BEAUTYand the
FEAST
The war between farmer and deer is an annual contest. Crop damage is always expected, but the degree of damage can’t be.
W
By Leigh Ann Tipton
ho doesn’t love to watch a graceful, glossy-eyed doe lift her head and twitch her tail as a green and gold ocean of cornstalks waves around her? Bufkin’s Brent Knight has the answer — him. And other farmers like him who know that picturesque midwestern scene of a deer in a field means one thing — that profits are disappearing into that doe’s belly. Not that Knight minds a single or even a few deer. They’re interesting creatures to watch, and on a small scale they don’t cause a noticeable amount of damage. “I haven’t had much of a problem with them this year,” he says, adding there may be a few stragglers in some of his 900 acres of field. Drought and heat have made a bigger impact on yields this year, though. Still, Knight watches the local deer population with a cautious caveat for good reason--a few years ago he lost an entire field he’d leased in southern Illinois to those
graceful, grazing intruders. They enjoyed the fruits of his labor night after night. “Just about every evening, you could see 100 deer in a 60acre field,” he says. “They kept the tops eaten out of that whole field. The field was a total loss.” It made the landowner happy — he had bought the farmland, which lay next to a wetland preserve, as prime hunting ground. It also taught Knight a lesson about the destruction deer can cause where their numbers are high, like near a preserve. Needless to say he didn’t lease the same farm the following year. Jon Neufelder, Agriculture Extension Agent for Posey County, said in the northern end of the county deer don’t seem to be much more than a minor nuisance. He suspects deer damaged about a quarter of an acre of his farm this year, but he, like other farmers, prepare for a certain percentage of loss each season. And in some cases, letting deer fill
up on a certain amount of crop actually has an advantage — it may eventually lead to a freezer full of venison. “There’s some farmers who like feeding those big bucks so they get ‘em fat and know where they’re at,” Neufelder says. Conservation officer Paul Axton said he gets a number of calls from farmers all over the county each year who find deer to