Deerly focused farmers

Farmer of the Year winners Grant and Sally Charteris with daughter Lottie, 8 months, at home yesterday, still coming to terms with the win at last week's Napier Port Hawke's Bay Primary Sector Awards. Also in the household are son Harry, 2, a dog called Baxter, and a cat. Photo / Warren Buckland

Judges of the Silver Fern Hawke's Bay Farmer of the Year award made special mention of the passion that came through as they put winners and deer farmers Grant and Sally Charteris and their Tikokino business through the hoops before deciding on the winner that was announced at the Napier Port Primary Sector Awards last week.

While the competition is reputedly getting tougher and tougher each year, a visit yesterday to the 327ha deer farm in the foothills beside Gwavas Forest - the clear sunny day accentuating the already sublime view across the plains to Te Mata, Kahuranaki and Mt Erin - makes it hard to imagine how the 45th annual award could have gone to anyone else.

The passion for, knowledge of and commitment to the deer industry are such that perhaps the most difficult question to answer is what would 38-year-old Mr Charteris be doing if he wasn't farming deer (500 breeding hinds, 400 velvet stags, 220 R1 hinds and 220 R1 stags) as well as cattle and small number of sheep?

Simply, he can't imagine doing anything else.

And it's infectious. Even wife Sally, 32, proud mum of their two young children and who came from a sheep and beef farm near Porangahau to be a schoolteacher, once commented to a friend after the couple met: "He's not a real farmer." She's long since taken that all back.

Grant Charteris didn't have to become a farmer, but he said: "It is a passion. There's no other animal that gets me out of bed each day as deer do.

"The velvet and the antlers are like an addiction, I guess."

He's driven by the gains to be made, in a deer farming industry still in its infancy and, he said, nowhere near its potential in which he plans to play a big part - either by the success of his own farm or by passing on the knowledge to others to develop their own path in the world of velvet and red meat production.

Forest Road Farm was developed by his grandmother, Penny, after she bought the property in 1956, and her work was carried on by his father, who died in an accident on the farm in 2013.

"This one's for you, dad," he said in an emotional moment in front of 450 people at the awards.