarkets
Hint 3: Do not buy meat in Canberra is at all possible.
Hint 4: Slow cooking/roasting/smoking – esp the ‘poor’ cuts is something you should be doing. Get a cookbook. Stop watching masterchump.
$200/head dressed for a lamb? Do you get shares in Brooklyn Bridge with that?
Stop buying meat at the supermarket. The closest abboitoir(sp?) to canberra is in Cowra with the closure of young and goulburn. Support small buiness and force the multinationals that run the ab’s to sell at the same price and volume that they do to the supermarkets.
Or learn how to fish and do everyone a favour and eat carp soup.
BimboGeek said :
you need more red meat in your diet to suppress your rage. Or you own an HP badged machine.
BimboGeek said :
It’s yummy. It’s what you evolved to do.
BimboGeek said :
Once you cut their heads and legs off, they have a tendency to not be ‘walking’. They have a tendency to be ‘tasty’
BimboGeek said :
Evolution. It’s what we are designed to do. It’s the processed crapola that will mess you up.
georgesgenitals said :
Ever seen the little pink nose of a nervous rabbit that has the flu?
Fisho stop stalking my computer! You’re making it frightened for its safety.
Fisho said :
Maybe…
Tee hee!
Grail, did you notice that you completely failed to answer the question of mine that you quoted?
I know what the organic part is about. I asked about the free-range part. Instead of providing a useful answer, you spammed RA with a boring propaganda diatribe.
Don’t do it again.
To address the original post, one aspect of this that has been ignored is lamb is trimmed far more than 10-20 years ago. Reducing the waste to the customer means an increase in price as the butcher is no longer selling fat & bone but he’s paid for it.
This has also seen the increase of mutton and hogget being labelled as lamb.
Think about that when you’re tucking into your lamb shanks that hang over the side of your plate. Big lamb hey…
Also, cost of production has increased significantly (drought anyone?) as has demand.
Re the free range debate with indigoid & grail. A lot of lamb nowadays is grain fed which doesn’t qualify them to be termed free range although there are no firm regulations that are really enforceable.
Same with organic. Anyone can get away with mislabelling meat as organic or free range and the onus is on the prosecutor to prove otherwise. The paper trails aren’t always there and that’s all there is to prove. It’s very hard to prove otherwise.
Lamb has been expensive for a long time, and why, the farmer’s aren’t making money.
indigoid said :
umad?
Fisho said :
Sure. Then you just need a freezer ($$$) and electricity to run it 24×7 ($$$) and space to store the damn thing ($$$).
Also some of us don’t eat that much meat. My parents do because meat was scarce when they were young, so for them it’s meat for breakfast, meat for lunch, meat for dinner, and the occasional snack featuring meat. I can’t manage more than 2-3 meals per week with meat in it. A freezer full of meat would last me years. Why would I bother?
BimboGeek said :
The main thing stopping me becoming a vegetarian is the behaviour of other vegetarians. Bunch of pretentious @&^!%#s.
nhand42 said :
+ eleventy billion.
I love vegetarian food. I frequently find awesome vegetarian recipes and prepare them. But I almost always end up improving them by adding bacon.
Meat is Murder!!!1!
Tasty, tasty murder…