- Hello everyone, welcome to "Michigan Out Of Doors."

I'm Jenny Ciolek, and we're glad you're here this week because we've got a brand new show headed your way.

Jordan will show us a project he's been working on for habitat improvement through the CRP program.

Lots of good information there.

You wanna make sure you check that out.

And Jimmy's got a very unique story headed our way this week too.

- Well, that's right, Jenny.

We do have another story on this week's show.

We're actually gonna kick off this week's episode by visiting with a sportsman who has a complete collection of all of the successful deer hunting patches here in the state of Michigan.

Really cool story, really great guy as well.

And you're gonna hear some fun hunting stories along the way.

Make sure you stay tuned, I'm Jimmy Gretzinger.

It's time for "Michigan Out Of Doors."

♪ From the first spring rains to the soft summer breeze ♪ ♪ Dancing on the pine forest floor ♪ ♪ The autumn colors catch your eyes ♪ ♪ Here come the crystal winter skies ♪ ♪ It's Michigan, Michigan out of doors ♪ - [Jimmy] What a beautiful day in the woods.

♪ Some day our children all will see ♪ ♪ This is their finest legacy ♪ ♪ Wonder and the love of Michigan ♪ ♪ As the wind comes whispering through the trees ♪ ♪ The sweet smell of nature's in the air ♪ ♪ From the Great Lakes to the quiet streams ♪ ♪ Shining like a sportsman's dream ♪ ♪ It's a love of Michigan we all share ♪ - [Announcer 1] "Michigan Out Of Doors" is presented by.

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(placid music) (upbeat music) - Well, people ask me all the time, how do we come up with stories for the television show?

And most of those are driven by the season of what's going on around our state, whether that's hunting and fishing or anything outdoor related, but we also get a lot of stories from you, the viewer.

And this next story, we're gonna sit down with Bob Neeley.

He contacted me just a few weeks back to tell me about his collection of successful deer hunting patches and that he had all of them all the way back to 1972.

And I thought, you know what?

I need to check this out for myself.

(upbeat music) When Bob Neeley reached out to tell me about his complete collection of successful deer hunting patches, well, I knew I needed to head to Monroe and see how this collection came to be.

- My dad was born and raised in Tennessee, came to Michigan shortly after the Depression, and actually came to Monroe with a nickel in his pocket and called his brother, said, "Come pick me up."

So he was from South, my mom was from Southern Ohio and we grew up on Michigan Avenue, which is an older part of the city.

My dad always hunted and fished when he was a youngster and taught me how to hunt and fish when I was a kid.

One thing I did not do and he did not do at the time was when I was growing up, is he was not much of a deer hunter.

He liked to pheasant hunt, loved to rabbit hunt, and loved to perch fish out on lake Erie.

And we spent many an hour out on Lake Erie together.

But over the years he worked at the Consolidated Paper company and a couple of his friends over there talked him into starting the deer hunt.

Well, the first year he went, he was hooked.

After a couple of years he says, "I want you to join me."

So I joined a group of guys and I started hunting like I think it was either '74 or '75.

This will be 50 years for me that I've been hunting.

And you can see, I kind of remember the deer by the patch from that year.

This is the cartridge I used, the .30-06.

My dad had bought me the gun, and this is a picture of my dad, myself, and a deer.

So that came from Curran, Michigan.

The wood ducks came from Bay Creek Hunt Club, which is a good friend invited me to go hunting at Bay Creek Hunt Club.

And I went out there and I wanted to remember my times at Bay Creek from, but with the mounds.

This is a wild turkey that came from Hillsdale.

And Joe Robeson, a good friend of mine at the DNR says, "You count the longest two strands of the beard," and I think it's about 12 inches.

So that was a big bird.

But Joe's been a good friend all these years too.

These deer all came from Michigan.

This one came from Millersburg, this one came from Millersburg.

This was my first eight point in the state of Michigan, excuse me, it's a seven point, but it was the first big deer that I got.

And it was a horrible year that year.

We had three feet of snow and had to be pulled outta camp by a tractor because we couldn't get out.

But that's all the memories of the hunt.

- [Jimmy] The memory of the hunt is really at the heart of Bob's collection.

And I was really excited to learn how he started collecting these patches along the way.

- The patch program, I did not know originally, but the patch program actually started in 1972.

And I've got all the patches, I've displayed 'em in a book.

I thought about putting 'em on a plaque, but anytime you put something on a plaque, it fades over time with sunlight.

And I wanted to be able to look at these and always remember 'em the way they were.

But it started in 1972 and in the early days, when there was a deer check station by Bay City, everybody coming down north on I-75 would pull into the station and get their deer checked.

It was the right thing to do, it help the DNR, and as a reward, as an incentive, the DNR gave you one of these patches.

