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Hello again friends.

I'm Jason Edens, your host of Lakeland Currents.

Thanks for joining the conversation today and thanks for your ongoing support of Lakeland Public TV.

Deer hunting in Minnesota is an institution.

It's also a cherished time of year for friends and family across the state and beyond.

Few if any organizations know deer hunting and the associated conservation efforts as well as the Minnesota Deer Hunters Association.

Joining me today is it's Executive Director Craig Engwall.

Greg thanks for making time for our conversation.

Thanks for having me Jason.

Good to be here.

Absolutely.

Well, first of all as a deer hunter myself, it's my understanding that that the Minnesota Deer Hunters Association is a membership based organization.

Yes, we're a very grassroots organization.

We've been around for over 40 years now.

Prior to the pandemic, we had nearly 20 000 members.

It's a little hard to say how many members we have now because our membership was driven by banquets and those things and of course we shut those down.

But, we're back in full action and we look for people are very enthused and our membership will grow as we have those banquets around the state and those members come back.

Well, as a deer hunter myself why should I join?

Well, we do a lot for deer and deer hunters.

Our three main tenants are habitat.

We've raised millions of dollars in habitat projects, more than a million every year and our money stays local.

That separates us from some of the national organizations.

They do great things but our chapters are here.

Our money gets all spent in Minnesota and so we focus on habitat.

We also focus on advocacy for deer hunters.

I'm sure we'll be talking about chronic wasting disease.

I'm down at the capitol all the time when they're in session.

I'm working with counties now on what they can do to help protect deer.

So, we're there on all issues that are important to deer hunters and then we also focus on education.

We have Forkhorn camp excuse me Forkhorn camps around the state where we partner with environmental learning centers and have curriculum for youth from 11 to 17 every summer.

Week-long programs where they can learn about deer biology, how to hunt, how to shoot a gun, how to shoot a bow for older kids, muzzleloading.

So, those are the main pieces.

The advocacy, the habitat and education.

So, what is the status of the herd today and what are your long-term and short-term concerns?

Well, the status of the herd is pretty stable and Minnesota's so unique.

As we know, we're a large state and you go down to southeast and you've got the rolling hills and I live in northern Itasca County where you have the tamarack swamps and then you have the ag to forest transition in the middle and so you have very different populations of deer.

They're relatively scarce, I wouldn't say scarce but they're not as many deer say in my area where I hunt compared to the transition zone.

So, every part of the state is different.

Overall the herd is healthy.

The biggest long-term concern we have is chronic wasting disease which has taken root in southeast Minnesota and we have concerns right here in the Northland due to some activities pertaining to a farm that illegally disposed of carcasses that were positive.

So, I do want to ask about CWD.

In fact, it's my understanding that this year there's mandatory testing for CWD.

Is that correct?

That is correct and we're filming in Bemidji.

I happen to live about 50 miles from here.

Where I live and hunt is in the surveillance zone.

So I'll try to make it a short story but CWD exists both in the wild population and in what are called Cervid farms.

Those are where deer and elk are in basically farmed and treated like livestock.

There was a farm in the Winona County area that transported deer up to Beltrami County to another farm.

That's the way the business works and the deer on the Beltrami farm ended up being positive with CWD.

The operator of that farm instead of doing what he was supposed to do, then disposed of those carcasses on public land which has threatened the wild deer herd here and has led to a cascading event of things to try to protect the herd.

So DNR and I are working with the county.

This dump was on tax forfeited land, has erected a fence around 12 acres of land at significant expense and effort to try to keep the wild deer from being out in that area where those positive CWD deer were.

What's the risk to a hunter of consuming a deer that's been infected with CWD?

Has that happened?

Certainly people have consumed deer intentionally or not.

The CDC has recommended people not consume deer.

There's a lot of testing going on.

There's been no evidence to show that CWD can jump from deer or by the way too it CWD can be in deer, elk, in moose and caribou, reindeer.

It's the Cervid family it's called.

There's no evidence that it's jumped to humans.

There's concern that it could.

It's recommended that people not eat the meat but it's a brain disease, a prion-based disease similar to Scrapey in sheep and Mad Cow in those type of diseases.

So, it's it's something to be taken very seriously.

So, this new requirement insists that all tagged deer need to be tested immediately?

Tell us more about this new rule.

