SBDC helps area farmer become state’s largest lamb processor

When Steve Pinnow, a lifelong Wisconsin farmer, determined he could find a market for freshly slaughtered lamb, he ran into an immediate problem. The only places he could find to process the lambs he raised were so busy that he would have to schedule his processing two months in advance – which made taking orders for fresh lamb almost impossible. And, if he wanted to sell his lamb products in Illinois, where the market is large, he needed federal inspection permits.

“That’s where Bud Gayhart came in,” Pinnow said. Gayhart heads the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. The SBDC provides consulting services to more than 75 small businesses each year.

“I was thinking of building my own processing plant and was looking at a lot in Whitewater when someone told me about Bud’s group,” Pinnow said.

 “He assigned me four students who spent a semester doing research on the lamb business and what it would take to make it sustainable.”

In the end, Pinnow and his wife, Darlene, built a plant on their five-acre homestead between Whitewater and Delavan. It opened in January and processes between 40 and 50 lambs a week. He hires four full-time workers.

“We slaughter the lambs on Mondays, process them on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and get them to market by the weekends,” Pinnow said. “You can’t get meat fresher than that.”

He sells his product in grocery stores in Wisconsin and Illinois (you can find a list of stores on his Web site, www.wisconsinlamb.com), at the Kenosha Farmers’ Market each Saturday and to quality restaurants, including Chicago’s famed Spiaggia.

Gayhart’s students were most helpful in preparing a feasibility study for the processing plant.

“I knew what we had to do,” Pinnow said. “But the paperwork necessary was almost overwhelming. Because they did such a good job on the study, it helped me when I went to the bank to get the money to build the plant.” He says he hasn’t yet adopted all of the Gayhart group’s recommendations.
“Bud’s a big advocate of the kosher industry, but we aren’t yet big enough to fill that market. Right now, we get more business from Muslim and Greek Orthodox believers, especially on their religious holidays.”

In the meantime, Pinnow is making use of other students at the UW-Whitewater’s Wisconsin Center for Information Technology Services to help him develop a new Web site.

“I just signed the contract with them,” he said. “Their students will study the site we have now and update it. Then they’ll give me the technology so that I can access the information myself and won’t need a professional webmaster to keep it current. It should be a big help in growing my business.”

Pinnow contracts with 30 lamb producers around the state to provide him lambs. He raises them for the last 30 days of their lives, providing precise feeding so that the lambs are consistent in weight and quality.

“One of the things the restaurants like about us is that our cuts of lamb are all the same. They don’t get one cut with a lot of fat and the next that is too lean,” he said.

By raising the lambs during the month preceding slaughter, Pinnow also has control of the number slaughtered each week, giving him an added edge of freshness.

Many of his producers are Amish farmers in Western Wisconsin.

“We go to their farms directly and pick up the lambs,” Pinnow said. “They like dealing with us because they get an extra $12 a head or so because they don’t have to arrange transportation.”

The Pinnows’ Pinn-Oak Ridge Farm is now the state’s largest lamb processing unit.

“We had been processing lambs elsewhere before we built our own plant, so we knew we had a market,” he said “But Bud gave us the incentive we needed to go ahead and take the risk of building. We haven’t reached our full potential yet, but we’re pretty much on our way.”