Backing onto the Gwavas Forest which backs onto the Ruahine Ranges, Forest Road Deer.

Farm is 327 hectares of rolling to steep hill country at a high enough elevation to mean a colder climate than much of Hawkes Bay.

The nature of their land and its climate are one of the reasons why Grant and Sally Charteris are predominantly running a red deer velvet stud where, as Grant puts it, “We’re producing deer to breed for velvet and we’re breeding velvet producing deer for other people.” They hold an on-farm sale every December selling 15-20 three year old velvet sire stags and up to 100 yearling hinds for velvet breeding.

They run the deer in conjunction with a 60 strong Hereford cow herd, an essential part of the Charteris’ pasture management plan given that their rolling to steep terrain won’t take a topping tractor. “Deer are browsers, they pick and forage, so the cows are there to clean up the rougher pasture which means the deer can take what they want out of it without coming under any pressure so it allows them to fully express their genetic potential.”

Everything on the farm works around the stags’ natural rhythms and is targeted to ensure that the stags are in absolute peak condition when they start growing their velvet, despite the ravages of the roar which runs from late Feb through to the end of May.

“They start acting like teenagers with way too much testosterone,” says Grant with a laugh. “They can lose up to 30% of their body weight because all they’re interested in doing is roaring and chasing around and trying to find a hind, so we spread them out to give them plenty of personal space you might say.”

The deer are farmed in age groups, each with their priority times of year for extra feed or feed of higher quality. The velvet-producing stags feed ad-lib on kale from June 1^st . “We’ve found over the years that the best way to grow good velvet is to use that first month after the roar to pour as much high octane feed into them as possible to help them recoup their body fat. By the time they cast their buttons and are ready to grow velvet in August you need them in top condition, so that any extra feed you give them then is going straight into the velvet.”

Apart from their obvious success with the quality and quantity of velvet they’re producing, years of carefully planned hard work by the Charteris’ was recognized earlier this year with two awards at the Deer Industry Environmental Awards. It’s a win that Grant puts in part down to the regrouping he and Sally did after the tragic loss of his father Bruce in a farm accident eight years ago.

“He was my mentor and my sounding board,” says Grant. “So we subsequently engaged with Rural Coach and we had to write down what values were important to Sally, and what values were important to me, and then align those values and set some clear goals moving forward.

“It was a really robust process and put some structure into our business plan and I think the environmental stuff morphed from there because it was the base line of everything that we wanted to achieve: our marketing story, the products we’re selling, and our goal to create a platform the next generation can use to market anything they want to.”

The premier Elworthy Environmental Award recognized the Charteris’ stewardship of the land as well as their meticulous planning, documentation and analysis. “Stocking levels and feed manage ment are our main tools,” says Grant, ”and we base all our key decisions on the data we collect and analyse so we’re making the best use of what we’ve got with minimal input.”

In its first year, the Dr Gyong Jai Lee Award for “leading, environmentally sustainable, velvet farming”, underlines the increasing importance of sustainability for consumers both here and abroad. It’s at the heart of everything Sally and Grant Charteris do, and is obvious in their carefully thought out and instituted environmental farm plan.

They’ve already planted over 15,000 native trees with more to come; waterways are being fenced off, non-cultivated strips left to protect gullies, and care is taken when choosing which paddocks to use for cropping.

It’s his work with the stud that Grant most enjoys though, and there too he leaves little to chance, thanks to his carefully orchestrated use of cutting edge technology combined with a half share in “Lazarus”, a velvet sire from Brook Deer in Southland.

Together with friend, farmer and fellow enthusiast Jeremy Dearden the Charteris’ paid the top auction price of $102,000 for Lazarus two years ago.

Using AI and embryo transfer Grant is accelerating his breeding programme using only his absolute top hinds. “Effectively you’re getting a whole lifetime’s worth of breeding from your very top hinds to your very top stag.

To put in into figures, this year after scanning it worked out that Jeremy and I have 150 in-faun hinds each to Lazarus, whereas if we naturally mated him with half my hinds and half Jeremy’s we’d have at the most 40 each. “

At the end of the day Grant says it’s this work with the stud breeding and genetics that gets him out of bed each morning. “We’re not simple commodity traders, we’re passionate about velvet and deer and we want to leave behind a legacy for the next generation.”

We’re not simple commodity traders, we’re passionate about velvet and deer and we want to leave behind a legacy for the next generation.”

The deer are farmed in age groups, each with their priority times of year.

by Annette Scott

Farmers Weekly - Agribusiness - 3 June 2021

Grant and Sally Charteris are passionate about deer farming and keen to showcase their deer farming story.

There may be something magical in the water, when for the second successive year a Hawke’s Bay farming family has bagged the Deer Industry NZ premier environmental award. Annette Scott reports.

HAWKE’S Bay deer farmers Grant and Sally Charteris are keen to showcase sustainable deer farming in the best of modern farming practices.

The couple proved they are front-footing the farming challenges and achieving environmentally sustainable velvet farming by winning the 2021 Elworthy award, the premier environmental accolade for deer farmers.

The award was presented at the deer industry conference in Invercargill.

This is the second successive year that the premier accolade has been awarded to a Hawke’s Bay farm.

The previous winners were Evan and Linda Potter of Elsthorpe.

More recently, the Potters have been recognised as the winners of the 2020 East Coast Ballance Farm Environment Awards.

