Tea on a Tuesday night?

The venison market is a key factor when considering deer management across the country. 

Having an outlet for carcasses or meat is often the difference between continuing with culling or having to stop due to full freezers.

I’m sure most stalkers out there will agree the past few years have been tricky, with low prices from game dealers, bottlenecks in the market and ever-increasing cull targets to try to get on top of our growing populations. But my own experiences have shown there is one option that can be highly rewarding and successful: self-processing.

I tend to process most of the deer I shoot myself and sell them locally, meaning I’ve always got a list of people keen for more venison, and I have learnt a lot of lessons the hard way.

But it’s important to emphasise I am not suggesting this is the answer for our nationwide deer and venison issues. Those of you with hefty culls of our larger deer species will know that setting up to process hundreds of carcasses would turn into a full-time job. However, the local processing and sale of venison is one part of the overall solution and one that needs more support.

So, let’s answer a very basic question, what is processing? For deer, a carcass can be fully gralloched and the head and legs removed before processing kicks in. Therefore, once you start skinning a carcass, you have begun processing, and the rules change slightly. What rules do I mean? There are a great many regulations around the production of food, and I won’t go into full detail here.

If you are processing game meat for sale, you will need to register as a food business first and foremost. This is done through your local council and will most likely involve an inspection of the premises where you are going to prepare and store carcasses and venison.

Don’t be put off at this first hurdle. A lot of people think this means they will need an expensive larder set-up. The reality is that you can get your kitchen approved, provided you can satisfy the council it’s hygienic and appropriate.

You will also need to have some training in food hygiene and make sure the right paperwork is in place. I imagine I may have lost some of you at the mention of paperwork, but it’s fairly straightforward. A HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point) plan will be needed, which sounds intense but is in essence a list of what you will be doing, what could go wrong and how you will stop it. My typical example for this is that because I will be extracting the deer in a vehicle, the carcass could get contaminated by dirt etc, so I will keep it covered in a clean tray to ensure there is  no contamination. Simple.  

Beyond these basic requirements for setting up in the first place, good record keeping is essential to keep track of the movement of venison. With the bureaucracy out of the way, you can supply direct to the end consumer or to a retailer that sells to the end consumer (butchers, restaurants etc). If selling to these businesses, they need to be local to  where the meat was prepared. In this instance local means your own council area, neighbouring council area or 50km over the border from your council area.