Wild deer have been a background nuisance on many Hawke’s Bay farms for years, a shape at the edge of the headlights and a bit of chewed pasture in the morning. A new economic study has now put a number on them, and the number is bigger than most farmers expected.
The research, by primary sector economist Peter MacIntyre, tracked what deer are taking out of farms through lost pasture, ruined winter feed crops, damaged native plantings and browsed bush. On individual properties the cost runs into tens of thousands of dollars a year. The findings were reported this week by RNZ rural reporter Alexa Cook.
One of the more uncomfortable findings is that farmers are routinely wrong about how many deer they are carrying. MacIntyre said thermal imaging keeps turning up far more animals than landowners expect. “There is good evidence from drone and helicopter thermal imaging that many landowners could have five to six times more deer than they think,” he said. During the study, one landowner who believed he had about 50 deer on his property was found to have close to 300.
The economics scale quickly once the numbers climb. MacIntyre calculated that when 100 deer take half of their annual feed from productive pasture, the loss to that farm is more than $10,000 a year. Run out over a decade and discounted at 8.4 percent, it passes $100,000. “Once deer numbers grow from 50 to 100 and more, the economic damage gets significant,” he said.
Sam Stoddart farms at Porangahau in southern Hawke’s Bay, with roughly 8000 hectares of bush sitting along his boundary. He told RNZ there would be, at an estimate, “800 plus deer right on our boundary”. The damage shows up fastest in winter feed. “A young kale crop will get pulled… plucked out before it’s had time to establish,” he said.
Stoddart’s rough sum is that if those deer grazed his land, they would eat what 1200 sheep eat, which he put at about $145,000 a year in lost production. In practice the cost turns up in a different form, because he cannot plant high value crops in the paddocks the deer can reach, and he watches native plants disappear from the areas he has tried to restore.
That second cost is the one the study’s organisers want people to notice. Marie Taylor of Plant Hawke’s Bay said deer graze selectively, taking out the palatable species that hold a forest together and leaving behind something that looks healthy from the road and is hollow underneath. “Even though the canopy of the forest looks great, we are losing everything underneath,” she said.
MacIntyre spoke to 14 landowners for the work, which was organised by Plant Hawke’s Bay and funded by the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council, the Joan Fernie Charitable Trust and the Pan Pac Environmental Trust.
Fencing is the obvious answer and the expensive one. MacIntyre put new deer fencing at roughly $40,000 a kilometre, which is beyond most farm budgets for a boundary of any real length. Adding an electric setup to fencing already standing costs about $8,000 a kilometre. His argument is that the maths improves sharply when neighbours stop working alone. “If you gang up with your neighbours and ringfence off the problem area then it’s going to be a lot more cost effective for each farmer,” he said.
The trend is not confined to one region. The Department of Conservation’s wild animals manager, Mike Perry, said national monitoring shows ungulates, the group that covers wild deer, goats, pigs, chamois and tahr, “are present at approximately 83 percent of monitored sites on public conservation land, up from 63 percent in 2013”.
DOC manages deer across about 200,000 hectares nationally, and Perry noted that in a number of Hawke’s Bay conservation areas wild goats do more ecological harm than deer. He also made the point that the animals ignore land titles, so no single agency can fix it. “Iwi, landowners, hunters, councils, community groups and government agencies all have an important role to play in protecting biodiversity while ensuring sustainable management outcomes across the landscape,” he said.
Deer were first released here from 1851 for sport, and DOC says populations “have been building over the past couple of decades across the country”. Monitoring across public conservation land found occupancy odds rising by about 34 percent a year in the North Island and 21 percent a year in the South Island over the sampling period, with the rebound linked to lower commercial harvesting and less government-funded control since the population lows of the 1980s.
In Hawke’s Bay, feral deer are listed as a site-led pest under the regional council’s Regional Pest Management Plan 2018-2038, which means control is aimed at selected sites chosen to protect particular ecosystems rather than applied across the region. What the study describes is what falls between those sites, an unmanaged flow of animals off the ranges and onto farmland where nobody has clear responsibility for the bill.
It is also why the issue is harder to settle than a straight pest problem. Deer are a valued game animal for tens of thousands of New Zealand hunters and the basis of a commercial venison trade, and any push for heavier control runs into a genuine constituency who see the same animals differently. What MacIntyre’s numbers add is a price tag that farmers can take to a neighbour, a council or a hunting club and argue from, rather than another round of estimates about how many deer are out there.
Have wild deer turned up on your place, and has anything worked to keep them out? Tell us what you have seen in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
Leave a Reply