randyhi

Its been a long time since I have been bowhunting but, I remember having access to several good places to hunt and farmers telling me to get every deer I see because their eating up his crop. Now, if you want to hunt, you pay about 5-6 dollars an acrefor a minimum 160 acre lease. I had a guy try to lease me 160 acres for $1000that has no timber on it just an irrigated corn crop. What's gonna be left there when he harvests his corn? Itmight be hard to hide in a bare field.Another guy offered me a prime location for $10 / acre and went on to tell me that farmers and ranchers in Texas are getting $100 / acre. I find that hard to believe. I finally found a good location and talked to the owner. He mustbe a car salesman on the side. I ended up agreeing to lease 320 acres for $1000. Not bad I guess. It's 25 miles from home and has lots of timber and winter wheat that will be growing in the fall. I've tried the public hunting areas and its not like hunting at all. Its way too crowded and the deer I saw were about the size of my yrllow lab. Do you guys have to lease a place to hunt? Has my return to bowhunting become rather expensive or am I just out of touch with reality?

wihunter402

I found things to be much the same. At first I just helped out the farmer. It was a dairy farm and I would give him a weekend off once a year and do the milking. Well then it got to be a couple of weekends. No big deal with that until he said that someone wanted to have exclusive rights and would pay him. He wanted to know if I would match it. Well I have always been willing to help with the work but paying to "lease" a place was just not something I wanted to do. Then when my son got more into this I decided I wanted something that would be there forever for us. I worked with my Dad and we purchased 80 acres (45 woods and 35 grass land). Not the best prime area but it is OURS. We do have a lot of nice bucks running around but the main thing is that NOBODY can tell us "This year you can't hunt, someone is paying me more". My Great Grandfather told me a long time ago that there would come a day when you would have to pay to hunt someones land. That was 30 years ago and I never thought I would see it.

LBR

I reckon it's the norm these days. Used to be you didn't even have to worry about getting permission to hunt on the neighbor's land. Over the last several years certain people and companies have bought up every decent acre that was for sale, cut the timber, and then lease the land. Folks have formed clubs to get enough land together to hunt on. Most of these require some "pull" to get into, not to mention a good bit of cash. I'm lucky to still have neighbors I can hunt on, but I don't know how long it will last. Tried leasing some land for a couple of years, but what I could afford was next to worthless for bowhunting. Public land is downright dangerous, especially during gun season. There's supposedly fewer and fewer hunters, but the land seems to be shrinking faster than that.

Take a good thing, throw money into the mix, and given time it's gonna get screwed up.

Chad

Arthur P

True. Some places are even higher. A friend went in with a few other guys for a $300 per acre lease and never saw a single deer the whole time they were there. They dropped it after that, but there was a long line waiting their turn to get ripped off.

Others I know have been on one lease for years, did their own management and finally started seeing decent deer on the place. Then the farmer pulled the rug out from under them and leased it to some got-rocks SOB for a pile of money. That kind of stuff goes on here all the time.

Lots of times it's some business that comes in and pays out a whopping sum for a lease, then sub-leases to other people for a profit. Or a corporation comes in and flashes a big wad of cash so they can have a place to entertain clients. They use it as a tax writeoff.

Cheapest way to go is with a day lease, and even that's not cheap. Day lease rates start around $50 per day, and that's just for upland game. Hog hunt day leases start around $75 per day. Much more for deer.

Other farmers charge by the hunter. Usually from $750 up to $2500... and up and up and up....

It sucks!

That's why I almost always hunt public land.

kevin1

That's one of the reasons that I finally knuckled under and bought a small patch of woods to live on that has a favorable location . Also , the publics here aren't that crowded outside of the gun seasons . I refuse to lease period , and there's no way that I would pay any of the prices you mentioned anyway .

Have you checked topo maps for smaller , less well known public properties ? Many of them are virtually unknown and get little or no pressure . Take the path less traveled and you may stumble upon little hidden honeyholes right in your own back yard .

texas10pt

trying to find a good day lease in west tx.

texas10pt

hunting for whitetail deer only.

BobCo19-65

Most definetely people are out for money in many cases. In my area, leases are still rather cheap. I believe my friends pay around $7 an acre. If you own land and do not hunt, you sure can appreciate leasing the land to hunters. For instance, on my 80 acres of land, I pay about $2500/year on taxes. The land is about 100 mile from my residence. Just to recoup the taxes on the land I'd have to charge around 30/acre, and that wouldn't include the additional insurance that I would need. Now I do have a cabin on the land and we do use it for other purposes other then hunting. But looking at it in another light, I could get one heck of a lease for $2,500 if all I used the land for was hunting.

Centxrecurve

All these commercial hunters and the vids are destroying a great american pass time at least for the average hunter. I am looking for a lease for myself.