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All neighboring states allow more NRs

I agree 100%......... pretty sad when you need to start packing a calculator to figure how many thousand more I will owe if I take this animal. Instead of making sure it's mature, you're checking your balance to make sure you can afford to release the arrow or pull the trigger.
 
So you want Iowa to be more "Liberal"? Last time I checked Texas was about as Red as a pile of lung blood /forum/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/grin.gif
 
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: OrionWhitetails</div><div class="ubbcode-body">cedar creek,

I don't understand your math? Last time I had a math class, 1.5% (or 3% if you double the amount as you suggest) is pretty close to 2% (NE) & 2.5-3% (KS)? Yet, NE has NO QUOTA on the number of NR tags & KS makes available FIVE TIMES MORE NR tags (32,000)! </div></div>So does this mean you are involved in the Friends OF Nebraska and Kansas? It's easy to throw out percentages with out looking at the real numbers. I for one would love to see twice as much public land in Iowa. Maybe we could start to increase our public hunting acres with your lease. Heaven knows we will need it with your proposed increase in NR tags. I can tell you private land owners where i live won't be granting permission to NR's.
 
Well I guess there are a lot of ways one can play with numbers, so I found this thread interesting. Especially since I live in MN, a state that I call (regretfully) "home of the most underachieving deer herd."

My buddy and I are kind of deer geeks. We also have had the pleasure of hunting Iowa whenever we're lucky enough to draw a tag. So we couldn't help but compare MN to IA whenever we could and wonder "what are we doing wrong?"

As it turns out, and this is no news flash to anyone from MN, a lot of things. But here is just one facet of our research that pertains to this thread.

MN is home to about 1.1 million deer.
We sell about 12,000 NR tags (over the counter, "ya'll come" philosophy)
Price of an NR tag? $135

So we snooped in to the Iowa situation and found that, with a state that has a fraction of MN's habitat and a much smaller deer herd, the IA DNR makes--from NR deer license sales alone--over 3 MILLION bucks more annually than MN!

My friend presented this info to one of our legislators, who was very interested (politicians and money having the relationship that they do) in these figures. The "pol" wondered why IA was over-achieving in this regard, to which my friend replied "because they have quality deer and a quality experience. If you charged $400 to hunt deer in MN, people would stay away in droves."

I could go on and on about this, but I thought it might be interesting info when considering the old "why not do X? everybody else does it!" debate.
 
The closest state is Nebraska and they still have almost twice as much public hunting land as we do. Take into account they have half the population we do...

Iowa = 3557 people per square mile of public land.
Nebraska = 1152 people per square mile of public land.

Iowa - 1.5% or 844 square miles of public land
Illinois - 5% or 2,895 square miles
Indiana - 5% or 1,820 square miles
Kansas - 2.5-3% or 2,262 square miles
Minnesota - 25% or 21,753 square miles
Missouri - 7% or 4,879 square miles
Nebraska - 2% or 1,548 square miles
Ohio - 5% or 2,241 square miles
SD - 12.5% or 9,639 square miles
Wisconsin - 15% or 9,824 square miles
 
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Clearly, KS, NE, and SD at least, have lower deer densities than Iowa, but KS makes 32,000 any-sex tags available, while NE & SD have no NR tag quotas! </div></div>

I would hope that these are not the states for which Iowa's deer herd management programs are to be benchmarked.

Getting back to an earlier post or two:
Public Sq. Miles - Deer Herd
844 - 330,000 - IA
1,548 - 325,000 - NE
2,262 - 350,000 - KS
2,895 - 750,000 - IL

I hated stats in college so I will refrain from some complex analysis of the above numbers. However, it does appear that resident Iowa non-landowner hunters certainly do have a reason to be concerned about changes in hunting regulations which will contribute to increased land access issues. It cannot be argued that an increase in the NR quota will contribute to reduced land access opportunities for Iowa resident hunters.

PS - I am all for an increase in resident tag costs to help the funding of our DNR. Wished it would have passed this year.
 
I would ask the question, if all the neighboring states allowed FEWER OR NO non resident licenses would we be justified in lowering our numbers? Just because one State makes decisions based on their own criteria doesn't mean that other states should use the same criteria does it?
 
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