Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Lost my East Texas Lease

One way to cure the problem of large timber companies charging confiscatory rates for hunting rights would be to institute substantial progressive property taxes on land that go up as acreage holdings increase. In Louisiana privately held companies own hundreds of thousands of acres of timber and are busy trying to squeeze smaller land owners out by keeping the price of timber sales on small tracts down and constantly badgering heirs to sell their shares so they can file legal actions to force out the other owners. I am lucky enough to hold 300 acres in my ownership which gives us plenty of whitetail deer and hog hunting. I get form letters all the time from the companies wanting to buy land or undivided interest in land. My friends that lease have to face all kind of restrictions along with continual rises in lease rent. Income tax is progressive and maybe land tax should be also. I see families pushed off their places and very little decent land is for sale to individuals as the big companies have lawyers constantly in courthouses doing title searches and driving wedges in property ownership parcels. The leases around here started out pretty cheap but now they are outlandish. I have one 100 acre place that a hunter begged me to let him have for $1000 a year cash under the table just so he could hunt in a place that was close enough he could sleep in his own house. Bottom line is the big companies block most people from acquiring a small (100-300 acres) piece of land and they depress the timber value of the smaller individual landowner.