Small scale, Big impact!

As I write this we are coming off the back of the wettest winter we have seen. The persistent rain has relentlessly fallen for somewhere near the amount of days that once required the building of an arc and I, as I'm sure you the reader, have just about had enough! Deer management in the doe season, which really is roll your sleeves up time, can be hard enough. As fallow wise up to the chase at the latter stage of the season and the roe remain in family groups with more than the usual one or two sets of senses to avoid, soggy waterlogged ground and the un-breaking weather firmly add to the stalkers woes. What this time off the ground does do is allow for some time of reflection or thought and it was on one of these such days that I began to ponder the progress made in the promotion of wild venison and how far we have come with it. 

I don't watch much television, I genuinely don't seem to find the time. I do now know how to watch Youtube on the TV and this is something I do dig about at. However, on this occasion I looked over the top of the book I was reading as I heard the words roe saddle. Masterchef. The professionals so it said, was on and there on the bench was a saddle, or best end, of roe. It transpired this roe saddle was there to be used in a skills test and as I watched the chef demonstrated what he wanted the candidates to do with said roe saddle. The candidates came out one by one to take part in the test and they all, not only knew what this was, but proceeded to butcher and cook the saddle beautifully. Some of the accoutrements to the saddle went a bit sideways for one chap and I put this down to him being a more slender chef than the others, my wife said this was ridiculous however, I don't trust a thin chef! Overall it was a pleasure to see. Would we have seen this even 10 years ago? I can't recall seeing wild venison on mainstream TV aside from the river cottage fellow.  Just how far have we come in the promotion of wild venison and is it being steered in the right direction?

I own and run a small venison production business as does a good friend of mine and we have often discussed how the demand locally has grown. My rationale for starting said business was two fold. Firstly, I actually enjoy processing and seeing the result of a job well done and secondly, I resent being paid barely enough to cover the tag and bullet for a 10kg muntjac. To be clear this sort of endeavour is never going to help you enormously in the financial sense. Yes it washes its face and covers the cost of stalking but the margins in this arena aren't overly huge, especially if you were to pay yourself accurately for your time. It is a labour of love and one I am sure many of you can relate to. Are small producers, like myself, driving the change from the opposite end to organisations trying to market venison?

When venison is driven by various organisations the narrative always seems loosely similar. Get it into supermarkets, this is a nigh on impossible task for a multitude of reasons and I don't see this changing anytime soon. Get it into schools and hospitals, this has been done on a small scale but does this have any real potential to cope with the volumes we need to cull? Prisons and the homeless has been another idea banded around and I see the financial saving from this and its viability as an outlet for overspill but neither of these sectors are going to be inspired to take a trip to their local farm shop or producer and buy it again. Someone significantly more eloquent and philosophical than myself once said from small acorns great oaks grow and in this analogy I think the small independent producers are those small acorns. They are the ones on the coal face quietly putting venison on the tables of local families with minimal marketing campaigns and the overheads associated to them. 

Could that funding then be used more constructively? There is no getting away from the fact that to attain accreditation and set up a processing facility requires some monetary input. It can be as expensive as you make it but there are a baseline set of standards we must achieve and adhere to so we can trade. The process with the local authority is not as daunting as one would expect and I have found my EHO (Environmental Health Officer) to be nothing short of brilliant. You can pay for extra "coaching" from them but I found the basic service I utilised to be very helpful and others have reported the same. So its not beyond the wit of any man, or woman, that spends there time in pursuit of deer to do this. I do believe more could be done the help those who desire to do so. Could some of the funding used at the top end, with arguably limited success, be allocated to programmes that aid this? Get the people who are closest to it driving it? It would be coming at it from the opposite end I agree but I'd argue small producers put more venison on the plates of "non deer people" than anyone else. Perhaps this is something for those at the other end to ponder the next time weather stops play?