Over the next few weeks, some venison companies will be offering minimum price supply contracts for the game season for shipment of chilled venison during September and October.
This is expected to assure better prices for venison animals processed for supply in the European game season.
Contracts offered in 2020 were $7-$7.20 a kilogram, when Europe was gripped by covid-19.
This year restaurants are starting to reopen in North America.
“Also, prices for all meats in major world markets have begun what economists expect will be a steady long-run climb,” Walker said.
Despite all the disruption caused by covid, the 2020 European game season went well, both at foodservice to restaurants and at retail.
“Importers were understandably cautious with their orders, but they sold everything and could have sold more, if not for airfreight disruptions,” he said.
“With mass vaccination programmes underway in Europe, demand from foodservice this coming game season could be even stronger.
“The only note of caution is the strength of the NZ dollar, which has firmed by about 10% against the Euro and US dollar since last October.”
It is more difficult to predict demand outside the chilled season when a lot of venison is frozen after processing.
Demand for frozen venison comes mainly from northern Europe, and now China.
In Europe it is stored until the following game season for use in traditional cold weather game fare.
“There are significant stocks of frozen venison from NZ and other countries in Europe from last game season,” he said.
“This will tend to have a bearish effect on prices for the next few months.”
On the other side of the ledger, prospects in North America are improving and demand from China, a developing market for venison, keeps growing.
“The US restaurant scene is coming back as vaccination campaigns are rolled out and infection rates drop,” he said.
The US is NZ’s biggest year-round market for chilled venison.
“Venison marketers have also been very active in North America in the past 12 months building retail and home delivery demand for our venison with some promising results,” he said.
“While this will take time to be reflected in meaningful volumes, every kilogram that is sold is a kilogram that is not sold frozen in Europe.”
Meanwhile, food price inflation is gripping the world.
Beef, pork and chicken prices are climbing on the back of the highest grain and soybean prices in seven years.
These are being driven by poor harvests because of bad weather and drought, at a time of growing demand, especially from China.
Westpac Bank senior agri-economist Nathan Penny expects covid vaccine rollouts will boost demand for NZ meat, first in the US, where the rollout is going very well, followed later in the year in the EU and the UK.
This boost will add to the demand strength already present in China.
“That means venison prices, which have been hardest hit by covid are also likely to turn the corner as European (German) meat demand returns.
“We expect the farm gate venison price pickup to materialise from around mid-year,” Penny said.
DINZ is working closely with the five major venison marketing companies to build year-round demand for venison, particularly at retail and online for home delivery.
“We fully recognise that deer farmers need a schedule premium over lamb to make venison production a competitive land-use,” he said.
“The industry was achieving that until the impact of covid.”
“Venison prices will improve and hopefully none of us will have to deal with another pandemic in our lifetimes. Once is more than enough.”
Because deer farmers can bank on getting better prices during the chilled season, Walker encourages talking to venison marketing companies about their plans and consider locking in supply over this period.
Walker says farmers should target getting venison animals away before the end of October, if that fits with their farm system.
