The 2025 Doe Harvest Challenge has been a success on the shore.
EASTERN SHORE, Md. – The 2025 Doe Harvest Challenge has been a success. The hope for the Eastern Shore Farm Bureau is to help control the deer population.
Dorchester Farm Bureau Committee member, Lin Spicer, believes the imbalance between doe and bucks has caused the issues. “In a perfect world, you’d have one doe, per one buck. Well, I don’t know what the ratio is, it might be 30 to 1, instead of 1 to 1.”
Farmers across the Eastern Shore have lost thousands of dollars to deer herds, destroying their crops. The impact is the reason the challenge was created.
President of the Wicomico Farm Bureau, Steve Hurley, is pleased with the turnout. “It looks like we’re going to hit 400 deer harvested through the 4 counties. Very happy about that, this will be our best year yet.”
One of the goals of the challenge is to involve more children. Thus, the local farm bureau offered a youth category for child hunters. Hurley knows that more collaboration will be a long-term benefit for growth. “It helps the youth understand the problems we’re dealing with, not only the farming community, but also understanding more about limes disease.”
Currently, farmers face various problems. One of the biggest is the deer herd. The expectation is this challenge will mitigate that. Spicer tells WMDT, they’ve tried reaching out to the Department of Natural Resources for solutions. However, the ideas DNR proposed are not feasible. They said to put a fence around these crops. Well, if you figure out what it’ll cost to put a deer fence around a couple thousand acres, you’d be busted before you get your fence up.”
The local bureau hopes the farm industry will thrive in 2025. We want to manage deer herd, not annihilate deer herd. We got to have a happy medium here.” Said Spicer.
On Monday, January 13th, there will be at least 12 $1,000 tickets drawn, 3 for each county. For more information, click here.