Yes, so in areas where CWD is present and here it's present we don't we pray hope and pray that no wild deer have gotten the disease from this spot but we know that captive deer on this farm were positive.

So, what DNR does then is they draw a radius around that area.

A rather large area and then on opening week and every deer hunter and hopefully I'm successful if I get a deer in my area.

I need to bring that to one of their stations and have the lymph nodes removed so it can be tested to see if it's CWD positive and then they surveil the area around there to see if there are any positives in the wild deer herd and they'll do that for three years.

So, how do hunters know where those stations are?

How do we find that out?

You can go to the DNR website that's in and it's also there's an insert in the the hard copy of the regs but the best place to go would be the DNR website and go to just Google Minnesota DNR and deer and you'll find it there and there's a good map.

They have a number of locations in this big area.

I'm in northwestern Itasca County but in the Walker area up north to Kelliher, they're they're stations all around.

So they're relatively easy to find.

Well, speaking of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, the DNR.

Do you consider the DNR an ally in your work?

We have to, we have to work together.

So we'll agree on a lot of things and we'll disagree at times.

So in deer management, people are very passionate about it.

What should be done?

Should there be antlerless permits in this area?

Should it be bucks only?

Everybody has an opinion and that's that can be healthy as long as people are respectful.

DNR has processes where deer hunters and groups like ours can offer our opinions and we have disagreed.

We, for example, after the cold, after the really disastrous winters of 2013 and 14 when the deer herd went down.

We wanted them to be more conservative in their licenses.

They weren't.

We disagreed.

We had a respectful disagreement.

Now the herd is coming back but we're working closely with them on we want to work together.

We need to work together.

So, as long as we're respectful in how we express ourselves, it's good.

We can disagree about wolf management.

There are a whole host of things but we keep the dialogue as professional As we can.

Are you satisfied with the DNR's response to CWD?

Is it adequate in your opinion?

Yes, we are we are satisfied with the DNR and I have to point out there are two parts to the CWD fight.

There's the wild deer issue and then there's this captive deer issue and the captive deer have previously been regulated by the Board of Animal Health.

We're not satisfied with how that's gone and it's been a legislative battle to increase regulations and we as a group and many people out there and it's a growing there's growing momentum to say that these farms do not work.

We have to work as a state to figure out a way to close the farms down and buy them out, appropriately compensate them but they are too high of a risk to the wild deer herd because there have been dozens of these sites that have had positive deer in them and in the wild deer herd around some of them, there have been positives as well and adjacent to that.

So, Craig you're also a lawyer?

Yes.

And, I understand that the Minnesota Deer Hunters Association does a lot of advocacy.

In fact, you mentioned that in your introductory comments.

What policies would you advocate for today and let's start with Cervid farms.

Are you saying that you would advocate for their elimination?

Yes.

We've proposed and we've had this position for a few years now where we'd want a moratorium on new farms.

A ban on movement of animals from farms to other farms both inter and intrastate and then a reasonable, it could be a phased buyout but of course the farmers need to be compensated for those livestock so they can transition into some other business on their farm.

So, we think that's very important.

The Beltrami County situation here has highlighted that.

It's become such a visible big issue that counties now are looking at putting in their own moratoriums in because the legislature hasn't.

So, I testified over in St. Louis County last month.

They have passed and they passed a resolution that called for the legislature to act and they've looked at their own zoning ordinance and are changing that to create a moratorium in St. Louis County.

Let's talk about other policies.

What about Antler Point Restrictions, for example.

What's your position on that?

Our organization has been opposed to those.

The state for a number of years has had APR as it's called - Antler Point Restrictions in the southeast.

There are other deer advocacy groups that supported them but here's one of the things that's happened with Chronic Wasting Disease being present down in the southeast.

Older bucks tend to carry CWD more than other deer and so to let those older bucks that are more likely to be positive stay on the landscape, they're shedding prions.

They're spreading the disease.

So, it's been agreed, even by proponents of APR, to take that away now in this area to harvest those bucks that are more susceptible or more likely to have CWD.

So for our viewers who aren't familiar with APR - Antler Point Restrictions, can you define that for us?

It is the the regulations in Minnesota, for instance, said that you can you about to harvest a buck it needs at least four valid points on one side of the rack at least.

And, our organization is at a long standing position against that.

I don't know if that's because we're more northern based.

