There is so much nuance to how whitetail hunting gets managed in the midwest it is nuts. There are a shitpot load of deer in certain states and others that were once great are ruined. There are a lot of dynamic situations with land that effect things as well.
Iowa is considered the last good whitetail state in the country. I happen to live there. People I respect say Kansas is now better and both of those states are declining quickly. I own a small piece of land in one of the best counties in Iowa. Since 2020 the amount of change to the whitetail herd locally is insane. Amish have killed them down to a shadow of the population that used to exist. Every 40 acre parcel with timber or warm season grass is owned by a different rich idiot from the city. None of them have a clue about age class or deer management. They just pay someone to plant 10 acres of grain, leave it for the late season, and hope for COLD. This situation has lead to lack of access and high grading like no tomorrow. Passing a 140" 3 year old and hoping it will reach 5 years old is a pipe dream anymore. There is too much tech. Box blinds, cell cams, smokeless ML, 35 cal or larger centerfire rifles, exposed turret scopes at prices that don't make your eyes water. The formula is simple. Buy 40 acres, plant beans, wait for a daylight picture of the biggest buck using your property, hunt from box blind with heater, range, dial yardage, kill deer, post grip and grin on SM. People want to shoot a buck. When there are no 5 year old bucks, they will shoot a 4 year old. The same when no 4 year olds are left. They also want to have the highest scoring set of antlers they can for SM, so they have no problem shooting a high potential 3 year old instead of the 6 year old that only score 130". That leaves ZERO giant deer left on the landscape where there were once many.
Guys that have money are gobbling up land via leasing and paying exorbitant prices for junk land. The guys that are the most serious with the most means buy up the most and best ground and the mad rush trickles down hill. Inaccessible, junk land just sold for $6200/acre adjacent from me. A small piece of junk land sold for 12,200/acre. It was marketed as a building site and a young couple bought it to build a house and hunt. It is so small that the instant you leave your house, everything on the property is alert. The property has flooded twice in the last week with the part left above ground smaller than a nice house. Why are banks writing loans on this? The average hunting lease in my part of the state is $38/acre. That's bad enough, but a somewhat local hunting personality that everyone knows from YouTube just offered $75,000/ year to control hunting on less than a section. This guy owns ground in multiple counties in my part of the state, lives here, nd has serious money and motivation to keep the rest of us out, so he can grow 200" deer and be a douchebag on YouTube. Farmers are paying waaayyy above what will cash flow for ground and dozing off all the trees for row crop. They wont even leave a fencerow. Iowa was 8% timber in 2020 and now we are under 7% trending to 6%. A firm from Texas just bought 400 acres with a small old farm house for $4M. Why? Because the guy that sold it claimed to have killed 5 200" deer off the property in 5 years.
This is Iowa. It is LOCKED DOWN from NR. People are moving here to hunt. There is no access even with NR mostly shut out. It is but a shadow of even a few years ago and unrecognizable from 15 - 20 years ago. We don't even have crossbows legal during the rut without a doctor's note thst you are handicapped and can't shoot a vertical bow. Imagine if things were wide open too everyone in the world. From what I've been told, that is the situation in northern Missouri.
Many of the great states of the passed have already been ruined. MN, IL, WI, etc have no big deer left to hunt. Guys start arguments about how they would never pass a P&Y deer. 15 years ago you would have been laughed at in a lot of these places if you shot anything close to the P&Y minimum.
Being from Iowa, we have a lot that needs to be fixed. People are still falling all over themselves to hunt here. If I didn't live here, there is ZERO chance I would travel here to hunt. The juice isn't worth the squeeze. 15 years ago, absolutely, but today, not a chance. We're all sitting here hoping the surrounding states will do what MO is doing. Fix your broken states. Get rid of baiting, make habitat improvement king, get guns out of the rut, and honestly, get rid of cell cams (i would prefer cams in general), and get crossbows out of archery season. There are several states that could be much better than Iowa. Only a tiny fraction of Iowa has deer habitat. The amount of habitat in MN, IL, IN, MO all vastly more than Iowa. With the right regs and culture, they should take Iowa completely out of the conversation. Then, there is more quality whitetail hunting for everyone. People won't need to have the deepest pockets and still empty them to get access. It's a supply and demand problem. The deer have no way to win anymore.
