Shepherds Talk – How Chefs Helped our Lamb Business Succeed with John and Sukey Jamison
John and Sukey own Jamison Farm in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Their picturesque 210-acre farm produced some 3,000 lambs annually, which were destined for great cooks at home and the finest chefs and restaurants in the world. In 1985, Sukey and John started a retail mail order business to sell their lamb to home cooks. By the late 1980’s, they began selling lamb to chefs at some of the best restaurants in the country, starting with Jean Louis Palladin, their mentor. Using the chef/farmer connection allowed the Jamisons to learn what specific requirements were needed by the chefs to provide them with the best lamb possible.
In 1994, the Jamisons bought their own USDA Slaughter/Processing Plant to insure further control over the finished product. They were one of the early farms to take their product from the farm directly to the chef, using their own processing facility. It was the time of the true beginning of the Farm to Table movement in America as chefs were willing and able to source locally grown products for use in their kitchens.
A seasoned cook, Sukey Jamison created a line of hand-prepared lamb dishes, which include a lamb stew created in collaboration with the late, great Jean-Louis Palladin, and Sukey’s award-winning lamb pie, which was a finalist in The Best New Product Category at the NASFT Fancy Food Show in 1997. A charter member of WCR, Sukey was awarded the Women Chefs and Restaurateurs’ Golden Plow Award in 2005 for her farming skills. John is past president of The Jean-Louis Palladin Foundation and served for nine years on the board of PASA (Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture.) Now retired from their farming business, they both enjoy living on their beautiful farm and writing about their culinary and farming adventures. Their book “Coyotes in the Pasture and Wolves at the Door – Stories from Our Farm to Your Table”, which was published in 2018, details their journey into farming and the amazing people they met along the way as well as recipes for their world-famous lamb.
In addition to this talk, the Jamisons will be signing and selling their book at the Authors’ Table from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on both Saturday and Sunday in the “Meet the Author” area of the Main Exhibition Annex. Stop by and say hello!
