This article first appeared in our sister publication, Dairy Farmer.

When deer scientist Geoff Asher and colleague Jason Archer suggested collecting milk samples from milk hinds for a research project at AgResearch’s campus at Invermay near Dunedin, some were sceptical but they found a way to make it work. Now, decades later, deer milk (tia miraka) is not only harvested routinely, it’s a key component of high-value cosmetics.

“We got a lot of commentary thrown at us, ‘I hope you get a new set of teeth soon because you will get your current ones kicked out!’, and various things like that,” Asher says.

“It was kind of considered in the very, very hard basket but we were not been daunted by that. Sometimes you just need determination and a touch of stupidity.”

Invermay recently celebrated 50 years of deer farming science by AgResearch and its predecessors, always in partnership with the deer industry and farmers. The research on lactation was typical of their studies, which included major advances in understanding deer nutrition, health, behaviour and genetics and the development of products such as venison, velvet and milk that are exported around the world.

The research team wanted to find out more about lactation in red deer hinds to understand how they could rear the large calves produced when much larger wapiti bulls were put over them. To do that he had to figure out how to milk them — without getting injured in the process.

“So we got some of our hinds and we put them through the crush and gave them oxytocin and put a little teat cup on them with a suction device and sure enough we found it wasn’t that hard to get milk out, certainly in the quantities that we were interested in studying lactation performance.”

Not only did it turn out to be easier than expected to collect the milk, but the hinds adapted to the new routine quite quickly too. In one study the hinds were brought into the yard daily, starting before birthing. A week after they were born, the fawns started coming into the yards with their mothers.

“We thought what a shemozzle this is going to be but what we found was a week after that we opened the doors of the pens and the calves, all by themselves, walked into one pen and sat down and the hinds all waited to be milked so it was a real eye-opener for us.”

The research project answered his questions about how relatively small red deer hinds were able to support the large Red Deer/Wapiti-cross calves they were giving birth to.

“The study showed us how important the demand suckling of the calf is in stimulating the milk yield in hinds but it was very seriously controlled by the available nutrition at the time and the fatness (body condition score) of the hind before calving,” Asher says.

The studies have all been published in international science journals.

“It’s one thing to set up a system to produce red deer calves out of red deer hinds but you don’t get a free lunch if you put a Wapiti bull over them to get a bigger calf. You’ve got to input more management into the hind and make sure they’re fat enough going into the start of lactation to offset problems there might be with feed supply in three months’ time.”

When word got out that it was possible to milk deer, innovative farmers soon approached the Invermay scientist to ask if commercial deer milking would be possible.

“I gave them the reply which I received when I suggested milking deer, ‘You’re nuts!’,” Asher recalls. “While we showed it was possible to collect milk samples for research purposes on Invermay hinds, it was difficult for me to visualise a large-scale milking operation.”

He adds that he’s happy to have been proved wrong and a while deer milking still isn’t quite mainstream, nor is it rare.

Farmers were interested to know if there was anything special about deer milk that was different from the milk of other species. Deer industry entrepreneur Graeme Shaw approached other AgResearch scientists, Stephen Haines and Sonya Scott at their Lincoln base, who led the ultimately successful programme to find a high-value way to use deer milk.

“They’d worked out how to commercially milk the deer and they wanted to find out what was in it and what they could do with it,” Haines says.

AgResearch’s team in Ruakura are experts in analysing all sorts of milk, be it cow, sheep or goat. They investigated and found deer milk compared extremely favourably.

“It was higher in proteins and fats than basically all other species. Sheep milk and deer milk were similar in some aspects but deer milk was really up at the top as the premium milk,” Haines says.

Next question was how to use the milk, and Haines and Scott worked with fellow scientist Alex Hodgson to find the answer. Making it into high-quality cheese was one possibility but that had limitations.

“You’re taking a small volume and making it even smaller with value-added products so the potential is not going to be huge if you’re going down that higher-value food route.”

What was needed was a high value application to make milking deer commercially viable, and cosmetics were identified as the best opportunity for that.

A project looking at the use of deer milk in skincare products was launched, using in vitro models of human skin, a product developed by a United States company to replace animal testing of cosmetics, which is being widely outlawed globally.

“It develops into a small piece of skin in the bottom of a cell culture dish and if you put it under a microscope, it’s got the same sort of structure as actual human skin and performs very much the same way.”

The researchers used the artificial skin to test the ability of deer milk to reduce the ability of detergent to damage skin.

“Detergent actually has a very damaging effect on skin and we had a system where you can test that with these 3D skin models by treating them with a bit of detergent and we see damage to the tissue and production of molecules that indicate an inflammatory response occurring. With deer milk we were able to show that it prevented the inflammatory response and a lot of damage that was done by the detergent.”

The deer milk preparations were next tested on human volunteers at Lincoln and, as with the laboratory tests, they prevented the inflammatory response and a lot of the damage detergent can cause.

“There was very, very positive scientific data showing that deer milk would have a positive effect as an ingredient in cosmetic formulation.”

Today deer milk supplied by Pāmu to South Korea’s Yuhan Corporation is the main ingredient in its Deerest range of cosmetics.

“They sell for large amounts of money,” says Haines.

“I know they’re very good because I had some samples my wife was most impressed by and has ever since been asking me for more.”

Shaw, who initiated research into how deer milk could be used, has also launched a range of deer milk skincare products, called Kōtia.