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leased hunting

tracker

tracker

Life Member
While the topic of leased hunting is on everybody's mind , let me throw a curveball at everyone.If a person has a parcel of ground and it is in some type of program that receives payments not to be in production,(crp,buffer zones,forrest reserve,etc) should they be able lease the ground out for hunting and make money off of it?For example if a person has 320 acres thats in a program, he's receiving lets say 100 dollars an acre for the program,that's 320,000.00 not to have production,then they turn around and lease their ground out to outfitters and receive another incomeoff of the same unit.Do you consider this double dipping??If this land owner can make money off of his ground by leasing it for hunting, does he deserve the money from the government?Does any of the government money come from the DNR??Do you consider leasing ground as some type of farming/production??
Just looking for opinions, not any argument's.
 
Of course you are going to start spirited debate,aka an arguement. Perhaps that landowner should submit a bill for feeding and allowing the wildlife to trespass on the landowners ground when the state claims ownership. (Until they are involved in a vehicle crash)
 
You make a good point...since "my tax dollars" are paying for the CRP program, maybe I should be entitled to hunt without paying for a lease on these lands?....

Anyone that is not familiar with lease hunting will be in for a shock to their checkbook....in southern states it is not uncommon to pay $10-$35 an acre for hunting priveleges.....on average most hunters spend $500-$1500 a year just to have a place to hunt. These states also have seen an increase in poaching and illegal activities as a result.

As a matter of record....Iowa has the least amount of public hunting areas in the Nation relative to total land mass. So if you can't afford to lease...you'll have to fight over what's left that the State and county's manage, buy your own land, or hope some farmer will let you hunt his for free.....


[This message has been edited by Rembrandt (edited 02-02-2002).]
 
My personal position is that those of us (Make that me included) should be campaigning for LOTS more public land acquisition in Iowa. And it should not be drowned with another lake. I am an avid fisherman and I believe if we need more water we should create it out of cornfields. We can build those. We cannot in many lifetimes build or restore habitat that gets covered up with water. At the very least people with opinions about hunting access need to be actively campaigning for more public land. I often have issues with the management of such land but at least if it is public it can be saved for all of us to use.
 
I don't even want to get into the arguement, just here to correct some math.

320 acres times $100 per acre equals $32,000.
NOT $320,000, otherwise everyone would be trying to get into farming.
 
On the western side of the state there is alot of public ground that is land locked close to the river. You can debate all day what's wrong and right about CRP land, but here's one that I have a problem with. When the state buys land with our tax dollars, they shouldn't buy the kind of land that don't allow you access to it. In the Loess Hills area, there is great land that the state has purchased, but you need to sky dive to get to it. And when you get there, you have to tresspass to get out. To me, it dosen't make a lot of since to do this. Buying land from farmers that don't want to sell, just makes things worse for the little guy to get permission... And fuels the debate on who has rights on CRP land!
 
Well DC, I assumed Tracker meant $32,000 per year for the normal 10 year CRP program. 320 acres * $100 per acre * 10 year CRP program = $320,000.
 
Sorry I didn't make the comparison very clear.The 320 acres at $100 per acre is $32,000 per year.Most programs run 10 years which would come to 320,000 or if it went 15 years 480,000. You would have the initial seeding costs in the first year and property tax every year.
 
IF it paid 100 buck an acre you would see more and more ground. In fact, the average rate for pay/per acre is something like this.

Corn: $47

Beans: $54

CRP: $65

These are dollar cost averages for the latest year I was able to find information. Ballpark it costs $85 acre to seed CRP with a mix grass seed. Even though CRP can still be posted and leased out, the area benefits for wildlife, erosion and filtering improve the entire area around the set aside ground.

So, if you CAN'T get permission to hunt a CRP area, get it set up to hunt NEAR it.

Considering cost, deprectiation and more, I am surprised that we haven't seen more enrollment as of late.
 
I have an idea. We'll stop making govt. payments to farmers for CRP and like programs. We'll then just pass the buck to all those big wigs throwing money around to lease hunting ground. They can be the ones paying the farmer/landowner. If they want to be in a new hot spot every year, then they'll really have to pay for it and the habibat that makes it a hot spot.Then we'll take all that tax money that is saved and put it towards more public ground.
 
CRP Ground that improves water quality is a win-win situation. We all live down stream.

More public ground would be nice, but with the budget crunch and not being able to pay state DNR employees, including the seasonal ones, I don't expect see alot more public ground being purchased in the future.
 
Maybe the dnr could make more of the smaller lakes in Iowa no wake year round and save on the several hundred thousand shoreline restructures that they are having to do.That would buy some ground.
 
You can't just sign up for CRP! Your land must qualify for it. The CRP that you see now is buffer strips and the like. I think that you would be hard pressed to find 100 acre fields that would qualify for CRP.
 
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