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THE LAND, SEPTEMBER 2, 2011
18 A
Cover story: Whitetails not your everyday livestock By RICHARD SIEMERS The Land Correspondent “I’ve been bow-hunting for 30-plus years,” said Randy Van Overbeke. “I bow-hunted whitetails so much and loved the animal so much that the next step for me was to raise them.” That’s how Van Overbeke explains how he got into raising whitetail deer. He and his wife, Susan, operate Redwood River Whitetails. They have more than 200 deer on their deer farm at Russell, Minn. It may sound exotic, but “it’s like other livestock business,” said Susan, who grew up on a livestock farm in South Dakota. “We sell bred does, open does, buck fawns, doe fawns, breeder bucks and trophy bucks.” The trophy bucks go to hunting preserves, the rest to other breeders. Susan is secretary-treasurer of the Minnesota Deer Breeders Association. Their website lists around 150 breeders in the state. These deer are considered livestock. They are not domesticated animals, the Van Overbeke’s point out, but neither are they wild deer that have been penned up. Their deer are 30 generations removed from their wild ancestors. They certainly aren’t tame animals, nor do they want them to be. The deer recognize a four-wheeler and a golf cart when they drive down the alley between the pens, so that doesn’t spook them, but they said that a person walking down the alley would send the deer running for the opposite side of the pen. “I can walk into their pens up to the feeder and they stand and watch,” Randy said. “If I step beyond their feeders, they take off running.” Still, they are considered livestock in Minnesota and are regulated as such. “We’re the most highly regulated agricultural
Randy and Susan Van Overbeke raise more than 200 whitetail deer at their Russell, Minn., deer farm.
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livestock,” Susan said. They test and register all of their animals. Every three years they test for tuberculosis and brucellosis, and every animal over the age of 12 months that dies is sent in to be tested for chronic wasting disease. All of the testing, vaccinating and worming makes a healthy herd. “It makes it kind of difficult, too,” Randy said. “A whitetail is prone to stress. When you start running them through chutes, they get stressed out, and can even die from stress.” The Van Overbeke’s have been raising whitetails for five-and-a-half years. This fall they will sell their second crop of trophy bucks to the preserves. They have seven breeding bucks, and most of their breeding is natural. They artificially breed to bring other genetic lines into the herd, or other traits of the antlers. When they artificially breed, they are hoping to have doe fawns to carry on the new genetics. This year they had all buck fawns out of their See WHITETAIL, pg. 19A