Paying for lease land is pretty much a fact of life where I'm at. There is some public land around, but I've already been shot at in my life and have no great desire to put myself in that position again. The only thing that I can offer is that if you work directly with a land owner, sometimes you can get cheaper lease rates for doing improvements to the land, not building permanent stands, etc...We do that on one of our leases where the owner is out of town. Heck, we even cleaned a deer that he shot when he came into town last year. Sometimes this pays off. We are leasing it for half of what the going rate is in our area. You might try that approach.

What you have to watch for is doing the improvements for the owner when you are leasing, and have the owner turn around and lease it to someone else for more. That happened on a corporate lease that my old company had. We tore down everything that we put out there and brought it back.