With the way prices of everything are going some of these historical hunting club prices will seem like a deal. Have y'all ever tried to price out what it would cost to pay tax, plant a handful of fields, maintain access via gates, have decent roads, and have a few stands on say a 100 acre personal property or lease? If ya did some of these leases wouldn't seem so expensive. Just saying.
It’s $$$. I lease a 430 acre tract to myself and it is very expensive when all said and done. Between the six food plots, stands, cell cams, and keeping 6 feeders running it gets extremely expensive. When someone gripes about a club that is advertising a $4k plus membership fee because they can “lease their own land for cheaper “ I just keep my mouth shut.
2021 Cost off the top of my head
Leases - $5k
Feed - $800
Cell cam fees - $840
New ladders (last year) - $1000
New Gate - $150
Fall plots - $900
Minerals- $150
Camp utilities- $2100/yr
Tractor work/maintenance - $500+
Let me add to your $.
Tractor payments
Soil samples
Ag lime, or worse pellet lime
Herbicide
Diesel
I have been in essentially 4 clubs since 2002 or so. Guess how many soil tested and limed? 1. My current one. If you can't get the coop in there with their lime truck, or have a big truck that can pull a lime buggy, or you have fields those can't get into, then you do it by hand, or do pellet lime, which is expensive. I brought 24 tons of ag lime to my club with my truck and a 2 ton dump trailer. All of it was spread by hand, the majority by me. The benefit is not the first year either. You really start to see it the second.
If you walk into an established lease, guess what else you will likely find? Hardpan from years of disking. So you have to subsoil.
Most people don't understand how much fertilizer they should put out either. Triple 13 has 6.5 pounds of amonia in it. If you need 100 pounds per acre you need 15 bags per acre. At $20/bag, thats $300/acre. If you have 10 acres, thats $3K. Guess how many clubs I have been in that fertilize properly? 0. Mine will be this year.
Your average club goes out in late august and bush hogs the fields. They may come back and spray them, and then they sit for a couple weeks. Then they disk and plant. They usually plant the cheapest 3 or 4 way cereal mix, if you are lucky, they add some brassica's, and put out a bag or two of Triple 13 and celebrate they got everything planted. And it turns yellow in about 45 days.
If they plant in the spring, they will come out and bush hog, disk and plant clay peas, and they never set foot out there again, until mid august, when the deer are really getting into the peas, and they start the process all over again, and run all the deer that were using the food plots off for about 6 weeks, in the driest month of the year.