Well, in early days, the group of guys I hunted with, most of 'em were older at the time, my dad and some other guys we hunted with, they really didn't want to do that to sit and wait in line.

But I said, "You know, we gotta do this."

So we did it for a few years and I got a couple of the early patches and then just, it was too cumbersome for them to do that.

So we would drive on home.

So I didn't collect for a period of time.

And then as time went on, I said, "You know, I'm gonna start collecting the patches, you know, when I was successful getting a deer," and I started picking them up again.

Then it got to be a little bit of a passion over the years.

And with that passion, I wanted to try to fill in the years that I was successful getting a deer, but I we didn't have the opportunity to stop and pick up a patch.

So I was, over the past three or four years, anybody I talked to, I said, "You know where to find one of these?

You know anybody I can talk to?"

And fortunately, I've got a lot of good friends that helped me facilitate and fill in the blanks that I didn't have before.

- [Jimmy] It was really something to look back and see the variety of the patches through the years.

- [Bob[ The first patch was 1972, and you'll notice that in 1973, you can see in 1973, it has a year on it, 1972 was the only year that the year date did not show up.

What is the reason?

Don't know, but the pattern, the display, the picture was basically a buck and a doe, which is Michigan Natural Resources.

And then it became Successful Deer Hunting patch in 1973.

So the first three patches were before I started hunting.

I started hunting in 1975.

1975 patch was probably one of the smallest patches, and it is one of the most difficult to locate.

I mean, that was the last patch that I was able to find.

And actually my son-in-law, Alex Shaw from Allendale, Michigan, was able to find it.

And he sent it to me as a Christmas present.

So it's one of my most precious patches and I appreciate what he did to find it for me.

In 1976, I mean, you can see everyone is unique.

Everyone is different.

I was hunting in Harrisville, Michigan for '75, '76, 1977.

These were the years that I had the opportunity to hunt on public land in Harrisville.

1978, 1979, 1980, 1981.

And by this time, our group had switched and we started hunting in Millersburg, Michigan.

There was a good friend that had some property up there and he was kind enough to allow us to hunt in Millersburg.

And 1982, this is my first big deer that I got in the state of Michigan.

It was an eight point and I thought I died and went to heaven.

So 1983, and you can buy online.

And I have these framed down in my lower area, but you can buy online.

There are posters that go 10 years at a time.

So I took pictures of the posters and I just used it to help facilitate the collection in my book.

1984, 1985, I was still hunting in Millersburg, Michigan.

We ended up there until the late '80s.

1986, and you can see the shape, the design, the patterns, the colors of the patches changed from year to year.

1987, most of the guys in the early days, at least the ones that I hung around with, if they were successful getting a deer, '88, '89, if they were successful getting the deer, they had them sewn under their hunting coat.

So it's not uncommon to see a fellow walking through the woods, and he had two or three or four or five patches sewed onto his jacket.

And that was just kind of to commemorate and remember the good times of the hunting.

And 1997 is when we started hunting in Curran, Michigan.

Myself and a group of guys, we had a friend that had some property in Curran and he invited us to hunt up there.

And that was a beautiful piece of property, beautiful piece.

Here is '98, '99.

(birds chirping) It is hard to believe that the deer patches have been around that long.

Before the deer patches, there were metal tags that went on the antler of the deer.

And if you go into some of the local taverns up north, that they've got an old mount hanging on a wall, it's not uncommon to see a metal tag hanging on the deer.

And that was until 1972 when the cloth patches came out.

Beautiful patches, I mean, the artistry on 'em, the colors.

2003, one of my favorite here.

I was hunting in Hillsdale, Michigan here, and that's probably one of the nicest deer I got, and I was hunting with my brother and a good friend.

We owned the property in Hillsdale.

Tracy Oberliter and I owned that land and I still remember that and all the stories on the phone we had about that.

This is 2004.

(plastic rustling) But they're absolutely unique, they're absolutely beautiful.

Why collect them?

I collect them because they remind me of all the good times that I had in hunting over 50 years in Michigan.

I think Michigan's the greatest state in the country to hunt and fish.

And you don't have to be in private land.

A number of these deer were taken on public land.

I started hunting, I didn't know where to start, what to do, borrowed everything I had, and over the years, just develop the skills and learned how to be a better hunter.

Always ethical hunter, I always believed in the ethics of hunting, a camaraderie with friends, the fellowship, 2014, 2015, and this is the year my dad passed away.

And I always remember that because it was a special year that he was able to join us on his last year to hunt.

- [Jimmy] The patch program did have a few years where the design was done by hunters, but for the most part, the designs came from within the department.

Finding the last few years for Bob and for other collectors can be hard to do.

- A complete collection such as what I have, and I know two older fellows in the state of Michigan, and they've spent a lifetime collecting them too.

And they share the same memories that I do about their family and their friends that they hunted with.

