Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire State, or Federal Owned Land Where You Live?

In Iowa the state owns little by comparison. Most Iowa land is worth paying tax on.

What about where you live?

Half of our county is Dept of Defense, the surrounding areas are TVA-COE, Land Between Lakes-Natl Rec/US Forest, state forest areas too all within 50 miles' radius.

And they get all assy if you think you can take off on a 2 day atv adventure on these areas.


No BLM, set aside Nat'l Monument 'dirt piles' or precious barren wastelands here.

Yep, welfare offices and post offices all over Texas.

the feds would rather pay a subsidy for schools and taxes to local counties rather than harvesting timber.

no tellin' how much good turning the federal land over to the private sector.

but they have their supporters. the rich for one, and the hunters for two.

there are others. but plenty of support to begin divesting land too.

And immigrant concentration camps

I live in Iowa, too, and totalled up the land the state owns that they allow hunting on and in the counties whose names are in the A's through C's, and there is about 90,000 acres that can be hunted on. That does not count the non-hunting land, which is also pretty abundant. Not to the tune of hundreds of thousands, or millions of acres in Federally owned forests out west, but quite a bit for our meager population. I doubt if we have much Federal land here, unless along the Missisippi or Missouri rivers on the border of the state, and down in the Ammunition Plant by Burlington.

In Iowa, .7% is would be owned by the state. Way down by state ranking, a lot near us however. We are in the cow racket, it be nice if we could have some of that for grazing.

Everybody hunts the state land, the birds fly into our grass, and crops, and they want to hunt that.

If anyone here is offended by my statements, they are few 'fire members I would not let hunt.

Iowa ranks 47th and Nebraska 48th (actually a tie) at 2.8% public (state and federal) and 97.2% private by total acres.

we folks debate this stuff over and over and over.

what are the benefits of federal land ownership?

what are the benefits of state land ownership?

what are the benefits of counties owning it?

why is the private sector not welcome?

There are shortcomings in Federal stewardship of public lands, but I can guarandamtee you states would sell it off if it was turned over to them.

75% of the county I live in... is the size of Rhode Island and yet is owned by the Federal Government...

Virtually endless country that’s wide open to hunt, fish, hike, berry picking, mushroom hunting, etc.

A mixture of federal land and state land.....mostly BLM and National Forests. A guy could spend everyday of his life in the backcountry and only see a fraction of what’s available. From the wilds of the North Cascades to the steppe country and deep coulees of eastern Washington to dense rainforests we have an abundance of areas where a man can stretch his legs and not feel crowded.

This is a beautiful place to live, politics aside.

About 4000 square miles in our county and I'd bet 3/4 of it is Federal (BLM or FS primarily with some NP), State, and or Reservation land. A lot of that land is juniper sagebrush scrubland. Conifer forests in the higher elevations.




Gus, that's somewhat of a misconception. There's a very large contingent of FS and BLM folks who would love to manage the land with higher rates of logging but they are effectively prevented from doing so by lawsuits. Even in areas that are burned there are particular groups that are opposed to all logging and nearly every time a timber harvest plan is proposed it gets litigated.

In the eyes of this hunter(and many of my friends) I can see NO good reason to turn the local Federal lands over to private, or even State interests. It's not like back east where a fella could buy 160 acres of raw land and have game on it. Our deer tend to wander a bit more than whitetails and even with food plots, water, etc there, it's no guarantee that deer would stick around. A person would have to be able to afford square miles to even have a chance to get quail to stick around, much less deer, antelope, etc. And most folks here I know that hunt, DO NOT want to pay trespass fees to a timber company that does have the money to purchase large tracts of land from a .gov agency.

All this land is "We the People's" land. Come on out and enjoy it. For Free!

Geno

Gus, we weren’t debating. I stated simple facts, nothing more. Benefits were never part of that. Seeings how my state has/had very little public land, I have always had to deal with landowners since I started hunting and fishing farm ponds in the early 60’s.

We are blessed in Wyoming with thousands of square miles of BLM, USFS and School Sections, You can hunt a different spot every year forever and never wet a line in the same hole twice.

Sometimes someone wants to give it all to the State or sell it off to private interests but they dont get very far. Wyoming people are fiercely protective of what we have.
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i think we're dealing with a population density issue.

and the number of hunters & fishermen.

and the cost of access to land.

free land is better always?

then, east vs. west?

we have no answer?

that is, it all depends?

i've walked NF's & private.

both work. it's just who pays?

now adays no debate ends rationally?

Damn I wish it was population density. 1.2 million people in the state, roughly 800,000 live in the Lincoln and Omaha area. Third largest city is Grand Island but on football Saturday it’s memorial stadium in Lincoln. Density no, people like Ted Turner coming in a buying up half a million acres and closing most of it. There’s more but I won’t debate it.

What does Ted Turner do with his land? Bison?

My backyard is 4.4 million contiguous acres.

53 percent of Oregon is Fed. 3% is State and local.