As a dairy farmer, Richard Usack's twice-a-month milk checks paid just enough to keep his creditors at bay.
In 1993, Usack sold his 40 milk cows, paid his bills and borrowed money to buy 425 goats from a Texas farmer. He raised the goats to be slaughtered for meat. Today, he and the several dozen other goat farmers in New York State can't keep up with demand, driven mainly by immigrants.
"The market is screaming, it really is," said Usack, whose farm is in Erin, near Elmira in New York's south-central Finger Lakes region. "You can sell them as fast as you can grow them."
PHOTO: BLOOMBERG
The goat meat market has increased with the influx of millions of people from goat-consuming countries of the Muslim world, the Caribbean and Latin America. Market growth has been most dramatic in Florida, California, Texas and the urban Northeast, according to a 1999 study by Terry Gipson of the E (Kika) de la Garza Institute for Goat Research at Langston University in Oklahoma.
With US production short of demand, frozen goat imports from Australia and New Zealand rose about 300 percent between 1990 and 1998, Gipson's study said.
At Greenville Packing, a slaughterhouse 37km south of Albany, New York, owner Robert Mattick butchers up to 20 goats a day. Wholesale and retail customers include Jamaicans, Mexicans and Bosnians from as far as New York City, a 2 1/2-hour drive away.
"Immigration is a boon to me," Mattick said. "Fifty years ago we couldn't give a goat away. Today it's big business." In the past two decades, federal beef and veal slaughter counts have remained steady at about 37 million animals a year, according to US Department of Agriculture statistics. The demand for goat has risen more than six-fold, to 530,371 animals slaughtered in 2000 from 81,770 in fiscal 1983. The department doesn't have statistics on the dollar value of the industry.
The federal slaughter numbers don't include live goats purchased by private buyers and slaughtered at home, or those killed at 23 "custom-exempt" slaughterhouses in New York City -- so named because they are state-inspected and exempt from USDA regulations.
Larry Decker, a chief meat inspector with the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets, said, "at certain times of the year, with the various holidays ... probably in the city there's hundreds [of live animals] going through" the custom-exempt slaughterhouses. He said the state doesn't keep precise numbers.
The New York City metropolitan area is home to an estimated 800,000 Muslims who are prime goat consumers, said Kevin James, spokesman for the New York chapter of the Council on American- Islamic Relations. Under Muslim dietary laws, meat -- goat or otherwise -- must be slaughtered according to halal ritual.
An estimated 2 million people of Caribbean descent in the New York metropolitan area also create a market, said Jean Alexander, executive director of the Caribbean American Center.
"I am from Trinidad and I would love to have goat meat a couple of times a week," she said. "I like to eat it curried or stewed. Also, you can grill it on a skewer .... The most popular red meat among Caribbean people is goat."
Halal Meat USA, a slaughterhouse in Paterson, New Jersey, kills about 1,500 goats every week, said owner Ibrahim Batca.
"We have Latinos, Muslims from the Far East, the Jamaicans -- they all want goat," Batca said. To satisfy them, he gets one or two shipments a week from Texas and has reached out to farmers in Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada.
The nation's biggest producer is Texas, where farmers long raised goats for their wool. Falling profits and the growing meat demand made slaughtering more attractive in recent years.
To be certified as halal an animal must be slaughtered by a Muslim butcher who recites a prayer over the animal and then quickly slits its throat.
Goat meat at halal grocery stores in New York City and northern New York State costs from US$1.79 to US$3.89 a pound, depending on the cut and the age of the goat, store workers said.
Goat meat sales are up in Utica, New York, since about 4,000 Bosnian Muslims arrived in the 1990s, said Judy Winfield, a spokeswoman for the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees.
For holidays and other special occasions, families will buy a live goat, slaughter it and roast it on a spit in their backyard, Winfield said.
Despite the efforts of Usack and about 40 other farmer members of the Empire State Meat Goat Producers Association, there hasn't been an upsurge in goat farming in New York.
Several groups are sponsoring a series of workshops Saturday in Voorheesville, near Albany, to tout meat goat farming as an alternative to dairy farming, where tight margins between prices and production costs often are too low to keep smaller farms going.
Usack, who concentrates on breeding goats and brokering sales of Texas meat goats to New York farmers, said labor and feed costs are lower for meat goats than dairy cows. The goats eat on their own half the year, munching on brush and leaves and twigs. They don't get milked twice a day.
"The dairy industry has been declining, and that's freed up a lot of land and farms for alternative production," said Robert Melchior, marketing coordinator for the Northeast Sheep and Goat Marketing Program at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "Our feeling is that goats and sheep are areas where that land and those farms could be properly utilized."
For now, it's still a seller's market for goat meat. Ghilman Hussain, a Pakistani immigrant who owns Halal Meat and Groceries in Latham, a suburb of Albany, said if customers "don't place an order until Friday, they're not going to get it."
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