But I know two other people and it is taken them a lifetime to collect it.

But lately it's become, you rely on family and friends, I mean, if I was missing a year that I either didn't get a deer that year or I needed it to help fill in my collection, I would just talk to family and friends and they would help direct me to where I could find one.

It's been a great experience, a lot of fun to collect these and hope I can continue to hunt for a few more years and continue to collect the patches because they've given me a lot of good memories.

- [Jimmy] The memory of the hunts over the years are very special.

And thanks to Bob for sharing some of his with all of us right here in "Michigan's Out Of Doors."

(upbeat music) - A few months back I started a large scale habitat project on our property in Ionia County, utilizing a well-known program in this part of the state, the Conservation Reserve Program or CRP.

In an effort to highlight some of the benefits of this program, I decided to capture each step along the way.

All right, it is April 26th, heading out to the property this morning to plant a whole bunch of trees, about a little over 1,200 in total, mostly spruce trees.

We do have some white pines we're gonna plant and a handful of red oak, white oak and sugar maple.

So this is all part of the ongoing CRP project we're working on.

And this is a big part of it.

It's been a busy week, been all over the state filming steelhead fishing and bass fishing and a bunch of stuff going on and back home now to get these trees in the ground.

A couple weeks from now we'll put the native grasses in.

But getting these trees in is kind of priority number one.

A little cold, kind of windy today, but we gotta get 'em in.

So we're gonna get started here in a few minutes.

Get out to the property, gotta cut all the roots back, get ready to put these things in the ground.

But big part of the CRP process here and once we get 'em in the ground, we'll just be doing the rain dance and really hoping that we hit the timing well because it makes a big difference with these trees.

(machine droning) I purchased about half of the trees needed for this project from our local county tree sale.

The remaining trees came from Cold Stream Farm in northern Michigan where I was able to get my hands on some slightly bigger transplants, which was a priority for this project.

We're doing all transplants, so no seedlings.

So all the trees that we're gonna be putting in the ground are two to three foot, somewhere in there, give 'em a better chance to survive off the bat, and also a better chance to make it through with the deer.

So I'm hoping the deer will leave the spruce alone.

That's why I decided to plant mostly spruce.

The white pine will probably have the cage and then all the hardwoods we'll probably put tree tubes on.

So this is a big part of the project.

We're gonna be doing the native grasses and switch grass here in a couple weeks.

But getting trees in the ground is probably the most labor intensive part of this.

So hopefully by the end of the day, all these trees are somewhere in the ground and we can kind of check off the first part of the CRP project.

The CRP has been around for decades and although many people have heard of it, most people don't really know what it's about.

During this process, I was able to sit down with a couple of folks from the FSA to learn more about the program and its history.

- Conservation Reserve Program has been in effect since 1985.

It was put in by the United States Department of Agriculture and the Farm Service Agency is the agency that implements that program.

So we are celebrating 40 years of CRP and the whole plan is that it takes sensitive areas that need protecting and takes them out of production and puts them into a conservation cover crop that will allow them to avoid erosion, sediment getting indoor streams, such as that, and it also creates wildlife habitat that's very beneficial.

So there are a lot of good reasons to do this and it's amazing how much runoff it stops, how much sediment it stops from going into our waterways, and also the fertilizer, and that cuts down on algae blooms and all those things.

So for our Great Lakes, everything that gets into the stream gets to the Great Lakes eventually.

And we're protecting all of that.

- [Jordan] Although there are a lot of benefits to the Conservation Reserve Program, not all properties qualify and there's limited availability for those that do.

There's two primary signups for those interested in the program.

- So with CRP, it can be on a first come, first serve basis.

If we're doing something that's in a general signup, that's actually nationally competitive, so that is actually ranked on the erodibility index.

So depending on, you know, the more highly erodable the land is, the more likely it is to be enrolled and accepted under that program.

When we look at setting annual rental payments for folks to enroll, we look at the three most predominant soils on the ground.

So that's what comes up with our average as far as to offer for folks for those annual incentives.

So a general sign up, we only have an offering for that.

We just ended one.

That's actually something that there's just a period typically maybe a four to six week enrollment period and it is a very competitive process and that is done nationally.

So the higher the erodibility is on a farm, the more likely it is to get accepted.

A continuous signup, we do those on a continuous basis.

Right now we are reaching our national statutory cap.

We're batching to make sure that we don't exceed that programmatic authority that we have in place.

Those, we have a tendency to look at what's more environmentally sensitive.

- After one very long day of planting trees, we managed to get them all in the ground.

We took a few days off after that, coming back later in the week to plant the fire breaks and one small food plot.

From there, we had to wait a few weeks for warmer weather to plant the native grasses using a drill that we rented from the county.