They also won the Gordon Stephenson Trophy, a national award in which recipients become ambassadors for sustainable farming.

Lead judge Janet Gregory says the eight entrants in the biennial deer environmental awards had many things in common, including active farm environment and business plans, and involvement in the deer industry’s productivity and environmental activities.

“All are leaders in the industry, show great passion and stewardship of the land, and are supporting their local communities,” Gregory said.

“Many of them have calculated their greenhouse gas emissions or are planning to do so.

“All were of exceptional standard, separated from each other by the narrowest of margins.”  

But she says Grant and Sally Charteris stood out for their meticulous planning, documentation and analysis that informs their stock and feed management in their district’s challenging climate.

Their Forest Road Farm is a 330ha red deer stud and velvet operation, harvesting three tonnes of velvet annually and selling three-year-old velvet sires and yearling breeding hinds at the annual on-farm sale.

The farm also runs Hereford beef cattle and a small flock of Wiltshire sheep.

Gregory says Forest Road Farm is a prime example of a sustainable farming business where the environment is being progressively protected and enhanced, with gullies and streambanks fenced off and planted in trees to reduce soil erosion and to minimise sediment run-off.

More than 15,000 native trees have been planted over the past three years on the rolling to steep hill country property, with more tree planting planned.

Soil protection is a key focus of everything done on the farm.

Care is taken when selecting paddocks for cropping and buffer strips of non-cultivated land are left alongside gullies.

Break-feeding of crops is avoided and high grass covers are maintained on pasture with progressive protection and enhancement of farm environment mitigating the biggest risks through gully protection.

Stock management is driven by attention to feeding and genetic improvement.

Both Grant and Sally are involved in their community and industry in their desire to help others into the agriculture industry.

They entered the awards to showcase sustainable deer farming.

“Farmers are getting a lot of unjustified bad press of late, and we wanted to fly the flag and to tell the good story of farming,” Grant said.

“Farmers are not perfect, but we are doing better than we are often perceived to be, we have our challenges and we are front-footing them.

“We also want to create a platform for the next generation to market profitable and sustainable product, and biodiversity and aesthetics are a big part of that working in stock management and animal health.

While a huge amount of work has been done on the farm, there is more planned for the next five years.

“There’s no such thing as a finished environment plan, we have a good solid plan in place to keep moving forward,” he said.  

As well as winning the premier Elworthy environmental award sponsored by SP Corporation and Dr Gyong Jai Lee, a major South Korean marketer of NZ deer velvet, the Charteris’ also won a new category award created and also sponsored by the SP Corporation, the Dr Gyong Jai Lee award for leading, environmentally sustainable velvet farming.

Award convenor Lindsay Fung says this is the first time a deer industry environmental award has been sponsored by an overseas customer.

“It underlines the importance of sustainability to consumers of New Zealand deer products in Asia as well as in other markets,” Fung said.

We are thrilled to have this level of interest and support for our awards.”

Like many of his peers, Grant Charteris of Forest Road Farm considers growing deer velvet to be an addiction. Grant explains that the reason for significant growth in the deer industry over the past 40 years is that while growth rate traits and body weight traits have a heritability of about 30%, velvet traits have a heritability of about 80%.

This means the result of selection decisions made in the previous season will show to a large degree in the next generation, consequently the emergence of the velvet is eagerly anticipated.

This heritability is so great that Grant can virtually pick the sire of an animal by eye before a deer’s EID tag is scanned because they breed so much like their sire. “I love it.”

When something’s got the heritability of deer you get to see the results of your breeding decisions pretty quickly. “It’s quite infectious so that’s the main driver. I love the animals, I’ve always loved deer so it makes it a pleasure to work with them.”

“They are an intelligent animal; they’re easy to farm if you get all the preventative stuff right, but if the wheels fall off they can be very difficult to farm.”

However, once a farmer has figured out how their sociability works and how they interact within their social hierarachy they can be farmed very effectively and very profitably, Grant says. Grant farms Forest Road with his wife Sally who is closely involved in the operation.

The generational family property, which Grant has been managing for 17 years, covers 327ha of Class 6 hill country at Tikokino, on the eastern flank of the Ruahine Ranges, central Hawke’s Bay. Grant’s late father Bruce started farming deer in the late 1970’s.

The farm supports 500 breeding hinds, 450 velveting stags and about 450 young stock as well as running hereford cattle. The annual velvet harvest typically totals about 2.8 tonnes. “We farm for predominantly heavy-beamed, tidy velvet and we purchase elite stags from other deer studs and also use our best breeding stags as well.

Everything is single-sire mated, apart from our yearling hinds that are multi-sire mated to our very best two-year-old velvet stags. “Fifty per cent of yearling hinds are sold at the on-farm auction mid-December so other people have the opportunity to purchase our genetics”.

Along with velvet traits, Grant focuses on breeding a large-framed animal because carcass weights count. “Ten kilos of extra carcass weight still makes a big difference so we’ve always focused on using bigger sires as well.” Grant is a member of the Deer Industry New Zealand executive committee.

The main market for velvet is South Korea and China, and for venison in Europe and the United States of America. Demand from the United States has steadily grown during the past 10 years to make it New Zealand’s largest year-round market for chilled venison.

There has been strong demand from American pet food manufacturers for venison meat and bone meal. “The US is definitely growing; it is probably our number one chilled exports earner. The good thing with the US market is that it’s not seasonal like the European market.”

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."