Game Dealer.

Shouldn’t free range organic meat retail more than “farmed” meat?

ATB

Tahr
 
Shouldn’t free range organic meat retail more than “farmed” meat?

ATB

Tahr


Woof! Now that's what I call a question and the short answer to it is... NO!

In a fair and equitable world the price something sells for should idealy return all of the costs (fixed, variable etc) of that something's production plus a reasonable element of profit as reward/inducement to those whose risk-taking placed that something on the market in the first place.

But, of course, we don't actually live in such an ideal, fair and equitable world. We live in one dictated to by "Market Forces" and complicated by so-called "Public Opinion" and "Political Will". A very fickle world it seems at times too, full of misinformation and the fashion of the moment. Virtually the only constants are change (pardon my oxymoron) and the wish to make money. And woe betide the producer of the wrong product or who fails to use the most competitive means of production.

But... I'm thinking; you aren't really looking for those sorts of answer, are you?

"Organics" is a concept for the simple minded, supported with a zeal more often reserved for religious beliefs, that is used by the cynical to gain a market premium for products with no actual intrinsic superiority. Organic food is simply no more or less nutritious or wholesome than conventionally produced food (here in the UK at any rate) though it is far less economical to produce. Having said this I realise that many of the organic producers themselves "buy into" the fallacy that what they are doing is better even if only morally so. On the "moral" issue they are totally at sea and deluded by the way, when two thirds of the world's population is mal-nourished or starving at any given time, unless, that is, you are going to go all weirdly calvanistic on me here and say man's suffering is for the greater good or some such pish. The big buyers and sellers (the retailers) know the truth, of course, but they are not going to burst the bubble so long as there's an extra pound/renminbi to be made, are they? ... And, given how costly true organic food is to produce you might think a market premium is justified, per the sentiment I expressed at paragraph two (above), that would only be fair, wouldn't it? But why should you pay more for something that is really no better, just because it costs more to produce than an exact alternative product? Especially, when its wasteful and overly costly production is so morally reprehensible into the bargain? That would just be illogical... but that doesn't stop it from happening.

Free range organic meat??? Now, there's another oxymoron. Truly "free range" meat production cannot, by definition, be "Organic". Organics doesn't allow for anything but total control of production within very strict, if often bizarrely arbitrary, parameters. The fact that "wild" deer, for instance, can browse and graze "conventionally" managed crops and/or the same land as "conventionally" reared farm livestock means that they cannot and should not be considered as "organic" as their diet and living environment cannot be guaranteed to fall within said strict parameters. You might think a hillside in the Highlands is an organic environment but if there are, or have ever been, conventionally produced sheep running around it there will almost certainly have been organo-phosphate or synthetic pyrethroid dips used on those sheep and the residues will be washed off them and onto that hillside. Likewise there will or could be residues from many and various sorts of very durable anthelmintics and numerous other wonder products used in farming and forestry today, many of which can actually be, as suggested above, arbitrarily, incorporated into "organic" systems anyway... with special permissions :eek: ??? But I digress, because that last one always used to puzzle me so much when I was being a simple, pure and naive soul trying to figure out if organics was for me, as a farm production system. Guess what? Once I realised it was all so much b-s I didn't go for it, but don't tell the housewife I told you why. It would just be too, too upsetting for her.

As a small aside here... You do realise that the famous bottled water "Evian" is the word Naive spelled backwards, don't you?

Returning to previous comments on this thread: You won't convince me that the cost of some suitable stalking gear and a bullet warrants getting the same price or more for wild, shot venison (a product of infinitely variable quality) than a farmer in this country is entitled to receive for his quality controlled product, especially given all of his investment and risk. However, Market Forces, Public Opinion and Political Will are all fickle mistresses, so I'm not saying it can't or won't happen....but.... £2.80 a kilo for Roe already sounds like damned good money to me.

High horse, dismount... and breath in. :D

I hope that answers your question Tahr, Atb~Tom
 
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Tamus good reply, as I work daily with the public on a open farm, it's amazing how most of the public don,t understand the organic system. As to the price of venison, back in the early 80s we got £1/lb for fallow and red skin on, spring lamb born in doors in January made £40-45each, wonder why we shot every deer we could. I know which I would sooner eat. Lamb
 
Tamus good reply, as I work daily with the public on a open farm, it's amazing how most of the public don,t understand the organic system. As to the price of venison, back in the early 80s we got £1/lb for fallow and red skin on, spring lamb born in doors in January made £40-45each, wonder why we shot every deer we could. I know which I would sooner eat. Lamb

Don't get me wrong, I like my venison, particularly when I've taken it from the shot to the plate myself... but I stand by my post, though it might have been better without the spelling mistakes and the oddly apt malapropism :D
 
John Bain Junior has been paying £2.80 KG for Roe for at least the last 6 months.

If you are near Fife, Iain Lawrie at Pluckin Magic will take Roe on behalf of the above.

According to some sources Game Dealers will be increasing their payment for Venison in the very near future...........

Regards

BP
 
£2.40 a kilo for Red at the end of last month.

As for organic farms, I was/ am of the opinion that their value is not in the 'quality' of the product but is in the quality of the environment. My local organic farm (mainly arable) has far more Grey Partridge, Hares, Skylarks, Yellow Buntings etc etc than the land surrounding it, which is farmed in the typical agri business high input high output got to look after the shareholders kind of way.
 
£2.40 a kilo for Red at the end of last month.

