We need them more than they need us

The state of the UK game meat market makes for depressing reading, says Emily Damment, but a collaborative effort could be the answer

- Emily Damment

The UK game market could hardly be described as healthy. Supply of feathered game outweighs demand, and as Stephen Crouch of the National Game Dealers Association (NGDA) confirmed, the UK does not have the processing power to cope with the number of birds being shot.

Perhaps the single biggest problem facing game dealers — and coincidentally the most difficult issue to solve — is the high cost of processing feathered game. Andy Gray, of MC Kelly butchers in Devon, explained further: “The equipment you use to process a pheasant is different from that you’d use for a chicken. Chickens are wet plucked whereas pheasants are dry, which almost always means someone standing beside a machine.

“Some of the bigger outfits have mechanised the process further, but not many. Pheasants are not uniform in size and the bits you hang them from are often damaged, so they don’t favour mechanisation. Mechanisation  also requires capital investment, which usually pays because you’re reducing labour costs, but with game being seasonal and only available for six months of the year, it must have twice as good a payback to justify that expense.”

The seasonal nature of game also creates issues with labour, and steeply rising wages add to the problem. It can take months for dealers to find decent labour for the season, only for them to disappear come summer. Rising wages do not equal a high output of birds, and so dealers find themselves paying more and more for the same product, which cannot fetch a higher price from consumers.