The views in the state are very different.

In southeast Minnesota there's a lot more private land there.

There's a lot more trophy hunting.

Where I am in in the swamp country of northern Itasca County you're happy to see a deer.

So I do know that APR wouldn't be very popular where I hunt, for instance.

Well, speaking of that distinction between the north and the south, what's your position on wolf hunting?

Should there be a wolf hunt?

We have supported predator management and a wolf season.

We followed it for years and decades actually and the wolf in Minnesota has been recovered since the late 70s.

It was delisted.

The Feds delisted the wolf in the 2011.

Minnesota had seasons from about 2011 to 2013 or there were three seasons there.

The DNR managed a conservative season.

The wolf population stayed healthy.

We think they can do that.

We're not anti-wolf.

We're about looking at the Endangered Species Act.

The wolf recovered.

It's now at levels that it can be harvested and so we support a wolf season.

Is there a particular threshold at which you would no longer support predator management as you say?

Well, for the wolf, specifically, as part of the Endangered Species Act, there has to be a recovery plan.

That recovery plan called for at least, I think, specifically, fourteen hundred and fifty one to sixteen hundred wolves.

The wolf population in Minnesota is far above that.

It's been, it's exceeded that since the late 70s.

So, there are measurements and the DNR does an estimated population every year.

So, there are safeguards to protect that because we're not trying to eliminate it.

We just feel that it can be a managed season.

So, CWD isn't actually the only health care concern of the deer herd.

There's also EHD, Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease.

Yes.

And they're very different.

They both can be very fatal.

CWD is always fatal and that's a brain disorder and you can have a deer with CWD that looks completely healthy and it just hasn't had the effects of it yet.

So, ultimately it attacks the central nervous system, creates holes in the brain and it's a very bad disease and always fatal.

EHD is passed by a midge basically like a gnat or a flea and it is seasonal.

Once we have frost up here in the northland, there's no threat of EHD for the season and so the bug passes the disease.

It makes the deer feverish.

They're very thirsty.

That's why they often are found dead in water holes but that is much more of a transmissible disease by a bug.

So, they're different.

They're both fatal but with EHD, you don't have this ongoing threat of spread.

I mean you can almost view CWD in some ways like Emerald Ash Borer or one of these diseases that you're trying to contain it because you can't eradicate it once it's established.

Interesting.

So, you mentioned that you have 20,000 members.

Is that correct?

That's right.

But there are about 500,000 deer hunters in Minnesota I read on your website?

Yes, that's correct.

That's what 10 percent of the population almost.

It is.

It's and there's a great hunting heritage in Minnesota.

Minnesota is one of the biggest deer states and I've lived that tradition myself.

When my grandpa and dad took me to deer camp and taught me.

And, fortunately, now at it's moms and dads and sons and daughters and the largest growing segment is women and young girls in the hunting community and that's that's a great thing.

It's no more the guys just going to camp and we've got to work on changing that and continuing that.

I want to ask you more about that.

How diverse is Minnesota's deer hunting community?

It's not really diverse but it's becoming more diverse and needs to change.

If you went back, some statistics, let's say 10 years ago, it was like maybe seven percent of our members were female.

That is changing and I think these youth hunts and other, there's their programs DNR has like Becoming Outdoors Women and it's about access and opportunity and that's increasing and we've got to keep it increasing because really as many hunters as there are in Minnesota, overall it's usually only about six percent of the public that hunts nationwide.

And, so what are you doing to increase diversity?

Offering programs, mentored hunts, different things.

Partnering with DNR.

DNR has and these are national programs called R3 which stands for Recruitment, Retention and Reactivation and so there's curriculum out there.

There are ways to do it.

We can, we need, we always need mentors.

So if anybody's interested in mentoring young hunters or adult hunters.

We're also trying to bring in people who are interested, who've never had that life experience.

Whatever their interest.

It might be that they're interested in natural food now.

You never know what draws people in but we always can use mentors and they can always get a hold of us at our website is mndeerhunters.com and we're always looking for people to join us and become mentors.

Tell us more about this youth hunt.

I was curious how MDHA is supporting youth hunters.

Well, we promote it.

So, DNR has a season now that's expanded.

So, that it's basically statewide.

Now it used to be in certain areas and so we support that.

