Emigh Lamb: The Vine Ripened Tomato of Meat

After speaking with so many California ranching families, my conversation with Martin Emigh is a familiar one. He was born into the profession, and his passion for ranching is almost genetic. For four generations, Martin’s family has lived in Solano County going back to the 1860s—that was before the light bulb or the typewriter.

They first settled in the Montezuma Hills, better known today for their wind farms and motorcycle enthusiasts, but a few decades later, The Emighs (pronounced like “Amy” as in Amy Schumer) moved north, away from the Sacramento River, and closer to Dixon—where they live now—among thousands of acres of patchwork farmland and pasture that crisscrosses the Sacramento valley, abundant with walnuts, almonds, grapes, and sheep.

Ranching requires tenacity. It’s a bucolic life, but solitary, dusty, and quiet. By the time Martin’s great grandfather was done ranching, he could only convince one of his 15 children to take up the family business.

“Then my dad got it, then I got it. Now my kids are doin’ it.” Martin said. I could hear his new grandchild crying in the background, presumably the next heir to the Emigh Lamb tradition.

In the US, Lamb are typically born and raised in the fields on pasture and fodder for about six months. At that point, they’re shipped to a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) or “feedlot” that looks much like the Harris Ranch facility in Coalinga I wrote about last year. Animals are corralled in mud pins, sometimes with shade sometimes without, and “finished” for 30 to 45 days on a heavy grain diet until they come up to average market weight, about 135lbs. That means most American lamb you find in the grocery stories is eight months old before slaughter.

At Emigh Lamb, Martin does things a little differently than most. He waits until his lamb are ripe.

“My ‘niche’ is because I knew there was a better way.”

Martin is a practical rancher. He’s not driven by an environmental ticking time bomb. He’s not pining away for an agricultural revolution. He admits he doesn’t even know what “regenerative agriculture” means. He’s grounded in the good old American religion of Capitalism. As a small business owner, and a card-carrying member of the mercantile class, I say this with complete respect. What is exciting about this is that Martin has learned that—for him—100% grass-fed lamb is more profitable, and that by finishing his herd on pasture—and balking the system of factory farming that is the norm—he’s not a “slave to the market.”  

Martin feeds his Rambouillet/Suffolk/Hampshire bred animals year round on legume grasses like clover, trefoil and alfalfa. When Mother Nature doesn’t provide the necessary water, he irrigates to keep his pastures green. But feeding his animals only on grass has a down side. It slows their growth rate, adding an additional 2-3 months that he has to feed them, before they reach a profitable slaughter weight. Why do this when it makes your animals less competitive. It’s because he knows it makes the meat better.

“Anything that grows is going to reach an ideal maturity, like a flower,” Martin explained. Lamb isn’t any different. “The perfect ripeness, or maybe even just as it starts wilting in the other direction, that’s how I catch that lamb in maximum bloom.”

Wait, are we still talking about sheep?

“You get a lamb at 9-10 months old, it’s extremely bland, it’s young and has no flavor,” he continued. “Once you get to that age point [10-12 months], things start to change, it starts to [build] flavor. But, if you wait too long, it’s going to get pungent, gamey.”

In a word, mutton. 

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on mutton in today’s post. That’s for another week. But technically, the USDA categorizes mutton is any lamb over 12 months. Historically, it was an animal even older, maybe three or four years. This could have been a milking sheep, a breeding sheep, or just one that was forgotten in the pasture. The meat is tougher, stronger in flavor, and best for slow cooking. Not what Martin—or his customer—is looking for.

“Ideal maturity is where they’re almost fully grown but you get that sweet spot from where they turn from a lamb to a sheep.”

Grass-finishing allows the animal to grow more slowly, like a vine-ripened tomato, rather than one picked green and left to mature on your kitchen counter.

Also, because Martin is raising his animals in pastures, and not shipping them off to a feedlot, he’s able to hold onto his lamb until the price is right.

“If I didn’t have them on grass, I’d have to sell them at a set weight every month. They’d all go to the feedlot at the same time, and I’d be stuck with the market rate.”

With the slaughterhouse just 10 miles down the road, Martin can also reduce transportation costs, and eliminate distributors. By marketing his animals directly, he cuts out middle men and keeps more money in his own pocket. 

This approach to ranching isn’t necessarily new. In fact, it’s how folks have been raising sheep (and other animals) across the globe centuries. But it’s an endangered species in America, and refreshing to see succeeding in an economy that prefers efficiency over quality.

Martin may not follow all the new lingo when it comes to environmental responsibility. He probably isn’t going to give a TED talk about sheep saving the world. He’s certainly not going to let an Organic stamp of approval determine if his sheep are better than most. Instead, he lets common sense dictate how he tends his herd.

“I’m just going to raise as many animals as the ground can handle. Rather than alter the soil, and make it produce more that it can naturally, I’m gonna raise what the ground can produce.”

That makes sense to me, and we’d be better off if more people raised lamb like Martin.

Try Emigh Lamb in the shop this week and every week at Electric City Butcher.