Celebrity helps boost venison sales

With venison now featuring on a regular basis with celebrity chefs, consumer demand for this lean, iron rich, meat has soared. The only problem is, as the country's leading venison processor stated yesterday, there is not enough venison to meet the demand.

Speaking at a deer farm on the outskirts of Linlithgow, Christian Nissen of Highland Game said he could not understand farmers not producing more venison when sales were "exceeding every expectation" and were currently more than 200 per cent of last year's figures.

"As a businessman, I find it strange that I should be begging to get people to supply more venison," he said. "I also find it hard to understand why numbers of deer are not increasing when there is such an opportunity in the market.

"With venison taking such a high profile on cookery programmes, the time is ripe for taking other meats such as poultry and pig meat."

Nissen takes both wild and farmed deer into his factory in Dundee and he said he now had to ration his customers because of the shortage of venison in the market. This year, he will import some 15,000 deer carcases from New Zealand to help meet demand. The bulk of those come in to help fill the gap in seasonal production of wild venison.

But this was business which he believed could easily be supplied by Scottish farmers and landowners.

He believed there was a great opportunity for an expansion in numbers of "park land" deer as opposed to farmed or wild deer. Apart from the cost of a perimeter fence, these animals would require very little in costs of production and would provide a good financial return. Scotland is estimated to have between 800,000 and 900,000 deer and they give an annual production of about 4,500 tonnes of venison. There are about 25 deer farmers producing between them some 50 tonnes of venison with the balance of the tonnage coming from sporting estates.

For 30 years, the small band of deer farmers have complained over exclusion from the main farm subsidy schemes and even with a reform in the Common Agricultural Policy now under way, there seems little political enthusiasm for bringing them under the support umbrella.

Frank Spencer Nairn highlighted the problems encountered by producers over the lack of abattoir facilities for deer with producers often having to spend a lot of cash transporting the animals to one of the few deer approved slaughterhouses.