Moose_Maximus

I personally think that farmers/ranchers charge money just as a kind of "idiot filter". As tycteach pointed out, one stray bullet can cause a lot of damage, and getting recompensed from some yahoo could be well-nigh impossible.

A friend of a friend used to let me dove hunt on his hobby ranch, a privilege he extended to others. All he asked in returnwas some respect and to pick up empty shotgun shells (his cattle had been known to eat them). Even so, he stillhad problems with idiots cutting his fences, leaving trash around, etc. etc.

So guess what? Thanks to guys like that, I lost my place to dove hunt. But I don't blame the landowner one bit.

falcon

"It might be interesting too for each of us to go out and buy a large tract of land, all the very expensive equipment that's required to work that land, the seed to put in the ground, the long hard filthy hours put in working it and the measly price we're going to get for the crop and then see if we wouldn't want some stranger to actually pay to trespass and hunt something that we would actually like to get rid of just so we could supplement our income a little."

You are correct. i do believe that most smaller family farms have a hard go of it. The larger farms are very different. They first thing they do when they acquire more land is to apply for more farm welfare money-your tax money and my tax money. Ten percent of large farms receive 70 percent of farm welfare money.

i was raised in WV where farmers take good care of their machinery. In OK and TX they buy a $150,000 combine or tractor and let it sitoutside in the weather until it is no longer serviceable. These farm porkers do not see the value in a $20,000 shed to house their farm machinery.

burniegoeasily

Charging money is what has come about with any farmer/rancher. People will pay, so they charge. Heck, I of guys whosfarms I use to hunt on for free, but not anymore. They now leasethem out to varmit hunters. Can you imagine paying for land to shoot nothing but yotes and prarie dogs? People from the city will pay big bucks to do so. I think its crazy, but people will pay, so farmers and ranchers take advantage.

burniegoeasily

very true. But they do make pretty good blinds to hunt from. That is once the windows are knocked out.

Jim_IV

Are you serious?

Do you even know what you are talking about. How about you drive through Texas from top to bottom and then tell me how many tractors and how much equipment you see sitting outside. Don't go around making accusations about other people if you have no idea what your talking about. Have you ever even worked on a farm? I'm not talking about your grandpas dinky 20 acre place, I mean a big 10,000 to 100,000 acre place. My guess is that you haven't. Working on large farms and ranches most of my life I can honestly say I have driven combines, tractors, grain trucks, ect. that were 15 to 20 years old and still purring like a kitten.

Keith Miller

come plant hogs here in new mexico please lol , i wish we had an overpopulation of hogs here.

[email protected]

tycteach, I know you mean well, and I suspect you may earn some income from this sort of hunting arangement, and I do understand where you are comeing from.
At the same time you are overlooking some important points as well.
1, the people in the great state of Texas are begging for help with the hog problem!
2, If I were to come and help with their problem I'd have to loose a week of work, gas enough for the 1500 mile round trip ( I live in Alabama ) then pay for food and lodging, buy a non resident hunting license and low and behold pay a redicilous price for the hog if I do in fact kill one!
3,Why the he!! would I do something as stupid as this when a bear or elk hunt would likely not cost more?
4, Well I live 35 minutes from Talladega super speedway and I've never been to a race there, as I've never seen a pro baseball game or football game from the statum, and will never pay to see one either!

retrieverman

Reb

You should have come to Nacogdoches with the plant. It is a pretty nice place to live.

[email protected]

I should also mention that I am a land owner( only 90 acres ) but I allow others to hunt my land. I also have neighbors who also own land, several hundred acres, and we hunt each others land, all without charge.
I always plant 6 or more acres of corn which I leave standing in the field for deer, although this year the drought wiped it out.
But I still feel that should I find a problem weed growing in my field and ask other farmers to come and help me pull them up it would be kinda crappy to charge them xx$$ per lb for the weeds they remove!
I see a big difference between charging to hunt for a trophy buck and charging to help eridicate a nusence animal that is destroying the habitat!
I guess that puts me in the minority here but I don't apoligise for the way I feel

Moose_Maximus

1. Name two.
2. So stay home.
3. Why, indeed.
4. Good for you.

A lot of the guys who are champing at the bit to hunt hogs live in urban/suburban areas (guys like me), and their hunting skills run the gamut, from being expert and ethical to being complete neophytes to being absolutely insane. To be blunt about it, guys like me have more money than free time, so it's worth it to us to pay a couple of hundred dollars to hunt hogs.

What people fail to realize (most of whom don't live in Texas) is that farmers and ranchers who know the guys who want to hunt there are reputed to be pretty good about letting them do it.

But then the guys they do know tend to invite others, and before you know it, the landowner has problems. In these lawsuit-crazy days, I don't blame the landowners for being careful about who gets on their property.Trading one kind of destructivepest (hogs) for another (morons with guns) isn't much of an improvement.

Any landowner is under no obligation whatsoever to allow anyone to hunt on his property. In fact, I own land that I don't hunt, and I won't let anyone else hunt either, because I don't want to be liable for some idiot.