Local lamb producer finds himself catering to the stars

By Rick Stouffer, Tribune-Review
Sunday, December 7, 2003

It's hard to believe that John and Sukey Jamison's farm, unknown to most people outside a stone's throw of their property, is on the speed-dial of the best chefs in America.

And that its grass-fed lamb has carved such a high profile with epicureans that many menus at the nation's best restaurants proudly tell patrons up front they serve "Jamison Lamb."

Legendary chef Julia Child is counted as a friend. Jodie Foster posed with a Jamison lamb in a promotional photograph for the hit movie "Silence of the Lambs." Emeril knows their product, as does the Food Channel's Sara Moulton.

UPS and FedEx drivers know the way to the Jamison's farm in Crabtree, Westmoreland County, by heart; overnight packages of lamb products stream out of the barn Monday through Wednesday for destinations nationwide, including to the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, Charlie Trotter's in Chicago, Restaurant Daniel and Cafe Boulud in New York, La Toque in California's Napa Valley and Angelina in Philadelphia. Local restaurants serving Jamison products include Isabela on Grandview and The Carlton.

Jamison lamb is used at only top-shelf restaurants. One reason may be that it's not cheap. In the farm's latest mail-order brochure, two legs of lamb go for $78 and two racks for $105. All retail is mail order only, accounting for about 30 percent of business, versus 70 percent wholesale to restaurants.

"It's just superior to other American lamb," said Kevin Hunninen, executive chef at Isabela on Grandview, atop Mt. Washington in Pittsburgh.

The lamb from the Jamison spread is enough to make grown French chefs cry -- with delight -- in having found product akin to what they left in their home land. Roughly 6,000 lambs annually are slaughtered at Jamison's nearby U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected slaughterhouse-processing plant in Bradenville, making Jamison Farm one of the few if not the only integrated lamb producers in the country. The entire operation grosses more than $1 million annually, with yearly growth conservatively pegged at 10 percent.

The Jamisons never planned to become lamb moguls. The husband-and-wife team started out 27 years ago with zero animal husbandry expertise -- they just wanted to restore a 178-year-old farmhouse. She was a housewife-caterer, he worked for the family coal-mining business. In 1976, they wanted to buy the farmhouse, but there was a catch.

"The farmer wouldn't sell us the house unless we also bought the 65 acres that went with it," said John, 56.

Becoming owners of acres of grass, the Jamison's determined they would raise livestock. Cows have a habit of knocking down fences, so they opted for sheep, buying 14 ewes (females) and a ram (male) in 1976.

"We did it as sort of a 4-H project," Jamison said. They looked to sell the sheep's wool and meat via word-of-mouth advertising, while using some for Sukey's catering business -- all as a part-time venture.

To maintain their growing flock, the Jamisons decided with the help of the local Penn State University cooperative extension office, to use a method called intensive rotational grazing. Under the French-developed system, there is no plowing and planting -- and no fertilizers added to the soil. The grass grows and the sheep and lambs are moved from one fenced section to another, chomping grass down to the clover, which provides protein for the sheep and nitrogen for the soil. The only up-front cost is the fences.

The sheep and lambs munch to their heart's content for nine months. Hay and corn is reserved only for winter's worst days -- the Jamisons believe strongly that the problem with most lamb today is that it is raised on corn most of its life, giving the meat a greasy taste. No hormones, additives or antibiotics are ingested by a Jamison lamb.

In the early to mid-1980s, the Jamisons began looking for more acreage, buying a farm in the Crabtree area, which eventually became a 210-acre spread. Soon after, Jamison was laid off from brokering coal, and he and Sukey, now with three children, decided it was time to become full-time sheep keepers.

The Jamison operation's big break came in the late 1980s, as Jamison contributed some of his lamb to a fund raiser at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh that featured some of the country's most famous chefs, including Paul Prudhomme, Jean-Louis Palladin and Ferdinand Metz (a University of Pittsburgh alumnus).

Not long after, Jamison got a call from Palladin, then chef at Jean-Louis at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. He needed three lambs for a weekend dinner. John and Sukey slaughtered the lambs on Thursday and drove them personally to Washington.

"Palladin was almost in tears when he looked at the lamb," John Jamison said. "He knew exactly how old it was, exactly what it had been fed." The chef soon was telling his French chef friends about the marvelous lamb from western Pennsylvania.

Today, Jamison Farm lamb maintains a stellar reputation, and its popularity continues to grow.

It has an 11,000-person mailing list, with two computers dedicated to maintaining customer lists shipped via UPS or FedEx. Jamison ships to between 50 and 100 restaurants, more than 20 placing orders weekly.

Years ago, Jamison quit raising sheep for their lambs because the system could not provide enough lambs for the burgeoning demand. He now buys lambs from regional flocks, lets them graze for two to three months, slaughters them at between 3 and 6 months old, then ships them.

"We have Jamison lamb on the menu at least half the time," said Daniel Boulud, owner-chef of Restaurant Daniel, Cafe Boulud and DB Bistro Moderne in New York, Cafe Boulud in Palm Beach, Fla., and a Jamison lamb proponent since at least 1993.

"Quality makes all the difference, and when you have direct contact with the person raising the lamb and there is no middle man, it means that much more quality." Boulud is one of many restaurateurs who lists on his menu "Jamison lamb."

Rick Stouffer can be reached at rstouffer@tribweb.com .