Quick genetic gains add financial rewards to deer velvet's romance

There's a certain infectious romance to farming deer for velvet for Hawke's Bay farmer Grant Charteris.

"There's nothing more enjoyable in my job than when the grass is growing and feeding grain to the velvet and trophy stags and monitoring their progress on a daily basis. That's what gets me out of bed in the morning," he says with pride.

Grant grew up on the deer farm he now owns with wife Sally, a primary school teacher. They have two children – almost-two-year-old son Harry and newborn daughter Lottie.

When Grant came home to the farm it had a small velvet herd. His father Bruce had retired into town and given Grant "enough rope" to do what he wanted as well as acting as his sounding board.

"My passion reignited his passion," Grant says. Bruce died while helping on the farm in 2013 and a stag statue now stands in the driveway in his honour.  "I know how proud he would be of what we're doing."

Grant says the nature of velvet makes it easy to track improvement... and improvement comes quickly.

"Because it's so visual and you get such a quick return on your investment with velvet, it became infectious. To put it into perspective, inheritability rate with growth rate traits is around the 30 per cent mark, where velvet and antler are more like 80 per cent.

"So what you're seeing from your sire stags correlates directly to your progeny. When you start single-sire mating you really start focusing on where you want to be going."

The 327ha Forest Road Farm is all deer-fenced. Stock numbers usually sit at 85 per cent deer, 12 per cent beef bulls for finishing and 3 per cent sheep (traded for ragwort control).

Between 50 and 200 beef bulls are bought and sold depending on the season and the available feed, giving Grant more management options when it's dry.  The bulls are carried over the winter and run with set-stocked deer.

"Once the hinds start fawning you have to leave them to their own devices and stay out of the paddocks otherwise the disturbance will interfere with production too much," he says.

"So, as a way of offsetting that, I let the covers grow up so I've got a bit of cover there for fawn survival. But then depending on the paddock size, I put in between five and 10 forward-coming bulls, bigger bulls I know I can kill from that paddock.

"Therefore, if we get a pinch in feed, if it stays dry, when those bulls are by a corner one day I'll hook them out. That's our lever and eases the pressure on those hinds and fawns."

Some of Grant's red deer have an eastern background from John Spier's Maranoa stud at Takapau. But over the past 10 years he has focused on Warnham and Woburn English red bloodlines with a swing to an increased velvet and trophy focus.

"I select stags first and foremost on their velvet, style and weight, and then if they have good tops, good royal tines for trophy potential, that's a bonus.

"When particular stags get to eight years old I grow them right out past the velveting stage, right into hard antler, and they get measured in inches of antler (including total of the length of every tine and three circumference measurements at certain points) and you're paid in brackets according to the score you're given.

"So over 360 inches puts you into gold medal class and the good money increases in increments from there upwards.

"I grow out 10 or a dozen each year and it allows me to get a good residual value for those stags getting towards the end of their productive life as a velveter. I reinvest that money in the best genetics that I see driving my business forward without robbing Peter to pay Paul, if you like," he says.

"When I buy a sire stag, I will work out what the trophies are worth. So if I have 10 trophies averaging $3500 each I have potentially got $35,000 worth of trophies.

"But I haven't got $35,000 to reinvest in a stag because I need to consider the $800 worth of velvet and $600 meat value for each stag and take that $14,000 off the total. So I would have $21,000 to reinvest."

He paid $26,000 for last year's sire stag and $20,000 the previous year.

"I'm at the stage where I'm not going to go out and buy second-best or my genetic gain isn't going to be where I want it to be.

"All of my sales are live sales now so if people are going to be willing to buy my stock for their breeding it has to be considered to be up there with the studs or better."

About 230 female deer progeny are taken through to 15 months and mated in two lines – a keeper line and a sale line – to his best two-year-old velvet stags.  They are all pregnancy-scanned in June and after he's selected his keepers, the rest are sold to other farmers for their velvet genetics.

"That allows other farmers to come in at the same level of genetics that I'm purchasing myself."

Most of his deer stay in Hawke's Bay but he has also sold a line of in-fawn hinds in the South Island this year as well.

Males are velveted as spikers with the top half retained in Grant's velvet herd and the other half sold as velvet stags to other farmers.  The retained spikers strike another cull as two-year-olds when those reaching 2.8kg of velvet are kept and those between 2.2-2.8kg are sold as well.

"We're always skimming the top off," Grant says.

"Trophies aren't even considered at this stage. They have to perform on their velvet merit and the trophy is a bonus at the end of it. I'm not farming for trophies, I'm farming for velvet."

Due to that selection pressure, last year's two-year-old keepers averaged 3.1kg in the first cut, three-year-olds averaged 4.3kg, four-year-olds 5.2kg and the mixed-age stags 6kg.

"Those mixed-aged stags, with that 6kg and say a kilo of regrowth, seven x $125 per kilogram is $875 a head. If you're running 3.5 to the hectare, you're in excess of $3000 a hectare for mixed-aged stags."

