Deer farmers bring regulatory concerns to ag board
Many Wisconsin deer farmers believe they are being overregulated to the point where they may have to close their businesses or move to another state.
A group of them appeared at the Dec. 8 board meeting at the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) to voice their displeasure with some new interpretations of rules and regulations they say are putting their farms in jeopardy.
Laurie Seale, a Gilman deer farmer who is also president of Whitetails of Wisconsin, told the ag board that the industry in the state has lost 75 farms in the last two years because producers are tired of regulations and complicated rules.
Even when they make good-faith efforts to comply with all the tests and regulations, they find themselves at odds with regulators, she said.
Seale was accompanied by a case in point - Amish farmer Eddie Gingerich of Readstown who said he started out in Minnesota with a few fawns that eventually grew into a deer farming enterprise.
Fingerich told board members that he continued to grow his deer numbers and upgrade his herd's genetics with artificial insemination. When the enterprise outgrew his Minnesota farm, Gingerich and his wife, Mary, bought a new place in Wisconsin where they started from scratch - building fences, getting the fence inspected, building a new house and shop, and setting up their growing deer business.
The deer were supposed to support the Gingeriches and their nine children, but they have run afoul of Wisconsin regulations.
Though their herd was fully accredited and tested in Minnesota and the same deer live on the new Wisconsin place, the farmers failed to register their farm with the animal health division at DATCP in the first 90 days of operation.
They are, in effect, put out of business for five years - the period of a quarantine that has been placed on their herd.
Gingerich told the board that he now realizes it was his mistake. His wife signed for a registered letter from the department informing him of the requirements. But in all the commotion and round-the-clock work to get their new farm ready, the letter was lost and he forgot about it.
"I was counting on the deer to help support my family. When I first heard about it, I begged and pleaded. I was told I can't sell any deer for five years. I can't feed my deer for five years. I will have to get rid of my business," he told the board, choking back emotion.
"I moved to Wisconsin to run a business and now my hands are tied," he said. "Eleven years of work will be going down the drain. I'd appreciate it if you would put yourself in my shoes."
"I'm feeding the same deer I moved. I didn't sell any or buy any. They were legal in Minnesota," he said.
Seale told the board that, even though she has been in the deer business in Wisconsin for 22 years, she has been tripped up by the state regulations and she can understand how this happened to Gingerich.
"I feel for Eddie and I know what he's going through," she said. "We're here today to ask for some relief for Eddie.
When board members asked department secretary Ben Brancel if there is anything that can be done for the Amish farmer, he said this was the first he had heard of the case. He said he would ask his staff for a report and look into it.
The department is also in the midst of revising animal health rules, including those referred to by the deer farmers.
Brancel said there has been a "fair amount of testimony on this particular part of the rule."
Is DATCP double dipping?
Seale had another deer farming issue to discuss with the policy board. She and a business associate had formed an agreement to jointly own eight deer that would be housed at her licensed deer farm.
When he was hauling the deer to Wisconsin, he was stopped and asked for his trucking license. He said he believed that he didn't need a trucking license to haul his own animals.
The department's response to that, says Seale, was that they are now requiring the associate to become a fully licensed deer farmer because he is part owner of several deer.
"The state is double-dipping in a case like this one, collecting double fees on a given farm. The rule is open to interpretation and this is a new one," she told the board.
The deer farmers said that it isn't uncommon for several people to join together to own an animal with top genetics - much as people do with top pedigreed dairy cattle. They don't like the department's interpretation that each of them need to be a licensed deer farmer.
Seale believes that if the farm where they are kept is licensed, that should be all that is needed.
"The more I disagreed, the more they seemed determined that I was going to pay," she said of the regulators she talked to. "No one in the department is listening.
"I'm tired of the department threatening our status," she continued. "We follow the rules, get the paperwork in on time, and there is always a threat to take away my animals."
Josh Winrich of Wilton told the board that he has 130 head of top genetic deer and has built a business of selling the genetics all over the country. He also has situations where other deer farmers want to bring their does to his farm to be bred.
He will miss out on those business opportunities with the current set of rules. "This is something the department needs to work on."
Partnerships on these top deer can include three or more people.
"The keeper of the deer, we feel, should be the one that has the license, not a partner who may own 20 percent of a deer," Winrich said.
Winrich told Wisconsin State Farmer later that the paperwork and license fees will kill his farm's partnerships. "If I tell my partners they have to fill out all this paperwork, they will pull their animals," he said.
Seale said DATCP staffers have also taken issue with her partnership agreements.
"I think they are overstepping their boundaries by picking apart these partnership agreements," she stated. "It's the biggest abuse of power I've seen come out of this department."
She told Wisconsin State Farmer that deer farmers in Wisconsin struggle anyway with the added burden of being in a state where chronic wasting disease (CWD) has been found.
"If this regulation is carried through, it will be the last nail in the coffin of this industry."
Ray Hanson has been running a deer farm in Chetek for 25 years and has built it into a very good business that now has 500 deer. He agreed that the rule interpretation requiring licensure for each part-owner of a deer spells trouble for the industry.
"There can be from two to as many as dozen registered owners per farm," he said.
The rule was meant to prevent farmers from taking deer out of the wild and putting them into their enclosures, not to prevent partnerships on deer, Hanson added.
"Too many top deer and elk farmers have left Wisconsin because it's not considered to be a friendly state for our industry. When you multiply those fees, we're no longer sustainable," said Joel Espe of Monticello. Espe serves as legislative chair for elk farmers in Wisconsin and nationally and is past president of a national deer farmers association.
CWD issues
Espe had another issue he wanted the board to hear about. An elk farmer near Clyde has been crippled by the regulations that followed the panic after CWD was discovered in southwest Wisconsin.
That farm, where beef and elk are raised, has been "quarantined for life" in effect because of CWD rules, Espe said.
But there are several problems.
The deer that was initially found to have CWD was shot 4 ½ miles from his farm, but Espe says no one can show the farmer exactly where this deer was shot. (Five miles is the regulatory radius of quarantine.)
The test used to diagnose this animal is one that is not approved by DATCP and Espe says the deer heads were just thrown in a hopper, meaning the sample could have been contaminated.
"There's no scientific basis for him to be quarantined," Espe said. "This family farm in Wisconsin is being held hostage even though they've done nothing wrong.
"It's wrong and unfair, and we need to find an answer. These people shouldn't have to live like they're living," he added.
The family had to watch as their elk were euthanized, he said. When injections didn't kill the animals, they were suffocated with black, plastic garbage bags, according to Espe.
But state veterinarian Dr. Bob Ehlenfeldt later told reporters that he wanted to make it "crystal clear" that no elk were suffocated. "They were killed by a captive bolt and garbage bags were put over the heads of the elk to keep blood off the equipment," he said.
