Starting a hunting preserve mn

It is very nice to get retail instead of wholesale for our bucks in the preserve. It isn't hard to sell hunts for clean typical bucks.

It takes a long time to build a good client base. Typical bucks are the key and good accommodations keep your hunters coming back. Insurance is very expensive here in Minnesota and you will get to compete with guys that are e bay selling hunts on 15 acres and less. And of course you will have the challenge of competing with guys that are selling 160s hunts for $1000. All while you are trying to recover your investment of $250,000 ? 500,000? Or more!!. You better really love your deer and not quit your day job. Don't mean to sound negative but we have been living that life in Minnesota for a long time. We are fortunate that we don't have debt on our farm operation or we couldn't do what we do.

Good luck.

Arrowed11061081453465871



It takes a long time to build a good client base. Typical bucks are the key and good accommodations keep your hunters coming back. Insurance is very expensive here in Minnesota and you will get to compete with guys that are e bay selling hunts on 15 acres and less. And of course you will have the challenge of competing with guys that are selling 160s hunts for $1000. All while you are trying to recover your investment of $250,000 ? 500,000? Or more!!. You better really love your deer and not quit your day job. Don't mean to sound negative but we have been living that life in Minnesota for a long time. We are fortunate that we don't have debt on our farm operation or we couldn't do what we do.

Good luck.




Yup..Just what is killing our hunting industry all across the country. One guy under cutting the other guy just to make the sale, Even at a loss?  This will continue to hurt the industry by showing hunters a false price on one ranch and then when they call around for another hunt they are sticker shocked by the correct prices. Just a continued downhill slide.  Dog eat Dog in today's world.

Be prepared! By taking in "pay" hunters you will find insurance is very expensive but beyond that you will have the cost of a new variable , hunters . They have a tendency to shoot the wrong deer , wound deer , not find the deer they want , miss deer that you end up finding later dead , taking 5 or 6 days to harvest instead of the 3 they have booked . They show up early , they show up a day or two late , they come as a smaller group than planned or a bigger group than planned , . Get ready to cape , cut meat , boxing crating and shipping of taxidermy and meat , hospital runs for the broad head and knife cuts (the Hunter) . Flights that are late and you have to pick them up , extra airport trips as their weapon of choice or clothes didn't show up , your hired guy doesn't show , the idiot that is shooting squirrels , rabbits , turkeys , the Hunter that won't stay in his stand and turns your deer nocturnal . The list is very long. You gotta love raising deer.

A guide with every hunter is a must. We charge a flat fee at our preserve. The guides have zero pressure to find specific animals. It is up to the hunters discretion to harvest their animal. The older biggest bucks were not harvested in our preserve. They evaded every hunter and most have now shed their antlers. This simple fee structure worked even better than anticipated. Nearly every hunter harvested the first decent buck that came within range. We also already own our land and get $300 per acre crop rent for a 100 acre field in the preserve.

We started with a guide for every Hunter. It is real difficult with larger groups. It is always the hunters decision to pull the trigger and never the guide. Just whining a bit earlier. Our big challenge now is to bait out the remaining deer in the preserve for our state required physical inventory. Like you Jonathon , our biggest and oldest bucks survived the season. Our bucks don't shed antlers til late March but we are done hunting for the season. We have stayed with the pay for the size you shoot as that is what our clients want. Soon all our stockers will be 190 plus and we are going to go to a fixed price and just have a few lower class bucks that the grandkids will hunt. Several of our clients have been with us for 3 generations of family. Although the hunt preserve concept is new to Minnesota we had them at hunt preserves in Wisconsin and Texas.

Arrowed1 makes a lot of good points  We have been in business nearly 20 years.  We always have a guide with our hunters, sometimes two hunters to a guide if they are family groups.  You have to pay guides and find good ones.  While it may cost you the same to raise a 150 deer or a 300 inch deer, you have to get different prices for them on the preserve.  As for the cost cutters, you hope your quality of experience etc. will bring folks back.  We have heard a lot of horror stories from guys who went on the cheap hunt.  If someone is going to make a decision based on price alone, you can't win that argument.  It costs something to get new hunters, whether it is ads, TV or shows.  It costs something to maintain your lodge and equipment.  You need to feed the hunters.  You need to allow all types of firearms and bowhunters as well.  Bowhunters are the most likely to be wounding an animal that you don't find until later, hence the need for a guide.  You have property taxes to pay and you still have to feed the deer that didn't get shot this season until next, and hope they make it or at least have a decent set of antlers. 

Gary ,

You too make a lot of good points. It is a good life but it takes a lot of time , money and labor to get a preserve to produce an income and even a fair amount of help !

