Iowa the best pheasant state again.

UGUIDE said:
KB, I have another option that is cheaper than owning land and you can help support habitat. Come and hunt at a UGUIDE Pheasant camp for $420-$820 a person for 4 nights lodging and 3-days hunting. You can't come close to owning a slice of pheasant hunting heaven for anywhere near that price.

Just a suggestion and another option on the table.
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Yes Sir! I can assure you you'll see my name on your roster for a future season. I plan to book a hunt for my son and I (obviously I'll need to recruit a few more) when he's old enough to hunt SD. Thanks for the invite. I suppose hunting with an operation like yours is an indirect way to support America's pheasant habitat without owning land.
 
Somedude, according to your logic. Weather is the reason Iowa doesn't have praire chickens anymore. That makes total sense now.
 
Somedude said:
No its not. Because if you had 5 times as many birds there still would be no one to shoot them. Bird numbers are not limiting the harvest numbers now. There just isnt very many hunters. If Iowa still had 2.5 times as many hunters as SD does, like it did in the 80s, Iowa would still kill more birds. I dont think Iowa ever had more birds on any kind of a rolling average. SD just has too much land that is unfarmable or not worth farming.
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What is the reason Iowa does not have as many hunters as it used to?
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The farmers complain that cash rent/land prices are too high? Who jacked them up? Not the hunter tho we went thru that argument last year at PC when the Agrus published a piece on land prices in SD.
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Uncle Buck, thats a good question what happened to Iowa's pheasant hunters. Iowa still has 250,000 hunters, but only 110,000 bird hunters.
 
Boom-IN, If $4 bu is break even point @ 200 bu/ac. Your friends are in deep trouble. Sell @ $3 bu this year and they will lose $200/ac and on 100 ac that puts them $20,000 down. They probably farm at least 400 ac so they will lose $80,000 on corn this year. They would need very deep pockets to continue. I'll take farming over any occupation. You get to be your own boss, work the land, raise pheasants, and if economy collapses at least you can feed your family while eveyone else starves.
 
$4.00 will be the price with supports(tax $). $3.00 or less at market with the huge crop. Good for ethanol, not much else. We truly could feed the world this year, but the world don't give a ----.
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improve the system

Live in southern mn but suffer the same problems as iowa. I would like to see 20 ft buffers be made mandatory between fields. It would help with erosion and it automatically gives some premium cover.Growing up we alway hunted the fencelines because of the cover provided with either the grass or brush that grew there, but land prices and crop prices go up and fencelines disappear. It is really tough to go and pound the public land with all the other guys that have nowhere else to go unless they want to leave the state.
 
pheasantaddict said:
Somedude, Where have all the quail gone? Is that weather related too? Maybe the weather decreased hunters in Iowa also.
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Being wrong and mad and then saying silly things does not make you right. You bring up prairie chickens and quail. Those are not pheasants. This discussion is about pheasant hunting, try to stay on topic. Those species are native birds that do require large unbroken expanses of very particular habitat. CRP is the worst thing for quail numbers. The ringnecked pheasant is not even a naturally occuring specie. Its a mixture of several species of Asian native pheasants. If you dont believe me that weather plays a huge role in pheasant numbers ask Ducks Unlimited. They will tell you that the U.S. had very poor rains in the 80s. Iowa also had great birds numbers in the 80s. Then in the 90s the U.S. got a lot more rain, back to normal. Bird numbers in Iowa started dropping when we got rain. Now much of Iowa is getting lots of rain, hence, no birds. The amount of rainfall in Iowa increases as you go from the southeast to the northwest. Pheasant numbers also increase as you go from southeast to northwest. You think thats a coincidence? Pheasants need some rain, not too much, and definitely not at the wrong time. If you get a hailstorm on June 15 I dont care what kind or how much habitat you have its all over.
 
Last illustration...hunt fields that have the same weather patterns for a year. I'll hunt crp, buffer strips, weedy fence lines, and food plots. You hunt mowed waterways, forests, and disked up fields. Lets compare who saw and shot more pheasants with weather being the same in each place. If habitat is not the key, why is everyone hunting where the habitat for roosters is? Somedude hunt those mowed waterways all year long and good luck!
 