As for organic farms, I was/ am of the opinion that their value is not in the 'quality' of the product but is in the quality of the environment. My local organic farm (mainly arable) has far more Grey Partridge, Hares, Skylarks, Yellow Buntings etc etc than the land surrounding it, which is farmed in the typical agri business high input high output got to look after the shareholders kind of way.


It's great to see an improved and still improving price for wild, shot venison.

Good too... to hear of worthwhile conservation gains on organic farms but sad to hear of surrounding, non-organic farms failing in that respect. However, good wildlife conservation and conventional farming are far from being mutually exclusive practices, I promise you. Perhaps the problem does happen to be greater in some arable areas but it is certainly less of a one in stock country and particularly the uplands.

Do you think we should start a new thread on Organics (generally) or as the might pertain to wild living deer in particular?

If so you might like to spend a while reading through this Parliamentary debate on "Organic Food"

see here> http://www.theyworkforyou.com/whall/?id=2007-10-16b.183.0 < for the full text.


I love the pre-amble... with such gems as

"Organic farming is not just about returning to farming as it was before the green revolution, or before farming became industrialised as our populations expanded and the demand for food increased. It is actually a belief system that has its roots in the anti-science backlash propagated by the vitalists, who believed that life arises from, and involves, special life forces. The teaching of an Austrian spiritualist or mystic called Rudolf Steiner in the early 1920s gave rise to the modern organic farming movement. The early beginnings of organic farming have been captured in a recently published book, "The Truth About Organic Foods", by Alex Avery."

and...
"The pioneers of organic farming believe that the synthetic nitrate fertilisers produce food that lacks vital forces imparted by animal manure. Steiner believed that the special forces possessed by animal manure come from far-away planets.
"Have you ever thought why cows have horns, or why certain animals have antlers?"
asked Steiner. He explained:
"The cow has horns in order to send into itself the astral-ethereal formative powers, which, pressing inward, are meant to penetrate right into the digestive organism....Thus, in the horn you have something well adapted by its inherent nature to ray back the living and astral properties into the inner life".
That is where the movement began. I would not have believed that people pat cow dung into cow's horns and bury them in the ground in the belief that they increase the vital forces in manure, until I saw the six recent television programmes in which one of the cast of "The Kumars at No.42" toured India. He went to an organic tea plantation in Darjeeling, where women sat on the ground patting cow manure into horns to produce special water to water on to the tea plants. If anyone thinks that that is fantasy, organic farmers still believe it, at least in certain parts of the world, today."

But my top favourite quote, which was much more up to date and from C. S. Prakash, a famous and distinguished plant biologist, who said:

"Organic farming is sustainable. It sustains poverty and malnutrition."
 
Bambridges in Watton, Norfolk.
£2.20 kg for Roe. Was £2.00 until recently
£2.10 kg for Reds. Was £1.80 until recently
 
Hi Tom

Thank you for taking time to answer in such a concise and informative way,:thumb: I think I unknowingly touched on subject close to your heart; do you work in farming by any chance? You must be up for a reward for the longest answer to the shortest question.

I perhaps should have asked “should wild venison retail for more than farmed meat?”

In a fair and equitable world the price something sells for should idealy return all of the costs (fixed, variable etc) of that something's production plus a reasonable element of profit as reward/inducement to those whose risk-taking placed that something on the market in the first place.

Now a view could be that wild venison is very heavily subsidized by us the very people that are stalking them so we do not receive a fair and equitable price for them. If we use the Forestry Commission figures for the value of a roe deer of a minimum of £100 per animal as an indication of the Leased land value, the time spent to successfully stalk an animal is often quoted as an average of one animal every 3 outing. So a 3 hour outing plus an hour to travel to from the stalking location/larder time/preparation time, cleaning equipment after the stalk ect so let’s say 12 hours per successful animal culled. Now if we put that time into a fiscal perspective as a figure call it £25 per hour, as you could not employ any tradesman for less and in reality it would have to be a lot more. We could of cause use a employed stalkers salary but this would make thing complicated because we would then have to work out all his vehicle cost, pensions, holiday pay, sick pay etc.

So £25X12= £300
£100 lease fee
Total cost to harvest £400 per roe.

The game dealer pays us for example £2.50 a kilo, 15kg for an average roe means £37.50 for each roe.

Now that means that each roe deer we take into the game dealer is being subsidized to a total of £362.50 by us.
Which bring us back to your statement:-

In a fair and equitable world the price something sells for should idealy return all of the costs (fixed, variable etc) of that something's production plus a reasonable element of profit as reward/inducement to those whose risk-taking placed that something on the market in the first place.

Now I am not arguing that farmed animals should be worth less, but what would the real market value of wild venison be if it wasn’t for us daft buggers that love to stalk them:?:

One point I will make is that early this year the W.H.O. sated that now more people are dying from diseases from over consumption of food than are now dying of lack of food, a thought for all of us who are carrying an extra pound or two.:oops:

Thanks again for you informative post on the organics,:tiphat: in fact I am going to show it to the wife who is big on this kind of thing, perhaps it will be a house wife converted.;)

Highland Game were paying £2.50 a Kilo but have just announced a drop in price for October.:confused:


Best regards

Tahr
 
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Yeah, you got me and I did go on a bit... sorry :D Read the link I posted, if you can be bothered, it's loaded with sensible observation on the whacky world of organics though

Love your apples and pears logic too, can't really argue with it... atb~Tom
 
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