Her parents bought a deer farm at Cave, near Timaru, when she was 10 years old where she got fascinated about working with deer.
“I got really interested in helping dad on the farm,” she says.
After completing a degree in ag science at Lincoln University, Coutts (25) did not know what lay ahead for her.
She worked as a technician for Lonestar Farms, collecting feed budgeting data in the Waitaki Valley and Otago for six months, then headed to Canada and the US for a six-week holiday in 2014.
She had secured a job on the co-owned family farms Oakleigh and Barton near Timaru just before leaving for her holiday, and she’s been there ever since.
In winter a typical day for her consists of break feeding, maintenance and feeding out. And from mid-October to late January velvet is cut.
The Oakleigh and Barton farms rear 1200 stags and 600 hinds, exporting the velvet mostly to Asia for medicinal purposes.
“I don’t notice I’m the only female. In other jobs I’ve always worked with lots of guys,” she says.
Coutts farm job is part office, part outdoors.
“I love being outdoors, following blood lines of animals and the more technical side of it,” she says. “Doing both has a good balance; it’s really cool.”
Coutts owns three hinds and two weaners and is “interested in playing around with genetics and maybe making some money”.
“Velvet is heritable; you can look at a velvet head and you can tell where it’s from,” she says.
Along with work and downtime Coutts is on various committees that help the industry and community.
She was the secretary of the Mackenzie Young Farmers, belongs to the local Deer Farmers Association and the Winchester Rodeo Club and is now helping organise the Next Generation Deer Conference for young people in Canterbury.
She is doing a diploma course in professional photography through New Zealand Photography Institute.
“It started as a hobby, but now people are interested [in her photos].” She enjoys having a hobby “removed” from farming.
Coutts has her own photography business, Antlers & Images, specialising in rural and farming scenes. “It could end up being a career,” she says.
• Beckie Wilson is a journalism student at Massey University.