Grant also sells three-year-old stags by private treaty in December.

He keeps the top one or two for his own herd then catalogues about 20 others that have recorded more than 5kg of quality velvet as a three-year-old.

Forest Road Farm won a national Rising Stars competition in 2014 with a 50-point spiker called Jagerbomb that measured 335 inches. (All antler measurements around the world are recorded in inches. It equals 851cm).

"Another good homebred stag called Bonsai was a 38-point spiker who recorded 457 inches as a three-year-old."

Grant says venison is important to the industry as well as velvet so he will never use a small sire stag.

"He has to be big in the body as well. When you're selling live sales and you've selected your choice out of your hinds, the first question a potential buyer will ask how big they are or how much do they weigh.

"They want a visually sturdy animal. It's important and I'm not naive to the fact that if something happened to the velvet industry, I've still got big animals.

"I would keep on farming deer and as Dad always said, "that extra 10kg carcass on the hook does add up". It bodes well too to getting good conception rates and having early maturing animal that's a good size when it's getting mated at 15 months."

This year Grant had one dry out of 150 yearling hinds. National conception rates are well below that. He says his good results come down to feeding and sociability.

"It's introducing the stags that are mating with them at an early stage in January so they can socialise with them. They're a similar age to them so they don't get the intimidation factor and they're fed well.

"We had that drought a couple of years ago and I fed them lucerne balage and maize every single day and was worried about the disturbance I would get from interrupting them during their mating period. But I got 99 per cent that year, too, so it showed nutrition outweighed leaving them to their own devices.

"There used to be a common misconception that deer live on the smell of an oily rag and they're low maintenance, that you can stick them out on that southerly face for the winter and they'll look after themselves. But if you want good production and good results and to farm them in a profitable manner, you can't treat them like a second-rate citizen."

Grant says he is constantly improving the infrastructure of the farm, particularly with laneways and a new set of yards - "Anything that makes life more efficient and minimises damage and looks after the welfare of the deer."

Grant is in his fourth year and second term on the executive committee of the New Zealand Deer Farmers Association.  He was shoulder tapped to go on the committee, but says it was a natural progression from what he'd done with the Young Farmer Contest (grand final 2008) and the Food and Agribusiness Market Experience (FAME) programme in 2009.

"When you're passionate about the industry you're in, it's easy to sit back and complain about what you're not happy with. But if you're there having a say, you can help steer the industry.

"One of my main drivers for being on the New Zealand executive committee is to help get that message out there, hopefully inspire people to stay with the industry and find ways of making it more profitable."

Forest Road Farm hosted a Next Generation field day in September. It is a group of 45 people, either young people or new to the industry, who are willing to take on new challenges and adopt new technology and new practices.

The first day of the Next Generation programme is a classroom day with a set topic. This year it had a velvet focus, looking at issues such as mating behaviour and conception rates, optimum feeding levels at different times of the year for optimal velvet growth and financial analysis. The second day was a farm tour.

Grant says as well as the evening dinner providing valuable networking, a Next Generation Facebook page has been set up.

"There are people firing questions on there all the time. It's a forum that allows questions to be asked and you're likely to get immediate replies. There have been a few about the climatic conditions this year. Many people haven't been through that and the answers are invaluable."

Grant is also a member of the Hawke's Bay Advance Party, a group of nine members operating under the umbrella of the deer industry's Passion2Profit primary growth programme delivering feed, genetics and animal health solutions to farmers.

"It takes a whole bunch of self-motivated farmers and puts them together in a group where you identify the issues you would like to focus on within your own business and then work as a group to fix those issues and make your farm more profitable."

Despite having a velvet focus, the Advance Party has encouraged Grant to move into weighing his deer and utilising the EID tagging and technology that comes with his new TSI Gallagher weighing system.

He says the first year was the slowest – putting in each stag's breed, sire, age and tag colour – as well as setting up a list of push-button traits such as beam trait, tine trait, overall comment, grade and temperament.

"Then we come to harvest and weigh the velvet and then that all gets recorded to that animal as well. The beauty of it is, any time that animal is scanned from here on in, all that information comes up on the screen so it makes culling decisions really easy. The real benefit of the TSI is going back to the office screen to filter by any trait."

The system automatically graphs velvet weights once they are two years of data.

"It's a pretty amazing tool to have in the shed."

Grant says to fully engage in what the Advance Party is doing, members have to first see the benefits in their own businesses.

"Then, once you are fixing your own issues and can show some examples of what you've done to progress your own business, the next part is to showcase it and spread that news to the wider industry. That's the most important part of it because if that last part doesn't happen, it's a farm discussion group.

"And it's more than that. You have to be fully engaged with your own issues and be prepared to monitor and share data and results and maybe financials and then take it the next step and share it for the good of the industry not just the good of your own farm."

He says a large part of the success of the Hawke's Bay group is the work of facilitator Richard Hilson.

"He can extract information without demanding certain answers. He understands the process… that what we pick up on the way might be just as important as the end outcome."