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Swathing 2nd and 3rd cutting irrigated alfalfa.

Absolutely the shortest hay I've ever cut. Outside borders next to the trees are a total loss.

Sickening the amount of damage. And I know it wasn't grasshoppers, the tops are nipped off by deer.


Googled it, figure a deer eats 10lbs per day?


Field I'm on now has a house on one side, nothing but a couple hundred acres of cover on the opposite side.

2' tall by the house, maybe 6" by the trees.


Figure we lost +100 ton of prime feed this summer. $30k.


And yeah, we let locals hunt but they won't shoot does.


I'm at a loss, no pun intended.

You be surprised how much they can eat.

I’ve put out chicken wire cages in food plots just to gauge.

Everything will be an couple inches tall. Inside the cage will be knee high or better.

Ps. Find some locals that’ll shoot does.

Pray for a better one next year man.

Thought everybody loved freezer pleasers ?

I’ve hunted with folks over the years that wouldn’t shoot does.

Buck hunters.

Camp i was in joined the DMAP program. You was in contact with a state biologist. He’d / or maybe it was a she would send a report each spring after the checked all jawbones you sent it.

After killing more does, Deer body weights went up.

You only have X amount of food/ browse.

After a couple years it went from average 75# does to around 100# with 120# being killed.


Kill does. Eating machines.

Our last alfalfa patch was up against some woods owned by city-folk who hunted their woods for deer. They stopped by one time wondering when we would plant crops on our property again to attract deer. D'oh!

We all have crop damage, Sam. Only the scale and livelihood status differs.

My raspberries were getting hammered earlier in the summer, so I Nigerian rigged moose exclosure from materials at hand one day. Damage continued- figured it was a fence crawling calf. Took care of that opening. Damage continued - I think it is a danged porcupine - maybe hares, but I think porky.. If I see the danged thing - well.....

It is pulling down, braking off stems and feeding on the leaves at the top and tips at night.

The worst part is that it only targets next year's producing canes, not this year's stalks, which are now done producing.

Had to put up some more barricade two days ago - so far so good.

As for your deer- them things are edible, you know?......

I hunted in Coleman county, central Texas, bunches of deer on that place. The first 20 rows of milo wouldn’t have cshit on them. They hit the winter wheat hard while it was green, but stopped eating it in the spring. The deer would eat the cotton blooms, don’t see how they made a cotton crop.

Know a farmer here that had a 40 acre field of it on top of a hill surrounded by woods that looked like a golf course all summer. Said the deer just kept it mowed right down to nothing.

I was hunting in ND for Pheasants once. Found a spot where someone had dumped 6 or 7 does. Sad.

My Fairbanks brother - now deceased, used to grow oats for hay. Moose would start feeding on it soon after it came up, but he said they confined themselves to the same spots all summer long, continuing to feed on the newer growth there.

Have Gun, Will Travel.

I was hunting just west of Plenty Wood one year.Stopped at a Ranch and asked permission to hunt.He said sure as long as we killed every Whitetail I saw.I have a friend who farms around Medicine Lake.He had a pile of sheds in his backyard taken out of hay in the spring.Deer are eating machines.

Interesting Sam. I was wondering about how much a deer might eat. And how that would affect a farmer/rancher.

Neighbor had about 40 deer, mostly does and this years fawns, one decent buck, feeding in his pivot field Tuesday evening. Happens every fall and in the spring when the alfalfa comes up. His swather broke for a minute a couple of weeks back, I saw him and stopped. He fixed it the next day apparently, but left what was left to cut for his cows. Said with the drought there's no graze on his land and his allotments for them, so he just gave them about 1/2 of his last cutting, some of which I know he usually ships out as "dairy quality" stuff.

at 10lbs ration per deer per day, the neighbor is losing between 250-500 lbs of product per day depending on the number of deer I see there every day, and not telling if more show up at night. Doesn't seem to mind, as I've never heard of him putting in for a depredation permit. And there is no doe season in our area so those critters are safe when they go into the public land to bed down even.

Can't do it this year, maybe next season I look into coming up your way and "removing" a doe for you if your locals won't do it. I'm old, will have my own place to sleep, and I'm past the point of abusing pillows so you won't have to worry about that.

Had a farmer here that told me the same. He hated deer with a passion and saw them as nothing but pests.. Carried a rifle on his tractors all the time and would shoot any deer he saw in his fields year round..

Not a farmer (my grandparents were) and not to be argumentative in the least, but there has to be a difference between green/wet browse and cut and dried baled feed products?
It can't be a pound-for-pound equation.

I was the manager of a grain elevator in the mid 70s, in Mississippi. The farmers there begged me to come and hunt their bean fields, and I did. They also spot lighted deer and gut shot them with 22 rim fires. I sure don’t condone that, but it happened.
I guess if those deer are costing you $10,000 or multiples of that, you have decisions to make.

No depredation permits available?

We have a couple of soybean fields that are next to good deer habitat that look like someone ran a lawn mower over the first 25' of field that abutts the woods. I don't know how much they ate, but at over $12 per bushel we lost at least a few thousand dollars of income.

20+ years ago I lived in NW PA. The county I lived in had 25,000 doe permits available. On average less then half were passed out to folks. And I knew folks who advocated applying for them to keep them from being used at all, just get it and toss it in the trash so you could keep the "breeders" alive and not in someone's freezer. Old thinking left over from Grandpa's day when the deer were trying to recover from being decimated. The old "don't shoot does where you hunt your buck" line of thought.

Funny thing was, some of them folks would shoot a button buck or a 2" spike just to say "I got my buck again this year. Haven't been skunked since '67 " and then they could shave their hunting season beard.