(upbeat music) (seeds rustling) So today we're out here for phase two of our CRP project, well, kind of phase three I guess.

First thing we did was kind of prep the ground and plant trees, and that was a few weeks ago.

Had a bunch of family members out here, had the kiddos out here, spent all day planting about 1,200 trees.

Once we finished up the trees, then I planted the fire breaks and I planted one of the food plots.

As part of this program we're allowed to have 10% of the property into food plots.

So we have 16 acres that we're turning into CRP here.

That means we could have 1.6 acres of food plot.

So I spread that out over two different areas.

I planted the first one into clover, so that one's already done, taken care of.

And the second one will be brassicas that we'll do later in the summer.

But today we're out here for kind of that third phase I guess.

And that's the native grasses and that's really the bulk of this project.

The CRP that we enrolled in fell under the Michigan Pheasant and Monarch Recovery Project, which has a unique set of objectives and guidelines for what needs to be included in the native grass mix.

- So with the Monarch and Pheasant Safe Recovery Program, that was developed not only obviously for those two focal species, but a lot of other focal species that are both of economic significance or even like significance as far as with hunting and things like that.

Or it might be even to go out for visual.

So think of things like Henslow's Sparrows, those will come in on there.

You have the optics and two of those native grasses and you have a lot of wild flowers planted out there, right?

So throughout the season, you have flowers out there in those fields and you're seeing different insects and different birds.

And so you're not just getting one type or one variety, you're getting a very diverse cover with a very diverse species out there coming in on these landscapes.

Our grasses that are developed on that program, we work very closely with the Natural Resources and Conservation Service and as well as the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

So those are developed specifically by those folks or that list.

And then we will get down to what specifically your soil types are as far as what will thrive best out there in those situations.

- There was several reasons why we really wanted to do this project.

You know, first off, this is where we're building our home, this is where we're gonna be.

You know, having the opportunity to plant trees and work on habitat stuff, you know?

As a kid, that was like the dream is to have some property where you could do this kind of stuff.

And we've been so fortunate to end up with what we have and now we have the opportunity, you know, doing 16 acres here this year into CRP is, it's just really cool to be able to kind of manage it how you want.

And of course deer hunting's extremely important to me and that's something that my family and I love to do, but this project was about more than deer hunting.

It's really about turning fields that probably should have never been farmed back into something that, you know, we can use from a hunting standpoint, but just from a wildlife standpoint, to have this grass in here.

You know, it's gonna be good for the deer, it's gonna be good for the songbirds, it's gonna be good for maybe pheasants someday if we're lucky.

Just kind of all around, you know, big benefit for the habitat here and I'm looking forward to these trees growing up, but I'm also looking forward to having a good stand of grass here and something that's a little bit unique to the area.

So trees in the ground, phase one, food plots and firebreaks after that, and then native grass is here today and hopefully this is all gonna work out, we'll have a good summer and a good growing season, but really looking forward to see how this project progresses and hopefully hunting out here and exploring out here for years to come.

(upbeat music) - Thanks for joining us this week for "Michigan Out Of Doors."

Make sure you come back in upcoming weeks, lots of great things headed your way.

We'll take you out for late spring action on Lake Michigan.

We'll also check out some sturgeon research that's happening right now, and we'll take a trip to the Keweenaw Peninsula.

If you'd like to see where we are and what we're up to, you can always check us out online.

- Well, that's right, Jenny.

Online is a good way to kinda keep tabs on us and probably Instagram and Facebook are the best two ways to see what we're up to on a day-to-day basis.

Make sure you are getting out and enjoying everything our state has to offer.

And if we don't see in the woods or on the water, hopefully you'll see you right back here next week on your PBS station.

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(upbeat music) Closed captioning brought to you by DD Ranch Foundation, a nonprofit 501C3 foundation working to make hunting and fishing accessible for those with disabilities.

(upbeat music) ♪ When I wonder far away ♪ ♪ A dream stays with me night and day ♪ ♪ It's the road that leads to my home state ♪ ♪ I am a Michigan man ♪ ♪ Changing seasons paint the sea ♪ ♪ Like rainbow trout in a hidden stream ♪ ♪ The whitetail deer in the tall pine trees ♪ ♪ I am a Michigan man ♪ ♪ I am, I am a Michigan man ♪ ♪ That where I'm from and I'll show you my hands ♪ ♪ Lord above, I love this land ♪ ♪ I am a Michigan man ♪ (upbeat music continues) ♪ From the Keweenaw down to St. Joe ♪ ♪ Kalamazoo, east to Monroe, to St. Marie and back again ♪ ♪ I am a Michigan man ♪ ♪ I am, I am a Michigan man ♪ ♪ That's where I'm from, and I'll show you my hands ♪ ♪ Lord above, I love this land ♪ ♪ I am a Michigan man ♪ (bright music)