Hunters, farmers come together to feed hungry

By JOHN BADEN

johncbaden@gmail.com

Sherri Good, an Ohio coor­di­na­tor for Farm­ers and Hunters Feed­ing the Hun­gry (FHFH), shows off a buck she shot with a bow in Octo­ber and donated to FHFH. With her is one of her grandsons.

Farm­ing and hunt­ing may be two impor­tant pro­fes­sions in meet­ing the eat­ing needs of the world, but what might out­weigh their sig­nif­i­cance alone is how they work together to meet this role.

Accord­ing to a 2012 deer hunter effort and har­vest sur­vey, more than 80 per­cent of hunters did their deer hunt­ing on pri­vate land in Ohio. While not all of the pri­vate land is farm­land, the state Divi­sion of Wildlife’s Exec­u­tive Admin­is­tra­tor Vicki Mountz, said that most of it is.

Mountz, who iden­ti­fies her­self as a “seri­ous hunter,” described the cur­rent rela­tion­ship between farm­ers and hunters today as “pretty excellent.”

“For the most part, the rela­tion­ship has been a good one because the farm­ers pri­mar­ily allow hunters onto their prop­erty because of deer eat­ing their crops and things like this,” Mountz said.

One of these farm­ers is Bud Run­ner of Miami County, who owns a 105-acre farm north­east of Troy.

Run­ner rec­og­nizes that deer not only eat up the corn and soy­beans out in the field but that its pop­u­la­tion can become “fairly dense” if it is not con­trolled by hunting.

Coy­otes also are another kind of ani­mal that is com­monly hunted on pri­vate land because of their ten­dency to destroy live­stock such as sheep and calves.

Paul Gearhardt of Casstown co-owns more than 300 acres of farm­land besides his 158-acre farm and allows hunt­ing on all of them.

“I can’t tell you a farmer in the area that is going to restrict some­body from com­ing on and hunt­ing coy­otes because they’re dan­ger­ous pests,” Gearhardt said.

While Run­ner does give per­mis­sion to hunters to be on his land, he tends to only give close friends the oppor­tu­nity to hunt there.

“I only give a few peo­ple per­mis­sion to do so who won’t go back and lit­ter and will respect the land, so I’m kind of choosey by who I allow,” Run­ner said.

Mountz rec­og­nizes there are farm­ers and landown­ers who don’t give per­mis­sion to hunters because of a past expe­ri­ence where a hunter behaved badly on their prop­erty and did not respect the land.

“As a good sports­man and a good con­ser­va­tion­ist, that just makes me mad,” Mountz said. “For some­one to open up their prop­erty to you, that’s a won­der­ful thing.”

Another rea­son Run­ner is care­ful about which hunters he allows on his prop­erty is his son,

a sev­enth grader who likes to take walks and ride his go-cart back in the area hunters search for deer.

While there’s a pos­si­bil­ity that hunters could mis­take a human for an ani­mal if not care­ful, Run­ner said that he makes his hunt­ing friends aware of his son and trusts them.

“The peo­ple I allow back there are sea­son hunters,” Run­ner said. “They’re not just going to start unload­ing their M-16 as soon as they hear a noise.”

Besides allow­ing hunters on his prop­erty as a favor to a friend and to keep the deer pop­u­la­tion in check to pro­tect crops, Run­ner also sees the oppor­tu­nity as a way that helps man­age wildlife through the fee hunters pay.

The coop­er­a­tion between farm­ers and hunters is more than just fees, per­mis­sion slips and good sport. The nation­wide orga­ni­za­tion, Farm­ers and Hunters Feed­ing the Hun­gry (FHFH), is a result of this collaboration.

FHFH works with hunters through con­tracts with local butch­ers to process donated meat at

a dis­counted price. This meat is then dis­trib­uted to local food banks and min­istries and feeds the hun­gry by soup kitchens, pantries and shel­ters. FHFH was founded in 1997 in Mary­land, and since then, Ohio has been one of the largest sources for meat dona­tion with nearly 485,000 pounds of wildlife and live­stock, includ­ing hogs, sheep and cattle.

Mike Armen­trout, a coor­di­na­tor for West Cen­tral Ohio FHFH, is a hunter who works with farm­ers “to serve those less fortunate.”

Like other hunters, Armen­trout does what he can to help keep the deer pop­u­la­tion from get­ting out of hand and dam­ag­ing crops.

“In my opin­ion, this reas­sures the farmer of the deci­sion to allow me to hunt the prop­erty and makes them feel good that they can help feed those who are hun­gry in their county,” Armen­trout said.

Because of the team­work between farm­ers and hunters across the county, this orga­ni­za­tion alone has donated more than 3 mil­lion pounds of meat, pro­vid­ing more than 13 mil­lion meals to those in need.

Posted by Tina Murdock on Dec 26 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.