A Women’s Touch

BENEFITTED BY A WOMEN’S TOUCH

By: Gail Veley • Sponsored by KALA

There is a peacefulness felt inside Mary Ann Hall when she’s outside with her deer. Pitching alfalfa hay to her eager takers as the sun brings warmth to the day, fills her soul with gratitude for the opportunity to raise deer At Solid Rock Whitetails, the farm she has operated along with her fiancé and KALA Chairman Tony Maddox and stepson Luke in Winchester (central) Kentucky, since 2017. Most days, Hall feels more satisfaction raising whitetails than she typically feels at her full-time job as a physician’s assistant. Yet, in her role on the farm, everything she has learned and done as a P.A. enables her to diagnose, administer I.V.’s, give shots, suture velvet, cast a broken leg, listen to wheezing or crackles in lungs and find appropriate correlating human-to-animal medications to treat virtually every situation that comes up with their deer.

Pulling on scrubs five days a week and seeing to the well-being of human patients takes an interesting turn when Hall’s white coat and earrings come off and the jeans and muddy boots go on. And it isn’t just her vast medical background that in her life of 46 years now comes intuitively and naturally, it’s her ability to bring the devoted and loving touch of a woman to raising deer. “Women bring a very caring, patient and nurturing aspect,” Hall said. “Men tend to the strong ones. We are the mothering ones. The deer follow me around. They don’t follow Tony around.”

Fawning season brings an expected increase in the commitment that she, Tony and Luke have for their farm, but all throughout the night when fawns first arrive, it’s Hall who is preparing and feeding bottles to any newborn that might need one. Sharing her strong protective mothering instincts for fawns is Mitzi Holland, who along with her husband Jason and son Jack have operated Barren River Whitetails in Gamaliel (south central), Kentucky since 2018. “We also raise cattle, but I’ve never felt like they were mine,” Holland said. “But with the deer I do feel like they are mine. People assume with agriculture it’s the male who’s running everything but that’s not always the case. Successful farms have the strong presence of women.”

“Women can be just as impactful as males as long as the passion in there,” Hall added. Both women agree that the willingness to perhaps work harder than you have ever worked in your entire life, is also a necessity when it comes to running a family-owned and operated deer farm. There isn’t one job that either woman has ever shied away from whether it be putting up a fence, record keeping, feeding, paperwork, financials, sending bills or gathering permits. While they are grateful for the fortitude that deer farming has required of them, they are also grateful for the life lessons it has taught their children.

“First of all, your children learn they are responsible for a life,” Holland said. “They witness the cycle of life, and they learn responsibility and that the deer are not going to make it without you. How that will shape them as an adult is amazing. To realize nothing is free and easy and to not have a sense of entitlement and to know that hard work pays off.” In addition, Hall believes “the biggest benefit is teaching them responsibility and to have a good management and work ethic. We have a lot invested and when we lose an animal, it hurts us all.”

“I have a new respect for deer and a new perspective on how hard life is to live in the wild,” Hall said. “And in knowing how important women can be to the cervid industry, I’m very glad that Mitzi and I, along with so many others, can be a vital part of it.”

Mary Ann Hall