New DINZ chair moots unity, growth
Paddy Boyd, the new chair of Deer Industry New Zealand (DINZ), says his priority is to make sure deer farmers are engaged and provide them confidence to grow.
New Zealand and South Korean scientists say they will soon be able to identify the compounds that give deer antler velvet its immunity-boosting properties.
If they succeed in this they will be able to promote velvet extracts as having a precise measure of the active ingredients they contain.
Deer Industry New Zealand (DINZ) says this will be important in getting such products registered for sale as healthy functional foods.
“Velvet’s reputation as a health tonic goes back 1000 years and it is still widely used in Korea and China in mixtures with ginseng and herbs in tonics and traditional medicines,” says DINZ chief executive Dan Coup.
“But these days, government regulators and consumers everywhere want the claims made for medicines and tonics to be supported by scientific evidence. It appears we are on the threshold of doing this with at least one of the health-promoting properties attributed to velvet.”
AgResearch scientist Dr Stephen Haines says bioactive compounds in velvet have been of great interest to NZ scientists since research began in the 1990s.
“We had shown that velvet extracts boosted immune function in cell-lines and in animals, but we didn’t know what was doing it. Velvet is a complex mixture of thousands of components, making it difficult to isolate and identify the ones that are biologically active,” he says.
But recent improvements in mass spectrometry and high-speed data processing have enabled researchers to sort through the thousands of peptides, proteins and related compounds in velvet, to find the ones with bioactive properties.
The research by AgResearch, on behalf of VARNZ, is a joint venture between DINZ and AgResearch, with support from the Korean Ginseng Corporation (KGC).
KGC is the world’s largest ginseng company, with annual sales of $US800 million, based on 200 ginseng products. In recent years, the company has developed 19 products that also contain deer velvet and in so doing has become the largest buyer of the NZ product.
The most active extract consistently stimulated high levels of activity in the natural killer cells that fight infection in an animal before the immune system starts producing antibodies. It also had good anti-inflammatory properties.
By comparing this extract with the one with the weaker response the researchers have identified several protein fragments and a peptide associated with immune activity. These may be the active ingredients or they may be markers for other bioactive compounds.
Foot and Mouth Disease outbreaks could have a detrimental impact on any country's rural sector, as seen in the United Kingdom's 2000 outbreak that saw the compulsory slaughter of over six million animals.
The Ministry for the Environment is joining as a national award sponsor in the Ballance Farm Environment Awards (BFEA from next year).
Kiwis are wasting less of their food than they were two years ago, and this has been enough to push New Zealand’s total household food waste bill lower, the 2025 Rabobank KiwiHarvest Food Waste survey has found.
OPINION: Sir Lockwood Smith has clearly and succinctly defined what academic freedom is all about, the boundaries around it and the responsibility that goes with this privilege.
DairyNZ says its plantain programme continues to deliver promising results, with new data confirming that modest levels of plantain in pastures reduce nitrogen leaching, offering farmers a practical, science-backed tool to meet environmental goals.
'Common sense' cuts to government red tape will make it easier for New Zealand to deliver safe food to more markets.
OPINION: For years, the ironically named Dr Mike Joy has used his position at Victoria University to wage an activist-style…
OPINION: A mate of yours truly has had an absolute gutsful of the activist group SAFE.