Hello Reed,  I think there is a need and a lot of opportunity for a hunting ranch in Minnesota.  I am not far from the Minnesota border.  We are a 2 hour drive from the Minnesota airport.  You need to spend the time setting up what you are going to do and how you are going to market your ranch.  Every hunter is looking for something different.  You need to decide what you are going to do and sell it.  I don't think you want to do everything the same as everyone else or anyone else.   You need to focus on what will make you different.  Here is what I do different.   I think cost is very important in anything that you do, but everything comes down to what value a hunter receives verse what he pays.  I don't have guides that sit with hunters.  I started with guides, but the costs of workers comp, disability, wages, etc. made it a lot more expensive than I wanted to add to the cost of the hunt.  I set up my ranch to hunt 8 hunters at a time.  There is the issue of a hunter being honest, I have had a couple issues over the years, but not enough for me to add the guides back. I couldn't imagine keeping 8 guides around the ranch.  Problems have been very minimal.  In my case, I advertise and push that hunters can hunt without someone looking over their shoulder telling them what animal to shoot.  In order to run without guides, I score each animal before it goes into the ranch and I use a visual color coded tag that correlates to the size of the animal.  This eliminates the problem of hunters making a mistake of shooting the wrong animal.  What I do isn't for everyone.  Some hunters don't like the extra tags.  Some hunters want to have a guide sit with them.   They hunt elsewhere.  I have enough hunters that book with me each fall to fill my calendar.  I harvest about 280 bucks each fall.  My calendar for next fall is about full already.  It wasn't always that way.  The first year I started hunting I went to multiple shows and only booked one hunter.  Now most of the bookings that fill the calendar are repeat customers and hunters that are referred by customers.  Just as others said, making sure everyone is treated right is very important because building that clientele is tough.  There is a lot of distrust in the hunting industry from hunters being taken or paying for a bad experience.  Not so much from the ranch hunts, but the outfitted hunts, but it still causes distrust of the whole hunting industry.  If you ever want to come and see what we do or have any questions, feel free to contact me.  I like to help.  You are doing the right thing by asking for opinions.  You should keep asking and talk to multiple ranches on what they do before you make a decision on what and how you are going to run your ranch.  I feel it is vital to all of our futures to keep moving forward with growth of the industry.  Growth means we need to get more people opening ranches, advertising, and bringing new hunters into hunting within our ranches.

So what about the carryover bucks that you don't shoot??  They will score differently the next year.  Also, don't you have does in your preserve?  We do and think it adds a lot especially during the rut.  We have a number of natural born deer in our preserve.

I believe MN would need to shoot everything out due to the ridiculous regs they have. So Adventures method would be the best plan. Put in and shoot out that year. Then start over again.

I can tell you on our preserve that would be next to impossible.  Too thick, a swampy area and over 250 acres.  Just about impossible.

Hello Gary,  We don't breed in the ranch.  We did at the first preserve we had, I thought the extra breeding was nice, but I wanted to reduce some of the fighting and death loss from fighting, so I eliminated the does when I fenced and built the second ranch.  I also had the plan I have now and decided I wanted to run the ranch the way I do.  I don't regret it at all.  It reduced the fighting, but the bucks act the same whether the does are there or not.


Our ranch is about the same size and is extremely thick, 2 streams that run through the ranch and meet in the middle.   Those consist of the thick tag alder and poplar bottoms.   Each year after season I get the bucks out of the ranch and into a couple of holding areas that are attached to the ranch.  This allows me to feed them and rescore them the following fall.  By getting them out of the ranch I can usually also get a better gain in antler size by feeding what I need them to eat.  I never was able to get a good gain on size and many times the bucks would be smaller the following year.  This has done well for me. Getting the deer out of the preserve and into the holding areas is not an easy task.  Matter of fact, I just got the last one in about 7:00 tonight.  He was a little smarter and didn't have a good feed pattern.  I have to double check for tracks after the next snow to make sure I have them all, but I am pretty sure this was the last one.  The other benefit for me with keeping all of the deer out of the ranch is I have no browsing during the year accept for during the hunting season.  Everything grows out very thick and makes for a great hunting area.  This is what I do.  I hope everyone wouldn't do just as me.   What works for some people will not work for everyone and it is good when everyone does things a little different to offer variety.


One last note for Reed or anyone else that is considering starting a ranch.  Under promise and over deliver!!  Keep everybody happy and learn how to market.  Marketing what you do is going to be the challenge.


I am going back out to Harrisburg,Pa this year.  Leave Wednesday. I haven't set up out there since 2010.  I have quite a few clients from that area of the country that I need to come back out and see outside of hunting season.  If anyone lives in that area and wants to stop and talk deer, come and see me.  I am never sick of it.   I am in booth 4923. 


 


Thanks,


 


Rick

Reed, Adventure gave you some great info. He wasn't afraid to open up and give good advice. I would follow his lead.

I will tell you from experience that if you try to operate as 2 premises , as long as your inventory that YOU control can go from one premis to the other you will have to test all your deer. It is very difficult to get deer out of a thickly wooded preserve . It is impossible to tag fawns in the preserve but you will soon learn that Minnesota BOAH will require that they all have tags. You will get to know your BOAH representative real well as you develop your preserve. That is probably why there are so few hunt preserves in Minnesota. Less than 10 I believe.

Adventuresranch are you darting these buck from stands our are you catching them in automated catch corrals like I have seen for hogs and residential deer overpopulations? Just handling my deer in my pens I couldn't imagine rounding up deer in hundreds of acres. Just curious as to how you round them up.