We often forget, so I want to address the gentleman that made the comment to the effect that greed is the new religion of this country, and it is a race to the bottom. I wholeheartedly agree. When I was growing up, there was far less public land in Iowa, but there was FAAARRRR MORE access. Instead of opening hunting methods to make sure it was easy to be successful, it was hard as hell. Some of that was because the tech wasn't available yet and some has come from reg changes. There actually were big bucks everywhere in Southern and central iowa and probably some other parts of the state I didn't hunt. I could get access to almost any piece of ground by knocking on doors. I almost NEVER had exclusive access. It was like the whole state was public hunting even though it was all private land. Because the best guns that were legal were knight mk-85 ML, and most used Remington 870 and 11-87 with bird barrels and rifled slugs, bucks had a pretty good chance of living to maturity. Seeing a 150" deer from a treestand was something that happened extremely often. We averaged 1-2 encounters with 180"+ deer per season. We were kids with ZERO clue what we were doing, in areas with a lot of hunting pressure. How many big deer were actually on the landscape? Now, we find a big (mature) deer with cams and I can usually kill him by the end of the season. The deer aren't big any more, because everything with the potential to get big gets killed as a 3 year old 140". The deer we are killing are the 5 and 6 year olds that no one else wants to shoot because they only score 120-140". I have had one encounter with a 180"+ deer in the last 6 years. We need to fix the broken states and the culture to have a quality trophy hunting experience. If no one cares about trophy hunting and only wants to whack a yearling buck every season, carry on. Just don't forget there are still guys out there that do want to trophy hunt. Enough of those guys have money to burn, Biiiiggg piles of money. They are going to force every low income to middle class hunter on to limited public. It's already happening. It wasn't the case when they could travel here, ask permission, and kill a big buck on just about any decent looking property.
Iowa is considered the last good whitetail state in the country. I happen to live there. People I respect say Kansas is now better and both of those states are declining quickly. I own a small piece of land in one of the best counties in Iowa. Since 2020 the amount of change to the whitetail herd locally is insane. Amish have killed them down to a shadow of the population that used to exist. Every 40 acre parcel with timber or warm season grass is owned by a different rich idiot from the city. None of them have a clue about age class or deer management. They just pay someone to plant 10 acres of grain, leave it for the late season, and hope for COLD. This situation has lead to lack of access and high grading like no tomorrow. Passing a 140" 3 year old and hoping it will reach 5 years old is a pipe dream anymore. There is too much tech. Box blinds, cell cams, smokeless ML, 35 cal or larger centerfire rifles, exposed turret scopes at prices that don't make your eyes water. The formula is simple. Buy 40 acres, plant beans, wait for a daylight picture of the biggest buck using your property, hunt from box blind with heater, range, dial yardage, kill deer, post grip and grin on SM. People want to shoot a buck. When there are no 5 year old bucks, they will shoot a 4 year old. The same when no 4 year olds are left. They also want to have the highest scoring set of antlers they can for SM, so they have no problem shooting a high potential 3 year old instead of the 6 year old that only score 130". That leaves ZERO giant deer left on the landscape where there were once many.
