We have been farming here since 2013. The farm is 1,000ac from 300m to 500m above sea level and, before we inherited it, the place was pretty run down. The fences were all down, the steading had collapsed and the grassland was pretty unproductive.

It meant we looked at it as a blank canvas and assessed how we could turn it into a viable agricultural business that would be sustainable long-term without subsidies.

We looked at all the traditional beef and sheep systems using some financial modelling but the return from all of them was pretty marginal, to be brutally honest.

I grew up in New Zealand where deer farming had become very commercial in the 1980s and 1990s so I had some familiarity with that style of livestock farming.

When we researched the deer business here in the UK, on paper it looked like it could work well and once we got talking to people in the industry, we liked the idea even more.

It’s been a long road since we started but we’re now in our second year of production.

We aspire to having a herd of 700 to 800 breeding hinds so we are keeping all our breeding stock at the moment and only selling surplus stags for meat.

This year we will sell 70 stag yearlings. We are part of the First Venison producer group, which supplies Waitrose through the processor Dovecote Park. The stags are sold at between 15 and 22 months. We aim for a meat yield of around 55%, which is a killed-out carcase weight of 60kg.

Last year the base price was £5.50/kg (€6.24/kg) but we’re hoping for an increase on that this year. Negotiations are ongoing with Dovecote.

This month is a busy time for us. We are weaning calves from the hinds and preparing to put the stags out for the rut.

The calves all get tagged with EID tags and go into the shed for their first winter. They will be fed silage, which we produce ourselves, and a 15% protein cattle ration, which we buy in.

We give the entire herd a cobalt selenium iodine and copper bolus and a general MOT. This compensates for grassland mineral deficiencies we have. Deer are particularly susceptible to copper deficiencies so we bolus the hinds and stags twice a year.

The stags have had their antlers cut off to prevent injury during the rutting season. Mature breeding stags weigh around 270kg and their antlers can weigh 7kg to 10kg.

In the wild, the stags shed antlers every year and they grow back at a rate of 1cm to 2cm per day from April. We saw them off in late August/early September when they have gone hard and before the testosterone starts to flow and they become more tricky to handle.

The stags and hinds go out to rut with two stags per 100 hinds. They are outwintered in paddocks, with silage and ration fed using a sheep snacker.

The hinds will be moved into their calving field in May and stay there until the end of July when we find out what we’ve got. There is no human intervention in the calving process and we just let them get on with it themselves. We have about a 90% successful calving rate and mortality in young calves is about 3%.

Deer are typically very healthy and quite low maintenance but there is a high cost of infrastructure to get established and a shortage of quality breeding stock. Fencing alone costs around £10/m (€11.36/m). Once you are established, though, there is positive sustainable margin in the longer term.