Can't agree that owning land is the future of hunting. If it is, we're looking at a sport of the wealthy, and that's never been the tradition in the US of A. Example: The farm on which I live (I own only the farmstead) was just auctioned off. Let's suppose Brown wanted to convert it from growing row crops to growing pheasants. How much would I have paid for the nearly 160 acres? Final sale price: $5630/acre. You do the math. I could've bought the farm across the road a couple years back. About 100 acres, about half CRP, lots of pheasants, deer, pond with waterfowl. That would've only set me back something shy of $300,000--a real bargain. And in fact, the individual who bought it did so primarily for hunting purposes. He also owns a half section, again with some good habitat, directly adjacent to that farm. But he has the means to make those kinds of deals. I don't. So I hunt on land adjacent to his, thanks to the generosity of my other neighbors that own and farm it, and I reap the spillover bounty. No one tells those pheasants they can't go across a property line to eat a little corn if they wish.
Private land is one answer to the hunting issue. However, consider this: Due to the price of corn (fueled mainly by the boom in ethanol), projections are that 1.3 million acres of CRP ground--mostly excellent bird hunting habitat--will be put back into row crop production by 2010, just in the states of IA and the Dakotas. That's something on the order of 15% of the total CRP enrollment for those 3 states. And that's all on PRIVATE land.
So sure, if you can afford to buy CRP ground, or ground that qualifies for CRP, go ahead and do it. Save every acre you can. On the other hand, you can also travel to states with both excellent bird hunting AND a lot of public land. I'm fortunate enough to live within a day's drive of a bunch of those states, even though IA--although we have pretty good pheasant hunting--has little public land. So every year, I load up the dogs, jump in the pickup, and head to Michigan's UP to hunt grouse and woodcock, and to ND to hunt sharptails. I could also go to northern WI or MN, or to SD. I sure wouldn't want to blow my hunting budget by buying 50 acres of land in Iowa, if that meant I'd no longer be able to afford to travel other places and hunt other birds.
