The Nikkei’s a no-show, the Nasdaq’s going nowhere and the Dow is back in the dumpster.

But another key economic indicator has bitten the dust: the price of elk antler velvet has sunk beneath the horizon, like a setting harvest moon.

Nevertheless, Frank Kuhnen, a resourceful Alberta elk farmer, considers himself fortunate.

He’s riding out the crisis, patiently waiting for good times to return.

Carla Victor, for Business Edge
Frank Kuhnen is now producing elk antler velvet solely for the domestic market.

In better days, Korean antler dealers routinely dropped by Kuhnen Elk-View Farms, on Highway 2 north of Red Deer, during buying trips. They’d place an attache case full of greenbacks on Frank’s kitchen table and start talking turkey.

“They’d dicker over price, like anybody else. Then they’d give you $20,000 US, right out of the case,” smiled the robust and hospitable Kuhnen, now 70.

Buyers would visit every elk farmer in the district. Then they’d head home with tens of thousands of kilograms of nutrient-rich frozen antler, prized in certain Asian locales as an aphrodisiac and all-around pick-me-up.

During the 1980s, Alberta elk antlers sold for as much as $120 Cdn a pound.

When the Kuhnens purchased their first small herd in 1989, the commodity still fetched $80-$90 a pound, in a good year.

But like all stampeding bull markets, this one screeched to a bone-jarring halt. Though several factors contributed, the primary deal-killer for Alberta producers has been chronic wasting disease (CWD), a puzzling and untreatable nerve condition which created a near-panic in the U.S. and Canada.

Only one captive elk (and one whitetail deer) has been diagnosed in Alberta, but South Korea has already banned North American antler imports.

Naturally, the value of breeding stock (the Kuhnens once paid $85,000 Cdn for an aristocratic stud bull) has also dropped through the floor.

Alberta’s elk farmers have absorbed punishing losses.

Game ranching has been roundly slagged as a pyramid-style ripoff, a game riskier than Russian roulette. To play, you draw on your savings, or wrangle a loan. Then you place your precious investment at the mercy of disease, unstable markets and strict government regulation.

But like most of Alberta’s 450 elk farmers, Kuhnen and his wife Rose didn’t really know what they were getting into. They purchased their first elk in 1989, after Frank’s retirement from his successful Red Deer welding shop.

He was scouting for a hobby and wasn’t adverse to picking up a few extra bucks. “It just sort of snowballed from there,” said Rose.

Compared to cattle, elk herds are low-maintenance. And Frank found genuine enjoyment in the breeding side of the business: he still loves to fiddle with genetic charts, trying to match high-yield studs (i.e. those producing 40-plus pounds of antlers a year) with similarly high-yielding females.

It was an expensive start-up, but the couple offset their costs by shrewd trading, buying and selling of breeding stock and semen. And they were able to cover feed costs by boarding their neighbours’ animals.

Then, when the provincial government nixed a proposal to allow hunters to shoot penned elk, Kuhnen dreamed up a creative alternative.

He placed an ad in a Red Deer paper, inviting photographers to stalk and “shoot” his 165 animals as they roamed his wilderness acreage.

Pretty good thought. But the ad drew only two telephone enquiries.

So Frank and Rose bide their time by producing elk antler velvet for the domestic market. Last year, they sold about 200,000 capsules to health food fans, at $40 per 100.

The couple makes no claims about the product’s aphrodisiac properties and stop short of hailing it as a medical miracle. But hundreds of Albertans believe the capsules, which contain antler blood, bone and nerve tissue, ease arthritic pain and fibromyalgia symptoms.

Both Kuhnens use the product. Frank became a convert after elk antler capsules helped him recover from a painful skiing injury.

Meanwhile, the couple hopes that some future trade commission can convince the South Koreans the CWD hysteria has been overblown. Or that a new test for the disease, announced in Colorado last week, will successfully detect CWD in live animals.

As it is, only dead animals can be tested. When a case is confirmed, the entire herd must be slaughtered.

“We are lucky,” said Kuhnen, who also runs camping and picnic grounds on his property. “You can’t compare us to the regular farmer. We don’t depend on the elk for our income.”

Hundreds of other Alberta elk farmers wish they could say the same.