We've got resolutions saying our organization is in favor of it and we're trying to get people to take their their youth out on those that season and having it over the MEA weekend makes it accessible for a lot of families because the kids are off and so we encouraged that.

We do mentored hunts.

We support DNR in that effort and we we hope it takes hold and the numbers are they're good.

I don't have them off the top of my head but they're readily available from DNR.

So, tell me more about Hides for Habitat program.

If I drop off a hide at one of your collection sites, how does that become revenue for the Minnesota Deer Hunter's Association?

That is just it's a wonderful program because it is Hides for Habitat but another way to look at it, it's a recycling system too and we've had that program in place for 35 years now and it's amazing.

We've collected nearly a million hides and we've raised about 5.7 million dollars for Habitat.

So, hunters can in it again I keep pointing out our website mndeerhunters.com but we have an interactive map where people can type in their address and they can see where our boxes are.

So, they should be looking for the orange boxes that have our label on it to donate their hides during the firearm season and what we do is we collect those.

So, each chapter collects those and we sell them to hide buyers and we take that money and we turn that into habitat.

So, we use that to do projects.

Where the hides go, actually even GUCCI buys deer hides.

So, yeah the hide buyers process them.

They'll go overseas.

Off into China, Vietnam or the Philippines.

But, those processed deer hides get turned into leather products in Italy and so there are gloves here.

You see gloves everywhere, leather, you know, the leather gloves.

But they also go into fine products so that GUCCI is a buyer of deer hides.

Interesting.

So, Minnesota deer hides are literally distributed around the planet and that creates more deer hunting habitat here.

Correct.

And this is an innovation of your organization?

Did it start with MDHA?

It started, yeah I mean I'm not familiar with any other.

It's been a formal program since 1985 or 87 maybe with 86 or 87 right in there.

But, for instance our Thief River chapter has a refrigerated truck.

They do thousands of hides and they salt them.

Some chapters salt.

It's evolved but old school some are still doing it where they salt them.

Some they have crews of people who salt thousands of hides.

They then deliver them to the hide buyers and then now in more recent times the hIde buyers will pick up the hides.

So, people you can't get as many people who are interested in doing the intensive work of salting hides and doing all that but we still can collect them and the hide buyers will pick them up from our boxes.

So, originally, at one point MDHA had to find these buyers and actually create this market?

Yes.

Well the buyers were out there but we created a source for them that made a lot of sense for them because we could funnel them in and make it easy for them to pick them up.

So it's just it's a win-win because, otherwise people are throwing those away.

So, that's why I call it a recycling program as well as a habitat generating program.

Sure.

So you're a non-profit organization.

We are a 501c3.

And you also spend a lot of time advocating for various policies as we've discussed.

What percentage of your revenue is spent on that activity?

That's a good question.

We have a a lobbyist.

We put him he's full-time in as a lobbyist.

We pay part of his, we're one of his clients.

But I'm down there a lot during the session.

For those who aren't familiar with Minnesota politics, the legislative session typically runs one year.

It'll be from January to May.

The next year will be March to May and so we spend a lot of time there.

It's an investment of several hundred thousand dollars but we also work on the advocacy.

It's important for our members to be calling their representatives and expressing their views.

So, for instance on Chronic Wasting Disease, if there's a bill that's really important say come this session, we will give them the information about what it is and they can be very, it's more effective to have grassroots members advocating for this than it is for me as an executive director or a lobbyist.

They want to hear from their constituents.

That's the best way to do it.

But we can help them get the information and we can help move things along and I can testify at the Capitol on those issues.

But the best way to be effective is to have an individual member call their individual representative or senator.

And what would you encourage those callers to say?

Now, I mean it's, there will be legislation that proposes a moratorium on operations.

So, we'll let them know what's there.

It's to give them precision if you will.

But just to say we want to a message as simple as we want to do everything we can to protect the wild deer herd and all that it means to Minnesota is the most effective thing they can do.

Because if you look at it, I saw in Commissioner Stroman's letter the other day that deer hunting and its side benefits, its economic effects it's 1.3 billion dollars per year.

So, you have the direct effect from the licenses.

You have taxes on merchandise.

You have people buying gas in communities.

People buying, going to the restaurants, staying in lodging and the the broad effect of deer hunting is 1.3 billion dollars a year.

That's remarkable.

