Oh. Deer.

~ This article first appeared in The Leader-Vindicator newspaper. ~

I just read an article extolling the virtues of wildlife in relation to farms across America.  The author’s tone indicated that “good” farmers spend their days weeping with blissful joy when they observe a spider web, baby turkeys, songbirds, and foxes, while “bad” farmers simply want to eradicate the wildlife variable from their fields.

To some extent this is true: Farmers, commanding large tracts of land, can choose by way of practice to increase or decrease the living complexity for everyone around them.  An abundance of diversity is without a doubt one of our greatest assets in maintaining societal stability by way of environmental health.  So, at face value, yes, good farmers impregnate the landscape with diversity.

To say, however, that on one side it’s a bounding, jolly existence and on the other there are dark clouds of ill intent exposes readers to an inaccurate picture.  When appealing to the public, natural farm syndicates fail to ever mention the havoc created by so much diversity.  The subterfuge creates a false reality in which nobody can be honest and nobody can function properly.

I am a pro-diversity farmer.  Many of our customers are our customers because they want their food dollars supporting a mission to bring increase for the land.  These wonderful people need also to understand that I’ll swear death upon adorable bunnies for eating the garden, I turn into Rambo around a groundhog, and I’m willing to run through a field in my underwear on a freezing night to shoot whatever is raiding the chicken coop. 

Deer are my worst nemesis.  Each time we convert a cornfield into a perennial pasture the hunters stop by and comment that they don’t know what the deer will eat without any feed.  Well, my friends, these deer you chase are ruminant herbivores; they’ll eat the pasture!  It is no figment of my imagination that the deer population has increased as the cropland decreased.  There are monster bucks walking around and I haven’t observed a doe that didn’t have twins for several years.  When we create and manage a proper environment for cattle, we’re doing the same for deer.  And I hate it!

The deer will reduce a stockpiled pasture to nothing before my eyes.  They strip out clover, palatable forbs, and young grass without restriction, leaving behind only the worst for cattle.  Each fall I watch as my field-stored feed diminishes in quantity and quality with each passing night, and I feel helpless and angry because I cannot stop their relentless work.  Adding insult to injury, they constantly destroy my fences and they’ve done horrible damage to our apple trees.  Frankly, when I come in from scouting depleted pasture and read about a farmer dancing in the fields with all his nature, I want to burn the paper.  This simply cannot be completely accurate reporting.

As nature increases, management of nature must also increase.  This does not mean that we’re destroying wildlife; on the contrary, the most robust environments feature serious checks on all populations in order to maintain balance.  Another way of saying this is the more life we have, the more death there will be.  We must not delude ourselves into believing that is a bad thing.

Orthodox wildlife management laws are rigid and built upon the framework of a sterilized and minimized environment.  They’ve created a concomitant hunting pattern that fails when populations are on the rise.  Management tools in place are as predictable and routine as a square baler punching out bales and, thus, are totally ineffective when confronted with the dynamic nature of nature; what we need is a surgeon’s scalpel to get in there and select precisely what needs done.

Wildlife such as deer can be trained and herded just the same as domestic cattle or sheep.  Pressure in the form of population reduction (death) is an effective tool to “train” wild animals where to graze and what to avoid.  If every animal that enters a certain zone is shot, pretty soon the only animals left in the herd will be those who refuse to enter the killing zone.  By way of maternal education, after several years of relentless selection members of the herd will “know” to graze one field and not the other.

Through careful planning and partnership with neighbors and selected hunters, a farmer can create multi-beneficial environments in which domesticated animals and their wild counterparts can thrive in havens created for them.  The only way to achieve this is through targeted and relentless killing, a statement that is definitely off limits within the happy-happy-joy discussions promulgated across the farmer-consumer barrier. 

Death must have a purpose so it isn’t meaningless slaughter.  I think it would be neat if deer killed in the pressure zone could be sold for meat, thus adding value to the hunter’s effort to managing the population.  Several of our upscale restaurant customers would love to put wild venison on the menu for an exorbitant price.  I would like to sell it to them and eliminate some of those dang, stinking deer at the same time.

Without a doubt, this week I’ll stop to watch a dragonfly.  I’ll marvel at a mole’s network of tunnels.  I’ll take a picture of a fox, if I can creep close enough.  And I really do like to see deer.  But doggone it, folks, don’t be fooled: I’ll defend my squash to the death.