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Major supermarkets should offer wild venison to tackle the UK’s “out of control” deer population, rural campaigners have demanded.

The Countryside Alliance and Country Land and Business Association (CLA) also called for wild deer to be offered in hospitals and schools.

Gavin Lane, president of the CLA, said: “I’ve seen venison in supermarkets, but most of what I’ve seen is farmed venison.

“There are obviously food labelling and food hygiene regulations that have to be adhered to within all of this, but there’s no reason why that can’t be dealt with.

“If there is a chance of getting venison on the supermarket shelves, priced competitively against beef and lamb, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be sold more widely.”

He added: “It should be in demand because at the moment, due to reasons of supply, the price of beef and lamb has escalated enormously in the last few months, and therefore having venison as an affordable, nutritionally dense, lean meat available would be really good news.”

Wild venison is packed with iron, protein and B vitamins and typically contains less than 3% fat.

Some supermarkets in the UK sell farmed venison, while fewer offer wild venison, depending on their location.

Mr Lane said: “I think 74,000 deer are involved in car collisions each year. We think the deer numbers are out of control. And obviously, if we’re going to end up having to kill deer, then they should be ending up in the food chain.

“I definitely think that we should have some ambition to get more wild venison into public procurement – our schools, prisons, hospitals – and then more widely, because it’s a fantastic meat. It’s healthy and low in cholesterol.”

Roger Seddon, shooting campaign manager at the Countryside Alliance, said a difficulty with getting venison into more stores is the meat’s “inconsistency”, as the manner in which the deer is culled can impact the venison.

While farmed deer or culled park deer are shot or slaughtered in controlled environments, preventing the meat being damaged, it is harder to do this with wild deer killed in dense woodland or on the top of hills.

Mr Seddon added that there is a “stigma” around venison as a “posh meat”.

While some of our venison is consumed in restaurants, the majority of the deer shot in Britain is exported to the Continent.

As a result, Andrew Opie, director of food and sustainability at the British Retail Consortium, which represents the supermarkets and department stores, said: “Retailers respond to demand from consumers, and there is relatively low demand for wild venison to justify widespread sales across stores.”

Meanwhile, farmer John Pawsey, owner of Shimpling Farm in Suffolk, told how deer have left him thousands of pounds out of pocket after wreaking havoc on his landscape.

He has had to replant a third of his trees after deer ate them, leaving him £4,000 out of pocket.

The animals trample his fields and eat his crops, with his legume yields a third lower than expected.

He said deer have decimated his ancient woodland dating back to the 1600s, with populations getting out of control during the last 10 to 15 years.

The farmer added: “We’ve got double the amount of deer in this country now that we’ve ever had before, and we just need some kind of concerted effort or some kind of support to help us get the deer under control.”

A third of English woodlands are now in unfavourable condition because of the impact of deer, an increase from just under a quarter in the 2000s.

The Government outlined plans to make it easier for land managers to control deer, which have a major impact on woodlands, last October, but no overall targets for reductions in national or regional deer populations were set.