Farming the Wild with Mike Robinson — WildFed Podcast #119

WildFed Podcast — Hunt Fish Forage Food

We've got a fascinating interview for you today. Our guest Mike Robinson is a restaurateur in the UK, specializing in bringing wild game meat to the market and table — something we can’t really do here in the US but is legal in England. More specifically, he and his restaurants specialize in wild venison. In fact, Mike is playing a significant role in how wild venison reaches British diners. He’s also a television personality, who currently has four different shows airing on Outdoor Channel. You read that right, four shows.

One of which, Farming the Wild — which airs in the same block as WildFed — often features him hunting deer in ways that frankly, we’d just never seen. Stalking through the English countryside with dogs, head shooting deer off of shooting sticks, letting his dogs find the deer, and then field dressing those deer to enter the restaurant market.

If you’ve never seen a man in a tweed golf hat field dress a deer in 70 seconds, you need to see his show! Mike has a method of cleaning deer that is faster, more hygienic, and more efficient than any we've ever seen. It comes from having harvested thousands — yes, thousands — of deer. And he’ll describe his method for us in this interview.

There’s a lot of really useful takeaways in this conversation, things that’ll make your field care and final cooking product even better. It’s also a very intriguing contrast — the differences between British and American hunting culture.

Here with our vast public lands, huge wilderness areas, and relatively short history as a domesticated landscape, our hunting culture has been shaped by a rugged, survivalist mentality. There in the UK, where there’s been thousands of years of domestication and farming, their hunting culture is more akin to animal husbandry, which is why Mike’s show is called Farming The Wild.

And while the differences are fascinating, between the old world and the new — we're even more interested in what we can learn from each other!

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/119