A letter has been sent to farmers from former Invermay director Dr Jock Allison, Dr Ken Drew, who led the deer programme from 1978 to 2003, and Prof Frank Griffin, from the University of Otago, who has collaborated with Invermay researchers for decades.
The trio have asked farmers to indicate their preference for the location of the AgResearch programme at either Invermay or Lincoln, and to express their opinions to their local MP, Economic Development Minister Steven Joyce, Primary Industries Minister Nathan Guy and Prime Minister John Key.
AgResearch is proposing to centralise its operations in Lincoln and Palmerston North, with jobs at Invermay dropping from 115 to 30, while 180 jobs will go from Ruakura, near Hamilton.
In the letter, Dr Allison, Dr Drew and Prof Griffin said the proposal would ''almost certainly'' result in many of the most important deer research staff not moving to Lincoln which had no capability at present to accommodate the approximately 1400 stock units ''so important'' for the programme.
Thirty-five years had been invested in fencing and animal handling capability at Invermay which could not be replicated at Lincoln and no hill country existed there. Some of the commercial herds with which present deer research staff worked were in Otago and Southland.
The Invermay deer programme had led the development of the New Zealand deer industry since its inception and the world industry and science since then.
Central to the programme had been the close co-operation with the University of Otago in the animal health and genomics programmes. The ongoing work with resistance and susceptibility to disease was an ''underpinning pillar'' for the deer industry, they said.
The proposal to relocate everything to Lincoln in effect disassembled the very sort of co-operation that was world-class in science, to which AgResearch had contributed $1 million only five years ago to establish the ongoing chair in genomics and reproduction.
''It seems schizophrenic behaviour to now remove all of the capability to co-operate with Otago in that area which also includes most of the $17 million investment in the new building at Invermay.''
The trio believed it would be only through ''concerted industry efforts'' that the deer research programme would be retained at Invermay.
When contacted, Dr Drew said he found the AgResearch proposal ''totally illogical'' as far as Invermay was concerned.
He believed many of the ''excellent people'' involved in the deer research group would not move to Lincoln and ''superb knowledge'' would be lost to the industry. He believed the value of technology and research for deer farming in 2013 onwards would ''go rapidly downhill''.
''I find that very unsatisfactory and very bad news from the point of view of the farming industry,'' he said.
Some of the active research that was being done at Invermay at the moment involved farms in Western Southland. That work ''just won't happen from Canterbury; I'm pretty distraught about that'', he said.
Dr Drew, who has written to Mr Joyce himself to express his concerns, received both the Deer Industry Award and the Lincoln Bledisloe Medal in 1995.
He was a former chairman of both the Otago branch of the Deer Farmers Association and the Elk and Wapiti Society.
Over the years, he and others from Invermay had been ''immersed'' in the industry that they supported with research and development.
''We weren't sitting out there divergent from the grassroots people. We were actually right in it,'' he said.
Dr Drew was also concerned about the impact on DEEResearch, a joint venture between the deer industry and AgResearch, saying it believed it would be ''grossly diminished'' and become ''very ineffective''.
Leaving 30 people at Invermay after the proposed restructuring was a ''complete joke''.
''It'll go down the tube and totally shut down within a very short period of time,'' he said.