\u201cOnce deer numbers grow from 50 to 100 and more, the economic damage gets significant, more so if they are getting 100% of their feed from your property.\u201d<\/p>\n
Porangahau farmer Sam Stoddart is all too familiar with the problem, with 8000 hectares of bush on his farm boundary.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019d be, at an estimate … 800 plus deer right on our boundary, so a young kale crop will get pulled … plucked out before it\u2019s had time to establish,\u201d Stoddart said.<\/p>\n
He said if those 800 deer grazed on his land, they\u2019d eat about the same as 1200 sheep, which could be making him $145,000 a year.<\/p>\n
Instead, with hundreds of wild deer on his land, the farmer has paddocks he can\u2019t put into higher value crops, winter grass that\u2019s being chewed up and native plants that are disappearing.<\/p>\n
He said wild deer populations have ballooned over the past 10 years.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe numbers have just exploded.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were released as a bit of game for hunters but were never really controlled, I don\u2019t think by DoC [Department of Conservation] or anything … now it\u2019s got to the stage where we need some sort of Government intervention.\u201d<\/p>\n
He\u2019s one of 14 landowners MacIntyre talked to. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a rather depressing story,\u201d MacIntyre said.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople had lost a lot of natives, people were losing forage crops.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a pretty sobering story from everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n
The research was organised by Marie Taylor from Plant Hawke\u2019s Bay and funded by the Hawke\u2019s Bay Regional Council, the Joan Fernie Charitable Trust and the Pan Pac Environmental Trust.<\/p>\n
During the study, a landowner who thought he had 50 deer on his property found nearly 300 with thermal imaging \u2013 and Taylor said this highlighted how huge the wild deer problem had become.<\/p>\n
\u201cNumbers have increased really exponentially,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are a real limiting factor for all things on-farm, including plantings; they\u2019re also really totalling our biodiversity because they graze species by species, they take most palatable things out of the landscape first.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven though the canopy of the forest looks great, we are losing everything underneath.\u201d<\/p>\n
The study showed when 100 deer got half of their annual feed requirements from productive pasture, farmers lost more than $10,000 per year.<\/p>\n
MacIntyre said over 10 years, using an 8.4% discount rate, that was more than $100,000 in lost value.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf farmers are losing forage or won\u2019t plant forage because of the likely damage, you can more than double the losses above.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018I want to see people working together\u2019<\/p>\n
MacIntyre said new deer fences cost about $40,000 per kilometre and sustained shooting programmes were costly and required ongoing effort.<\/p>\n
He calculated that electric fencing added to existing fences would be about $8000 per kilometre.<\/p>\n
However, he said accounting for the losses from deer grazing, it became more economically viable to fence.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you try to ring-fence your farm it\u2019s going to cost you quite a lot … If you gang up with your neighbours and ring-fence off the problem area then it\u2019s going to be a lot more cost effective for each farmer,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Taylor agreed.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to work as catchment groups and put up deer fencing where we can defend the fence,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to see people working together like they did with possum control areas \u2013 that was hugely successful in Hawke\u2019s Bay.\u201d<\/p>\n
To achieve that, what is really needed is more funding for conservation and pest control, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere has been an uncontrolled invasion of feral deer into farmed land from the ranges in Hawke\u2019s Bay with no co-ordinated control programmes and a consequent destruction of years of careful biodiversity planning, planting and management as well as economic loss to farmers.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnless DoC does its job properly this situation will only get worse with deer numbers increasing and environmental damage becoming even more significant and economic costs to farmers becoming unsustainable.\u201d<\/p>\n
DoC\u2019s wild animals manager Mike Perry told RNZ that DoC actively managed deer in areas where they had the greatest impact on biodiversity, with about 200,000ha of deer management nationwide.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe acknowledge that wild animal numbers are increasing,\u201d Perry said.<\/p>\n
\u201cNational monitoring shows ungulates \u2013 wild deer, goats, pigs, chamois and tahr \u2013 are present at approximately 83% of monitored sites on public conservation land, up from 63% in 2013.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn response, DoC has significantly increased control efforts across the country in recent years through additional funding provided in Budget 2022, alongside more than $10 million received through the International Visitor Levy.\u201d<\/p>\n
DoC said deer management was carried out at several sites across Hawke\u2019s Bay and surrounding areas, such as in the Ruahine Forest Park.<\/p>\n
However, Perry said in Hawke\u2019s Bay wild goats posed a greater ecological threat than deer in many conservation areas.<\/p>\n
\u201cDoC undertakes goat control across a range of sites in the region and is carrying out extensive work in the northeastern Ruahine Range with the goal of making that part of the park wild goat free.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said managing wild animals is a shared responsibility that extended beyond public conservation land.<\/p>\n
\u201cIwi, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cOnce deer numbers grow from 50 to 100 and more, the economic damage gets significant, more so if…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558311,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[4193,1561,4194,54760,2668,12474,12967,1976,111,139,69,1118,147,383,15454,2742,15391,406],"class_list":["post-558310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-alexa","tag-bay","tag-cook","tag-costing","tag-deer","tag-dollars","tag-farmers","tag-hawkes","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-science","tag-study","tag-tens","tag-thousands","tag-wild","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558310\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}