So, speaking of 1.3 billion dollars, where do you get your revenue?

How does MDHA operate?

Is it exclusively from membership dues or what are your other sources of revenue?

So, our operational funding to pay my salary and our staff to do the things we do comes from our memberships.

So, an individual adult membership is 35 dollars a year.

People can buy lifetime memberships.

There are youth memberships.

That's a core function and when they go to banquets they're buying those memberships too.

So, we have 50 to 60 banquets around the state a year.

About 70 percent of our membership comes from that.

We also raise millions of dollars in grants.

We, that doesn't fund us.

That buys the land, that plants the trees, that puts the bud caps on the trees.

So we're using the operational dollars to have our grants coordinator, to have me to do different things, working on getting the habitat work done on the ground.

So it's a combination of seeking grants but to fund what we do comes from our memberships.

So we truly are grassroots, about 60 chapters all around the state.

So, let's zoom back out.

You describe your organization as a conservation organization.

How so?

Because we are making an impact, a direct impact on the land in the work we do and it's not just about deer.

What rallies us together is a single species white-tailed deer but when we put in, when we protect for instance, we had a three and a half million dollar project where we got a grant.

Potlatch had been selling forest lands that had been converted to agricultural uses and the habitat was being destroyed and so we sought a grant to buy that land.

So, we acquired almost 2,300 acres of land in Hubbard and Cass County.

We turned that over to the counties.

We donated that to the counties to be managed by their land departments to be to stay in habitat but to be managed as active forest lands.

So the county got an economic benefit and we opened it up to the public for hunting.

It had not been opened before.

So, that's an example of on the ground, protecting the land, protecting the water because in the pineland sands it's a very porous area where chemicals and things can permeate the soil.

So, we kept working forest lands working and providing habitat for deer and other species.

And we do that all around too with smaller projects and our partners, our chapters will partner and have match money and we'll do what, we'll do buckthorn removal is a project.

We'll do tree planting.

We'll create wildlife openings.

They're just a whole host of things that we do with that money.

Let's talk about the next generation of hunters.

You mentioned your Forkhorn camps earlier at Deep Portage Environmental Learning Center, for example.

What exactly happens there?

So, they're there for a week.

There are some camps now that I'm in and this happened during the pandemic as well, when they're trying to work their way back, there's there are some day camps.

But the traditional camps have been a week-long camp at Laurentian, at Deep Portage.

There's seven of them around the state.

I'm sorry for not naming them all.

But so they're three different levels Forkhorn, one, two and three and they started with 11 year olds and the first camp might teach them how to use a gun, might teach them about deer biology, might teach them how to use a compass.

Just a whole it's like a really fun camp that has a deer-oriented focus but it's much broader than that and then as they go up in two and three they're more advanced.

They can get their certification for archery.

They can shoot a muzzleloader maybe at the third level and so it's a chance to be away from home, have a fun summer opportunity but learn a lot and the Environmental Learning Centers are such a tremendous partner.

Long Lake and Aiken County is another one that's just great too.

Sure.

Well we only have about a minute left and I'm curious.

A lot of non-hunters throw darts at the hunting community.

What's one common misconception about deer hunting that you would like to dispel if possible today?

I would say that some people may think we're all about going out and hunting deer and getting trophies and that's all we care about and as I've kind of laid out, I hope I've laid out that we're much more about habitat and doing things that benefit all species out there that do as we have diminishing habitat and things happening.

We're keeping things on the ground and creating new habitat and working with our county and state and federal partners collectively to protect our wildlife and do a broad range of things.

So, I would say and I'm sure we do have a lot of members who don't even deer hunt, who appreciate that aspect of our mission, that we're out there doing things on the ground that benefit pollinators.

As I said our state is very diverse from forest lands to prairie and we'll partner with the Pheasants Forever down in the southwest and we'll partner with the Rough Grouse Society up in the north central part of the state.

We'll partner with the Nature Conservancy and other groups to do great things.

So, we're much more than a hunting group.

Well, Craig I want to thank you so much for helping us better understand the Minnesota Deer Hunters Association and thank you for your time today.

Thank you for having me.

Absolutely.

Look forward it and I wish everybody a safe happy hunting season.

Thank you and I want to thank all of you for joining me once again.

I'm Jason Edens, your host of Lakeland Currents.

Be kind and be well.

We'll see you next week.