Missouri Non Res Changes

[ddowning]

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.

 

[Weldor]

All interesting, I hunt Texas and was thinking about Oklahoma. They did the same last year jacked up NR tags, that ended it for me. Used to hunt Michigan, to far now, but prices are fair. I was thinking about Missouri because a friend had moved there years back, said Deer hunting was good. Not now. It's not that I mind paying a higher price, I just don't like the reasoning. We cap our NR to 10% been that way for a long time, and charge a large fee plus license to apply for a limited resource. We don't have a million Elk or Deer. Sure be nice if we did . JMHO but I believe the good old days are done. Saddle up boys and get your check book.

 

[sasquatch]

The Iowa statement above (about NR being locked down and people moving) is what most people need to learn very quickly

If you push NR out hard enough to cause people to MOVE. You will end up WORSE off.

People moving, raises demand which raises prices and piece by piece removes habitat. Then NR can’t be the blame so the residents eventually get targeted.

When keeping NR out, creates more residents it don’t always work out as a long term win


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[Erict]

...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....

As I understand it, the average Iowa resident can shoot 2 bucks every year and many can shoot 3 bucks per year, plus they can participate in "party hunting". While the law was recently changed, selling of buck tags by residents to outfitters/NR hunters and allegedly used for "party hunting" was apparently common. Good for the residents, but in the long run, I suspect they may have killed their own golden goose.

Average NR can only hunt Iowa every 1-2 years with firearm, up to every 5 years with archery, and 1 buck per year. NR tag quotas are quite low and I think they have a pretty good system. While an argument can be made elsewhere, I think it's hard to blame NR for much of the "problems" in Iowa.

 

[NRA4LIFE]

I'm actually a fan of reciprocity rules. Would encourage more access. Would also be fairly easy to implement with software there days. I say this coming from a state that does not discriminate between res and NR, except for hunting license being more expensive.

This is a bad idea. Every hunter in WI would also be hunting every state they could if the tags were as cheap as theirs. Don't know how that reciprocity thing works. I hope MO keeps an even keel, even with tag increases. Even if all this passes I can still buy 2 tags for less than $400. Try that in MT.

I like MO and WI because I have private land there to hunt in both. In WI I can hunt 4 different parcels if I want, one I am part owner of and the rest owned by my family or good friends.

 

[IsThisHeaven]

As I understand it, the average Iowa resident can shoot 2 bucks every year and many can shoot 3 bucks per year, plus they can participate in "party hunting". While the law was recently changed, selling of buck tags by residents to outfitters/NR hunters and allegedly used for "party hunting" was apparently common. Good for the residents, but in the long run, I suspect they may have killed their own golden goose.

Average NR can only hunt Iowa every 1-2 years with firearm, up to every 5 years with archery, and 1 buck per year. NR tag quotas are quite low and I think they have a pretty good system. While an argument can be made elsewhere, I think it's hard to blame NR for much of the "problems" in Iowa.

I’m an iowa resident. Residents can get 2 anysex tags - one has to be an archery tag. The other can be for any of the remaining seasons. Most guys hunt one archery and one gun tag. Landowners can get a third anysex tag. To say that many can shoot 3 is inaccurate.The number of people shooting 3 bucks is not enough to impact the problem.

The law that recently changed addressed nonresidents buying antlerless tags and using that tag to party hunt with a resident’s anysex tag.

The reasons Iowa’s deer are hurting in some areas of the state are: over harvesting of does (driven mainly by the ag lobby in the legislature), disease mainly EHD, and farmers tearing out habitat. There are parts of the state where deer numbers are way down. But there are also parts of the state with good numbers of deer that still have good numbers of quality bucks.

I do not hear of anyone blaming NR’s for Iowa’s deer population issues. But that is in part because NR are limited here, as they should be.

Good on Missouri for putting its residents first. It’s a good deer hunt in state that could be really good.

 

[ddowning]

As I understand it, the average Iowa resident can shoot 2 bucks every year and many can shoot 3 bucks per year, plus they can participate in "party hunting". While the law was recently changed, selling of buck tags by residents to outfitters/NR hunters and allegedly used for "party hunting" was apparently common. Good for the residents, but in the long run, I suspect they may have killed their own golden goose.

Average NR can only hunt Iowa every 1-2 years with firearm, up to every 5 years with archery, and 1 buck per year. NR tag quotas are quite low and I think they have a pretty good system. While an argument can be made elsewhere, I think it's hard to blame NR for much of the "problems" in Iowa.

It is definitely not the NR in Iowa. All around the Midwest there is insane greed for gobbling up access and closing it off to others. I believe people should have access to hunt in their home state. The bigger the pool of people trying to "lock up ground" the more it will cost. This will displace residents. Also, the easier it is to kill a big buck with cell cams, bait, crossbow or rifle during rut, etc the more likely NR will buy/lease land there and deny access to others. These guys aren't (except in VERY RARE circumstances) managing the population. They are coming to shoot their buck(s).

If things aren't done to lower the success rate and also lower competition for available land, there aren't going to be hunting opportunities for the average guy. Everyone has a different take on what to do, but that seems to be the aim in MO. In my opinion, when you dig pretty deep, it has been death by 1000 cuts and there needs to be a lot of changes to fix things.

I married into a family where a lot of people live in the west. Many of them can't draw a tag in their home state to hunt big game every year. I honestly don't know what effect eliminating NR hunting there would have, but I have infinite regulatory opportunity to hunt every year in my home state even if public is ruined and access to private is tough. I am fortunate to be able to own land, but even for my small chunk, by the time I pay interst on the loan, maintenance, etc I could have retired on what it will cost. The average guy isn't going to do that and we are talking a single 40 acre parcel. I can only imagine what things would cost if it were open to NR to hunt over the counter here every year. Land prices would double, the hunting would be completely ruined, and every public land parking lot would look like the mall every Saturday morning.

I'm not sure how MO does it, but one trick from IA is they split the gun season into multiple blocks and don't allow people to hunt it all. That opens areas up and puts fewer hunters in them at one time.

Like I said, it's been death by 1000 cuts and the entire Midwest is hurting. Even Iowa, which is supposed to be the golden goose. The solutions are complex, but all of it could be fixed in 5-10 years if people would get behind it. If we keep going the direction we are going, there will be very few mature deer and only the wealthy will hunt. Look at what happened to IL and WI and MN.