Guys that have money are gobbling up land via leasing and paying exorbitant prices for junk land. The guys that are the most serious with the most means buy up the most and best ground and the mad rush trickles down hill. Inaccessible, junk land just sold for $6200/acre adjacent from me. A small piece of junk land sold for 12,200/acre. It was marketed as a building site and a young couple bought it to build a house and hunt. It is so small that the instant you leave your house, everything on the property is alert. The property has flooded twice in the last week with the part left above ground smaller than a nice house. Why are banks writing loans on this? The average hunting lease in my part of the state is $38/acre. That's bad enough, but a somewhat local hunting personality that everyone knows from YouTube just offered $75,000/ year to control hunting on less than a section. This guy owns ground in multiple counties in my part of the state, lives here, nd has serious money and motivation to keep the rest of us out, so he can grow 200" deer and be a douchebag on YouTube. Farmers are paying waaayyy above what will cash flow for ground and dozing off all the trees for row crop. They wont even leave a fencerow. Iowa was 8% timber in 2020 and now we are under 7% trending to 6%. A firm from Texas just bought 400 acres with a small old farm house for $4M. Why? Because the guy that sold it claimed to have killed 5 200" deer off the property in 5 years.
This is Iowa. It is LOCKED DOWN from NR. People are moving here to hunt. There is no access even with NR mostly shut out. It is but a shadow of even a few years ago and unrecognizable from 15 - 20 years ago. We don't even have crossbows legal during the rut without a doctor's note thst you are handicapped and can't shoot a vertical bow. Imagine if things were wide open too everyone in the world. From what I've been told, that is the situation in northern Missouri.
Many of the great states of the passed have already been ruined. MN, IL, WI, etc have no big deer left to hunt. Guys start arguments about how they would never pass a P&Y deer. 15 years ago you would have been laughed at in a lot of these places if you shot anything close to the P&Y minimum.
Being from Iowa, we have a lot that needs to be fixed. People are still falling all over themselves to hunt here. If I didn't live here, there is ZERO chance I would travel here to hunt. The juice isn't worth the squeeze. 15 years ago, absolutely, but today, not a chance. We're all sitting here hoping the surrounding states will do what MO is doing. Fix your broken states. Get rid of baiting, make habitat improvement king, get guns out of the rut, and honestly, get rid of cell cams (i would prefer cams in general), and get crossbows out of archery season. There are several states that could be much better than Iowa. Only a tiny fraction of Iowa has deer habitat. The amount of habitat in MN, IL, IN, MO all vastly more than Iowa. With the right regs and culture, they should take Iowa completely out of the conversation. Then, there is more quality whitetail hunting for everyone. People won't need to have the deepest pockets and still empty them to get access. It's a supply and demand problem. The deer have no way to win anymore.
We often forget, so I want to address the gentleman that made the comment to the effect that greed is the new religion of this country, and it is a race to the bottom. I wholeheartedly agree. When I was growing up, there was far less public land in Iowa, but there was FAAARRRR MORE access. Instead of opening hunting methods to make sure it was easy to be successful, it was hard as hell. Some of that was because the tech wasn't available yet and some has come from reg changes. There actually were big bucks everywhere in Southern and central iowa and probably some other parts of the state I didn't hunt. I could get access to almost any piece of ground by knocking on doors. I almost NEVER had exclusive access. It was like the whole state was public hunting even though it was all private land. Because the best guns that were legal were knight mk-85 ML, and most used Remington 870 and 11-87 with bird barrels and rifled slugs, bucks had a pretty good chance of living to maturity. Seeing a 150" deer from a treestand was something that happened extremely often. We averaged 1-2 encounters with 180"+ deer per season. We were kids with ZERO clue what we were doing, in areas with a lot of hunting pressure. How many big deer were actually on the landscape? Now, we find a big (mature) deer with cams and I can usually kill him by the end of the season. The deer aren't big any more, because everything with the potential to get big gets killed as a 3 year old 140". The deer we are killing are the 5 and 6 year olds that no one else wants to shoot because they only score 120-140". I have had one encounter with a 180"+ deer in the last 6 years. We need to fix the broken states and the culture to have a quality trophy hunting experience. If no one cares about trophy hunting and only wants to whack a yearling buck every season, carry on. Just don't forget there are still guys out there that do want to trophy hunt. Enough of those guys have money to burn, Biiiiggg piles of money. They are going to force every low income to middle class hunter on to limited public. It's already happening. It wasn't the case when they could travel here, ask permission, and kill a big buck on just about any decent looking property.
