What an incredible place! I am not really into duck hunting, but deer hunting there would be a bucket list trip. Did you get to meet Jared Mophett? Like Gobble4me757 mentioned I would love to know the back story on how that place came to be. Thanks for sharing
So I’ll try to share a little bit but I’m definitely not the expert on it. It started out as cleared farmland. Part of a 100,000 acre row crop farm. One of the biggest row crop farms in the US. Over the years pieces were sold or whatever so this 20k acre piece is the largest piece of what is left of the original farm. When Drew Keith was hired to work there (along with Jared), it was just flat farmland. Zero trees on it besides the willows beside the ditches next to the field levees. The owner rolled a few acres into WRP program and in the first phase they planted around 350k trees on it. It took them 6 years to accomplish that. The next phase, they planted around 400k trees and it took them 6 days lol. They changed their methods lol. Now they have about 1.4 million trees. Every single one planted by Honey Brake. (I’m trying to be accurate with these numbers here but i may have gotten some wrong lol.) it is the largest piece of land in these types of programs. Of the 20k acres they flood about 8,500 acres. They pump about 3.4 billion gallons of water each year depending on rainfall. They use water to manipulate what plant species grow for the wildlife like we would use prescribed fire. Incredibly interesting to me.
I did meet Jared briefly. He was leaving taking some of their dogs to a super retriever series competition so I didn’t get to talk to him much. But he’s a character now. I met Drew Keeth as well. He’s a great guy with a great vision.
The lodge also sits on a public oxbow lake, which just happens to be one of the top crappie lakes in the US. The property basically sits at the bottom of the funnel that is the Mississippi flyway.
