In fairness to the Yoopers, the big bait thing probably started in the LP when the produce truck farms started selling directly to hunters. You could back up under some carrot dispensing apparatus and get a pick-up load of carrots for 10 bucks. I don't know of any facilities like that in the UP. Beets were loaded with a bucket on the front of a tractor.
Am just saying, I don't know for sure--only what I saw.
When I was first married in the mid-seventies and occasionally working, happily shacked up with my bride on the big Croton Pond, pards and I bowhunted the Dungeon Swamp area and that is where I saw my first big bait dump. Some guy with money from Indiana bought an adjoining 80 and had, what we thought at the time, a railcar's worth of carrots on the ground under a stand. He really had nothing to fear from our recurves, but he was pretty dang hostile to company...
As time went on, the dedicated bait-arama places were selling bags of bait. I wonder if they need a license like you do for lemonade? Some guy was running an old dump truck up and down M-37 to supply.
And so there it is--a guy from Indiana started the whole mega thing and it got out of hand from there.
