Anyone can chime in, I know this has been talked about before: Matt, what’s your opinion on these type of permits to farmers in terms of managing whitetail deer population and health? Every farmer you’ll talk to that shoots deer on these permits claim that they can’t seem to kill enough deer and the hunters that hunt those areas claim the farmers kill all of the deer. I’m sure it’s more of an “in between the two”. A guy that hunts property in the valley near our farm claims his year has been terrible because the “farmers shot all the deer this past summer”. Our deer numbers seem ok, so maybe we are far enough removed from something like that to see a noticeable difference.
I did hunt a property about 10 years ago that routinely produced several 140”+ deer a year. You didn’t see high numbers of deer, but you were confident when you would see a buck that it would be a nice one. One year that property completely fell flat and stayed that way for at least the next 4-5 years that I hunted it. That was around the time EHD was hot and heavy, but at the same time, the farm next to the property also started shooting deer in the summer. I’m guessing the drop off was a combination of the two. I’ve not been back to that property and have no clue if it’s been able to recover to how it once was.
Is there somewhere that these numbers are recorded by specific property, county or statewide? In the large scale scheme of things, I’m sure it’s a drop in the bucket, but in an isolated area that practices this what could a landowner do to manage for higher deer numbers? Improve their habitat to the point that you can hope the deer don’t walk to the next farm in the summer time and Just practice trigger restraint while the neighbor isn’t?
