the DNR’s Central Farmland Zone. ….

the DNR’s Central Farmland Zone.

Any changes wouldn’t have gone into effect until 2022 at the earliest.

Johnson said splitting the county into two zones is a worthwhile discussion to have, if not now, certainly during the next time the option becomes available. He said putting land south of Hwy 64 into the Farmland Zone, or adding land west of Hwy 73 to it as well, may be viable options down the road. It would easily meet the qualifications to do that, such as the 200-square mile minimum for a unit and using roads or rivers as boundaries that clearly separate habitat types.

As the council has discussed with the county-splitting issue in the past, the drawbacks center around needing to do two separate private/public quota-setting processes for each zone, which becomes more difficult when you potentially include free tags that can be offered with every license purchased by hunters in that zone.

Johnson, however, noted those free tags can be a valuable tool if the herd in a farmland area starts getting too high and sales of regular antlerless tags aren’t adequate.

“It gives those hunters in those areas another option to manage the herd,” Johnson said. “It gives you guys another option to manage the herd. Having grown up in that area, hunted in that area and just what I see on DMAP properties in that southern tier of Taylor County, their habitat is getting hammered, whether they know it or not.”

As they did last month, council members expressed their concerns about how many antlerless permits private- land hunters in Taylor County are now willing to buy and make the effort to fill.

“That is a concern when your supply exceeds demand,” Johnson said. “That’s going to be the troublesome part if we ever truly get to that point where we can’t sell enough tags to manage the herd.”

Tourism representative Allan Koffler questioned if free farmland tags may entice more hunters to become violators and put deer harvested on public forest land on them.

“It goes without saying that would happen,” DNR conservation warden Kurt Haas said. “To what degree, we don’t know. When you have a county that was buck only for quite some time where Taylor County antlerless tags were like gold and now you’re giving them out like candy, it’s even easier for people to do that. It really doesn’t matter on our end. It is what it is. If people are going to violate that, they’re going to violate that and there’s really nothing we can do unless we catch them out in the field.”

The council will meet again twice in early spring to set antlerless harvest quotas and permit levels for the 2021 season.