Thanks for the input. I was thinking with hay and pellets a cost of around $500/ head/ year. Using data PUBLISHED by the Iowa DNR on THEIR website, they say 78% of a deers yearly food source comes from corn and soybean fields. Do the math for your state. What is your states wild herd number?
Multiply that by $500 X 78% = $390 per deer for every wild deer in your state! That is money STOLEN from the farmer! Everyone knows when a farmer makes a dollar, he spends it, for new equipment, buildings, new truck, etc.... The economic generator of a farmers dollar is a minimum of 7, some studies report as high as 11 times.
I was at the Iowa DNR meetings last week over their wild CWD findings. They said that deer hunting was a $200 million dollar economic input into Iowa's economy.
If Iowa has 500,000 wild deer and they consume $390 of farmers crops/deer/year, that's $195,000,000 of direct crop losses, or income lost to farmers. Using the low side, the economic losses to the economy is times 7, or $1,365,000,000, of economic loss to the state of Iowa.
State Farm Insurance in 2010 reported car accidents in Iowa were up 21%, with almost $11 million in car damages and an average of 9 deaths for year.
How does the math support keeping wild deer on the landscape?
How do they justify putting us out of business to protect their government subsided hunting that produces such huge economic losses for the state?
The way I see it, is ALL deer should be hunted behind a high fence. We pay our own feed bills, we don't steal feed from our neighbors.
We don't have cars hitting them, doing vehicle damage, and killing people, behind our fences.
We add a positive economic impact to the states economy.
Looking at the map of the U.S. the DNR had, where CWD was prevalent in the wild herd. I imagine how that herd is spreading prions all over the landscape, polluting our farm soils for 20 years or more!!! With the report that plants, such as corn and alfalfa, can uptake prions, is the wild deer herd putting our food supply and export ability at risk???
At least when farms get CWD, we depopulate and leave fences up, so we don't spread diseases.
The way I see it, we need more preserves not less, in each state!
Gary Olson
