Question Larry: Why doesn't Iowa still harvest over a million birds a year or out-pace SD today?
I'll answer it for you. It's simple, The loss of CRP acreage, or put another way, the loss of quality habitat.
All states are suffering from the same loss of CRP. The difference in South Dakota is the commercial operations that recognize the value of quality habitat and the raising & releasing thousands of birds into it every year.
Actually dogon, in the case of the recent decline in Iowa pheasant numbers, it isn't mostly CRP. I'm in the process of doing an article on the subject as I write this. We've lost in the 10-20% range, total CRP acres, from our all-time high. However, the NATURE of those acres has changed from a lot of big fields in our very best pheasant areas to a lot of buffer strips along waterways. And most of the remaining big fields are in southern Iowa, where pheasant numbers have been down for quite some time.
Add to that the general loss of non-govt acres: hay ground, small grains, etc. Add to that the fact that the size of the average Iowa farm about doubled from 1960-2007, which means fewer fencerows. Add to that the concentration of livestock farming, which means you don't need any fences at all if you're running a confinement operation, or if you don't have any livestock.
But the real killer for us was weather. Our harvest was still 1.1 million birds in 2003. But then, from 07-11, we had an average of at least 30" of snow every year, followed by 3 springs in which we had over 8" of rain (and the other 2 were very close). We'd never had 5 years' worth of weather like that. The harvest declined from about 3/4 million to just over 100,000 last year.
Remember, we used to top SD every year without commercial operations releasing thousands of birds. Why? Because we had more CRP than they did, of the right kind, and we caught weather breaks they didn't catch. (SD is even more vulnerable to bad winters than is IA, but not nearly as vulnerable to wet springs because the overall climate is significantly drier.)
The nature of the land--wetter, more fertile--means that Iowa has the potential to be significantly more intensively farmed than SD. And when commodity prices are high, as they are now, it will be. And when the feds are looking at cutting CRP across the board by something like 20-25% by 2017, we're all going to take a hit.
Conclusion: the long-range future of pheasant hunting isn't very rosy.
