Five Generations on Bonavista — The Carter Family Story

When you cook a Hunter Natural roast on a Sunday, you're sitting down to more than a good piece of meat. You're sitting down to a family, a paddock, and five generations of people who have worked this Upper Hunter country before us.

We think you should know who we are.

A family company

Hunter Natural is owned and operated by David and Maryanne Carter. It is, in the truest sense, a family company — there is no head office, no boardroom, no marketing department. There's a farm, a butcher shop, and the two of us making the calls and doing the work.

That matters, because it means every decision about how an animal is raised, fed and handled is made by the same people whose name is on the product. Nothing is outsourced to a system we can't see.

Five generations in the Upper Hunter

We are fifth-generation farmers in the Upper Hunter. Our family has been on this country a long time — long enough to have watched this region suffer through droughts and floods, good seasons and hard ones, and long enough to feel the weight of what it means to hand it on.

Five generations gives you a particular way of thinking about time. You stop measuring a farm in seasons and start measuring it in lifetimes. A decision isn't good because it pays off this year — it's good because the people farming here in fifty years will thank you for it.

"Bonavista"

Our property is called "Bonavista", at Woolooma, via Scone, in the Upper Hunter Valley. It sits on the banks of Stewarts Brook, where we run our beef cattle and sheep across hilly paddocks of predominantly native pasture.

It's beautiful country, but it isn't easy country. The hills are steep, the seasons swing hard, and the only way to farm it well over the long term is to look after the soil, the water and the grass as carefully as you look after the animals. That's exactly what we set out to do.

Why we farm the way we do

Our guiding idea is simple, and we say it often because we believe it:

It is important to us to raise healthy, happy animals — and to improve our environment — so we can pass the land on to future generations in better condition than it is today.

That one sentence shapes everything. It's why we graze in a strategic rotation rather than setting stock in a paddock and walking away. It's why we built a commercial-sized worm farm to make our own natural fertiliser. It's why we handle our cattle and sheep using low-stress methods. None of it is an add-on — it's the whole point.

From our paddock to Morpeth

For years we sold our beef and lamb at farmers markets. Then, in February 2014, we purchased Morpeth Butchery — so we could process our own Hunter Natural beef and lamb properly, and bring grass-finished meat to the people of the Lower Hunter.

It means the chain from our paddock to your plate is short and entirely in our hands: we raise the animal, we know the butcher, and we stand behind every cut. We take real pride in good old-fashioned personal service, the kind that's getting harder to find.

Come and meet us

We'd genuinely love for you to know the farm behind your food. Over the coming posts on From the Farm, we'll take you through how we graze, why we chose our cattle and sheep breeds, what our worm farm does, and how grass-fed really does make a better feed.

If you're ever near Morpeth, call into the shop at 143 Swan Street and say hello. And if you'd like beef or lamb direct from Bonavista, you can order a whole, half or quarter beast — and we'll prepare it for you ourselves.

From our farm, direct to you. That's the whole idea.