COLUMBUS, Ohio – Mike Shea raises hay and beef cattle, and rents land for corn and soybeans. He sees a “tremendous” number of deer on the farm. They graze unhampered in the corn and beans. They eat the hay and tromp it down when they bed there. In the fall, Shea has a couple of hunters who come.

“Whatever the legal limit is, they take it,” he said.

Mike Tonkovich, deer program administrator with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Wildlife (DOW), plays a big part in deciding what that legal limit is in all 88 counties. Once every three to five years, the DOW sends out a survey to Ohio’s hunters and farmers to ask them a number of things but most importantly their opinion on deer population size.

In the 2015 statewide survey, 50 percent of the hunters said there were too few deer and 29 percent of farmers said there were too many, Tonkovich said. Those were both dissatisfied populations. What to do?

“You have a situation where you have a lot of unhappy hunters and a lot fewer unhappy farmers, so you grow the deer population a little bit,” Tonkovich said. “You reduce the number of dissatisfied hunters and you increase the number of dissatisfied farmers.

“That’s how that is supposed to work,” he said. “Maybe those numbers move in a perfect world to 35 and 35. We took away a few unhappy hunters and we added a few unhappy farmers. We have equal numbers of dissatisfied constituents which is what my job is all about, having the same number of people be mad at me at the time.”

Fast forward to the 2023 survey where Tonkovich saw the opposite results. Forty-six percent of farmers said there were too many deer where they farm and 29 percent of hunters said there were too few.

“Then we have to make a decision because this is not an exact science,” Tonkovich explained. “When you have two groups that are that far apart that means that we need to do something. If you have numbers like 27 and 31 you can just keep the status quo and that would be fine but when you start getting a wider gap than 4 percentage points between the two then we need to grow the deer population or reduce the deer population.”

Changes have to be made just to keep the population stable because the herd has been growing, Tonkovich said. Surplus deer have to be removed to keep the number where it is, otherwise, the following fall there will be more deer, just because the population is growing.

There are more complications. If the deer population has been growing with a two-bag limit (a hunter can take two deer), to make any progress, something has to change. In the past, giving the hunter more days to hunt would solve the problem. But not anymore.

“Today it really doesn’t help to give the hunters more time,” Tonkovich said. “They just take more time to try to hunt that buck that they’re after.”

Nowhere are folks calling for more deer, and a large portion of the state’s deer management goals have been revised for reduction. Yet it is interesting that in most parts of the state, hunters and landowners held positive views of deer. Most enjoyed seeing and having them around.

Most farmers reported “light” to no crop damage from deer in 2022. “Moderate” or “severe” deer damage was more frequently reported by those farming 300 acres or more. Very few farmers (3 percent) received Deer Damage Control Permits in 2022. Those who participated in the program harvested five deer on average with those permits.

“We anticipated the results in 2015 and took steps to grow the deer population,” Tonkovich said. “To date, we have not taken any meaningful measures to address the results from the 2023 survey. Perhaps we will see some changes in the 2025 season.”

During the 2024 deer gun week, Ohio hunters checked 28,606 antlered deer and 58,586 antlerless deer. Tonkovich is expecting a record buck harvest.

“We’re going to watch the harvest and it has been up considerably this year,” he said. “I am sure we are going to set a record buck harvest. I think the record harvest was set in 2006 so we will likely harvest a record number of bucks this year. There are a record number of deer in Ohio.”