Hear yea, hear yea, Iowa pheasant hunters. Abandon all hope yea that enter. Barak Obama's Iowa caucus victory was bought and paid for by the Illinois based agribusiness giant ADM, in other words he's got their back. Another dirty little secret kept hush hush by Iowa DNR bureaucrats is that our now U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack despised going on the annual governors pheasant hunt and even skipped one year. When I saw Vilsack's picture out hunting pheasants on the PF website I knew these were desperate times. The utter hope crushing irony came in a recent Pheasants Forever magazine when the editors wrote a thank you note to the Monsanto Corporation for a lousy $15,000 contribution. Company executives in St. Louis must have rolled over and smoked a cigarette. pheasantaddict, you said "the future looks bright", you really need to get those rose colored lenses out of your glasses before you shoot a hen.
 
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Niceshot, I suppose your waiting for nightfall to cross the Big Sioux. I think SD has increased its border patrol this year so be careful. You should stay at home and hunt because pheasants don't need habitat. All those disked up fields in SC will be crawling with birds this year.
 
niceshot said:
The utter hope crushing irony came in a recent Pheasants Forever magazine when the editors wrote a thank you note to the Monsanto Corporation for a lousy $15,000 contribution.
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Speaking of Monsanto, who can tell me what is wrong with Monsanto's pitch of "Sustainable Agriculture"???

(Monsanto has pitched this in magazines such as Audobon Society, etc.).
 
pheasantaddict said:
Niceshot, I suppose your waiting for nightfall to cross the Big Sioux. I think SD has increased its border patrol this year so be careful. You should stay at home and hunt because pheasants don't need habitat. All those disked up fields in SC will be crawling with birds this year.
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I have tried to get NICESHOT to go hunting with me in IA he never gets back to me about it. I think he is afraid to take me hunting because he thinks I will steal all his good spots around Vermillion.
 
An entertaining thread. Everyone knows too much rain in the spring means poor nesting conditions and a poor spring hatch and not enough rain means insect numbers (food for chicks) will be down but it all begins with habitat. In SW Wisconsin, weâ??ve seen one honey hole after another go under the plow and the birds are disappearing as fast as the habitat.

It seems to me the growth of the CRP program coincided with the increase in clean farming methods and as a result, CRP compensated for the loss of roosting cover that dirty farming used to provide for the birds. Now that CRPâ??s on the decline, so are the bird numbers. Weather certainly plays a large part in determining bird numbers from season to season but over the long term, habitat = birds, plain & simple.
 
pheasantaddict said:
j that looks inviting, just wish I had enough to buy a 100 acres.
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Hmmmmm. Maybe you actually can afford all 480 acres, at least if you share with, say, three partners.

Here, check out my math:

Purchase price: $204,000, 30 year loan @ 5% = $14,700 annual mortgage payment. Taxes = $1400.

Total expense = $16,100 per year.

Income $7497 CRP + $2455 hay rental = $9952 income per year

Botttom line, out of pocket = $6148/year

Four owners = $1537 each per year.

If I weren't such an old fart, I'd look into it myself...and there may be some even better deals.

Spend just a little more money, plant a few more trees, and a few acres of corn or milo, and I'll bet you can grow all the pheasants (and ducks and Geese) four guys can ever want.
 
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us iowans NEED a break from mother nature the bad winters and wet cold springs are reaking havoc on pheasant numbers and the loss of crp isnt helping either but i think the weather is our biggest issue right now. if we could see a normal winter and a warm dryer spring it couls help ramp up some numbers but the crp has to come back if we intend to keep decent bird numbers. chet culver and tom harkin belly ached this spring about the low revenue that was brought in from iowa pheasant hunters last fall but yet they wont lift a finger to help the situation. we tried to get a dove hunting season to help raise revenue here in iowa and as useual it got denied. chet culver and tom harkin can both kiss my ass!!!!:mad:
 
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