With his phone propped up on the dash of his well-loved pickup truck, Scott Stubbs recalled why he became a sheep rancher in southern Utah.
“It’s in my blood,” he said as he drove down a dirt road, sun setting behind him. “I've been doing this for about 34 years on my own. And of course, before then I helped my dad, my grandpa, and that's where I came from.”
As a fifth-generation rancher, Stubbs is up before the sun rises and home after it sets. It’s been that way for decades. He loves every aspect of the job, even the parts he doesn’t like, “there's no good to hate in anything. It's all got to be done.”
For some years now, Stubbs has been concerned about the domestic sheep industry. The profit margins are tight. Some years he wondered if there was enough money in the bank to make it through another harvest. There just isn’t a local market for sheep or stability in the industry, Stubbs said, despite the fact that domestic lamb consumption went up almost 10% from 2021 to 2022.
That’s because the United States imports more than 70% of the lamb it consumes from other countries like New Zealand and Australia.
“The demand is growing for lamb, but then when you realize that we're only filling 26% of that, it makes you wonder, why can't we sell more of the market?” Stubbs said. “There has got to be some way to level the playing field so it's equal. That's all we're asking for.”
So sheep ranchers across the western United States started to rally. They wanted to bring the issue to Washington D.C., and they caught the attention of Utah Republican Rep. Blake Moore. The congressman sent a bipartisan letter to Katherine Tai, the ambassador of the Office of the United States Trade Representative on Oct. 27. The letter requests the launch of a “safeguard investigation” into whether the U.S. lamb industry is being significantly harmed by imports.
In 1884, there were roughly 51 million sheep in the U.S. As of 2016, that number has since dropped to 5 million. Moore worries about America relying too much on foreign food imports, especially as more sheep herders sell their land because they can’t afford to run the operation anymore.
”What happens when a COVID hits? What happens when there is conflict in the world and we can't control our own supply chain and our own food source?” he said.
The safeguard investigation under the Trade Act of 1974 would allow the U.S. to slow down lamb imports by increasing tariffs or capping the amount of imports in a given timeframe. Moore said it could also open the door to some policy changes.
He noticed regulation discrepancies between the U.S. and other countries that he would like addressed. In the U.S., it’s illegal to use the pesticide Sodium Fluoroacetate (also known as Compound 1080) on livestock. It helps deter certain predators from killing livestock, but it’s not a tool ranchers can use to protect their product. However, Australia and New Zealand can use it.
“If they can't use it in America to produce, why are we allowing it to be used from another country and then imported and eaten by the same people?” Moore said. “That's just inherently unfair to require U.S. manufacturers to do something that we don't require of our imports.”
Carson Jorgensen, the former chair of the Utah Republican Party, played a role in bringing the problem to Congress. He’s a sixth-generation sheep rancher. Nearly 90 years ago, his grandpa bought a few sheep when he was 17, and that handful turned into thousands. At one point, the family had 22,000 sheep. But the operation isn’t as fruitful as it once was. Now, their flock is down to around 4,500.
Jorgenson said the decline is partly due to land development. What used to be “historic grazing pastures are now covered with homes,” so there isn’t room for that many sheep anymore. And his family is facing the same issue as Stubbs – lamb imports are shrinking the business, and if they don’t ease up “there won't be any sheep industry left,” Jorgensen said.
The investigation isn’t a permanent solution. Rather, it provides relief for a short period of time.
“It's a kind of a tourniquet for the industry so that the industry can get itself back on its feet,” Jorgensen said. “We were hoping for a reduction of imports over 10 years to where the domestic industry can at least reclaim 50% of the total market in the United States.”
Ambassador Tai hasn’t confirmed there will be a safeguard investigation, but Jorgensen is hopeful. Representatives from 8 states (Wyoming, Nevada, Illinois, Montana, Idaho, Colorado and California), including all three members of Utah’s House delegation, signed onto the letter, and Moore is confident there is “strong bipartisan support” on the issue.
Stubbs is hanging onto the possibility that the investigation would help keep his livelihood and identity alive.
“I've spent a lifetime already and I don't want to let it go,” he said. “This is what I do. This is who I am.”
