From Baton Rouge chemical engineer to Sugartown sheep farmer, it's been a long, strange trip for 59 year old Frank Boggs.
No one goes into the Louisiana sheep business by design. It's unheard of. It's outrageous. How did it happen? The answer is in the numbers.
"There's 5,000 guys trying to sell beef in Louisiana for a living, but no one is trying to sell lamb to eat," Boggs said. "But it was an idea that developed slowly."
He sells Katahdin sheep, the domestic breed best suited for meat production. The nouveau shepherd grew up in the northeastern corner of Beauregard Parish along LA 26 on land better suited for pine trees. His family always had a variety of livestock, cattle, hogs, chickens; and his aunt and uncle were dairy farmers.
"They had dairy cows when you could make a living milking 28 cows," Boggs said.
Frank Boggs herds 300 Katahdin ewes toward his northwest pasture. "Grazing is the only way these sheep have of making a living," Boggs said. Since most lamb is imported from New Zealand, Boggs said his lamb meat is 10,000 miles fresher.
Like many Louisiana rural families in the late 50s and 60s, the Boggs had no telephone service until Frank was of high school age. He left rural Beauregard to attend LSU in 1964, and upon his graduation in 1969, he entered the work force as a chemical engineer with a large company located south of Baton Rouge along the Mississippi River. But after 11 years as a cog in the chemical industry, Boggs became disenchanted.
"I was sick of it," he said. Packing up his new wife, Boggs returned to Beauregard Parish and began to live the life of a country squire. A "poor" country squire, he specified.
He bought his aunt and uncles dairy pasture land in 1982 and stocked it with beef cattle, while his wife worked as an educator. Always the analyst, Boggs bought two pregnant ewes in 1994 as a way to control weeds, and while he wasn't having a problem with his cattle, the sheep helped to keep intestinal parasite infection in his beef herd to a minimum.
"The internal parasites that sheep and cattle have are not all the same," Boggs said. "If the sheep eat the larvae of the cattle parasites on the grass, the parasite dies inside the sheep. If the cattle eat the sheep larvae; the parasite expires in the cattle." An added benefit was Boggs and his family had all the lamb they could eat.
He was content with this arrangement until 2001 when he found out about a sheep-only slaughterhouse business in Summit, Miss.
"Two Muslim brothers bought the slaughterhouse and supplied the Muslim trade from New Orleans to Memphis along the I-55 corridor," Boggs said. "It was a place where I could sell 30 or 40 sheep at a time."
That's when he increased his flock with a few more ewes and began phasing out the cattle.
"If a sheep knocks you down in the pasture it hurts less than when a mama cow does," Boggs quipped.
He also occasionally sold individual live sheep directly to consumers, but was actively searching for ways to expand his market.
Boggs said Beauregard Parish and the rest of west central Louisiana was a major wool sheep producing region from the 1920s through the 1940s.
"Some families had 3,000 to 10,000 head grazing on open range," he said. "In those days there was a type of grass that grew in clumps and provided winter grazing. But that grass is extinct now because of our area's pronounced proclivity for woods arson."
As world military powers were stockpiling wool in anticipation of World War II, the sheep market reached record highs in 1939, but quickly quieted after the war when garment manufacturers began using synthetic cloth materials.
Boggs also said American sheep producers did such a good job of protecting their meat market from foreign imports; they were no longer able to supply the domestic business.
Frank and Lynne Boggs at the Red Stick Farmer's Market in Baton Rouge.
Consequently three generations of Americans grew up without ever tasting lamb.
Boggs got the idea to sell lamb meat directly to the consumer from a couple of fellow Katahdin Association members from Fayetteville and Little Rock, Ark.
The Little Rock farmer was selling about four sheep a week in a farmer's market setting so Boggs tested the Lake Charles area. But Boggs said the small Lake Charles market didn't have a provision to sell lamb meat and Lafayette provided no electricity to power freezers. He considered both Baton Rouge and New Orleans to set up shop.
Baton Rouge was the practical limit for a truck drive to sell the meat, Boggs explained. "I sold about a hundred lambs last year at the Red Stick Farmer's Market and now I've got lots of repeat customers." After determining a month's consumer sheep demand, Boggs delivers the live sheep to Elliot's Slaughterhouse in Morse, LA. The State-approved facility slaughters the animals and dresses the lamb cuts for retail sale.
"The most popular cut is rack of lamb and I sell out of it quickly," Boggs said. "But I also sell a lot of sausage, lamb chops and lamb kebobs." The Boggs Farms lambs are hormone and antibiotic free," Boggs said.
"The sheep are totally free of drug residue since we rigorously observe the withdrawal period required between the date of any oral medical treatment for parasites and the date of their processing and packaging," he said. "But they're not organic. It's so hot and humid in Louisiana it's not economically feasible to try to meet the organic food specifications."
Enjoying the retail pricing the Red Stick Farmers Market afforded him, Boggs phased out selling his lambs to the Summit slaughterhouse. "They would only pay commodity prices," he said.
Lamb carcasses hang in the cooler of Elliott's Slaughterhouse in Morse, LA.
Boggs has a contract with Elliott's to prepare his lamb for commercial meat sales
at the Red Stick Farmer's Market.
Frank Boggs promotes his quality lamb meat to a Red Stick Farmer's Market shopper.
Boggs is a savvy marketer and his booth at the Red Stick Farmer's Market is adorned with a large sign loaded with information.
"My wife says it's too much to read, but I see a lot of people reading the sign," he said. "People also ask me a lot of questions about the lambs."
And Boggs also knows he needs to tell people how to cook the lamb so he maintains an extensive Web site with many links to lamb recipes.
In addition to rack of lamb and sausage, Boggs also sells lamb chops, lamb mignon, leg of lamb, lamb shanks and mountain oysters.
He knows he's won't get rich selling lamb meat, but it has been profitable. "It's making money and I'm trying to make it a viable business," Boggs said. "But enough income to support a wife and two college-age kids? No."
Despite the fact that his lambs pasture graze year round and are low maintenance, he must deal with the same high input prices, like the cost of diesel and fertilizer, just like other agricultural producers.
And after 14 months of selling fresh, ecologically-raised lamb meat directly to consumers at the Baton Rouge market, it's too early to detect a pattern in the customer's buying habits, so Boggs is continuing with his plan and collecting data.
"Locally-grown sheep, it's something you can't get anywhere else," Boggs said.
