{"id":662537,"date":"2026-06-28T09:43:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T09:43:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/662537\/"},"modified":"2026-06-28T09:43:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T09:43:08","slug":"out-of-control-deer-threaten-crops-and-woodland-farmers-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/662537\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;Out-of-control&#8217; deer threaten crops and woodland, farmers say"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Elliot Fairs, an ecologist who runs a farmer cluster group in Devon called the Teign Valley Facilitation Fund, said: &#8220;There was a very clear challenge all the farmers were facing which was the rising numbers of deer in the Teign Valley.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;It was causing them all sorts of problems, be it damaging their fencing, eating their crops, destroying their woods, any laid hedges, any planted hedges were being affected.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">A herbivore impact assessment revealed nine of the 13 landowners surveyed reported high levels of deer browsing.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In the first year of the group&#8217;s management scheme 432 deer have been culled.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I&#8217;m an ecologist, I&#8217;m not a deer stalker,&#8221; said Fairs. &#8220;I&#8217;m not really somebody who gets the whole stalking, hunting side of things.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;But to suddenly understand and see with my own eyes the links between the clear levels of deer and the impact they&#8217;re having on other species of wildlife and the damage they&#8217;re causing to habitats.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;It was pretty obvious to me that if I didn&#8217;t try and help figure out a way to resolve or at least reduce this problem, the other efforts I was putting in to save dormice and butterflies would be pretty much nullified.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elliot Fairs, an ecologist who runs a farmer cluster group in Devon called the Teign Valley Facilitation Fund,&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":662538,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-662537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=662537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662537\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/662538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=662537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=662537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=662537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}