Fee Hunting May Boost Farm Income, Wildlife Habitat
Daniel
Hellerstein
Hunting is a recreation activity that mostly
occurs on private land, where the right to hunt
is controlled by landowners. In most cases, such
use of private land is arranged through personal
contacts. However, some U.S. landowners market hunting
opportunities by managing wildlife on their property
and charging hunters a fee to access their land.
In their attempts to provide hunting experiences
worth paying for, these landowners may also provide
a public service for those who value wildlife for
reasons other than hunting.
Access to private land for hunting is becoming
more limited, helping to explain recent declines
in hunting participation rates, as measured by
the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service.
Encouraging more landowners to offer fee hunting
can offset this trend, providing enhanced opportunities
to hunters while augmenting landowners’ income.
But could fee hunting also benefit game and non-game
species by encouraging landowners to make improvements
in wildlife habitat?
To explore this issue, ERS recently examined the
implications of expanded fee hunting on land enrolled
in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). The
CRP retires environmentally sensitive cropland
from production and pays the owners to plant conservation
cover. The ERS study considers a nationwide program
similar to existing State programs (such as those
in Kansas and South Dakota) that encourage landowners
to grant hunters access to their land.
The impacts of such a program were simulated using
the CRP “Likely To Bid” Model, which
ERS developed jointly with USDA’s Farm Service
Agency. When combined with an estimate of the demand
for wildlife-based recreation within each county,
the model predicts changes in the type and geographic
distribution of land enrolled in the CRP as landowners
take fee hunting opportunities into account.
The ERS study found that hunting fees increase
landowners’
willingness to participate in the CRP by supplementing
CRP rental payments. An estimated 3 million acres,
or 8 percent of all CRP land, would shift into counties
where hunting demand is greatest. CRP payments in
these counties increase by about 10 percent, reflecting
both greater enrollment and higher rental rates
due to an approximately 25-percent increase in the
wildlife attributes of land enrolled.
In
essence, where feasible, hunting fees motivate
landowners to install wildlife-friendly land-use
practices. On land that is eligible for the CRP,
improving wildlife habitat increases the likelihood
of being accepted into the program, allowing landowners
to receive CRP and hunting fee income. Elsewhere,
landowners may find that by improving wildlife
habitat, they can provide higher quality hunting
experiences—thereby generating higher hunting
fee income.
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