Show Notes
On this week’s episode of the Ohio Outdoors episode Paul is flying solo. We cover the news from the State, talk about counting birds…yes counting birds and tell you about the future of Team USA from right here in Ohio. The main episode this week is a throwback to our good buddy Doug Duren. Doug’s perspective on life and conservation is really fascinating. Enjoy the show!
Ohio Whitetail series starts soon!
Have a great week and enjoy the O2 if you get out into Ohio’s great Outdoors!
Show Transcript
Paul Campbell: Welcome back to another episode of the oh two Podcast, the Ohio Outdoors Podcast. Man, Paul, your buddy. I'm flying solo here. This week brother, months is out and about working. It's my turn to hold down the fort here. I know it's been I've been hit or miss with this podcast here recently. I've been just really dialed into work trying to get things done on that end.
So thank you so much for listening to this show. Very excited that you are here. Lots of neat things to talk about today. The intro here is new. We are gonna run a a greatest hits episode, if you will, our buddy Doug dur. That episode was great. We're gonna talk, we're gonna, we're gonna listen to that again here at the end of this intro.
So I do wanna say thanks for our sponsors. Go wild. Time to go wild.com. We got a ton of stuff for the bass angler out there. Great social community for hunters, hikers, anglers, outdoor enthusiasts. You've heard us talk about it. Great group of people. Sign up, get $10 off your first order. They have a really just robust fishing [00:01:00] selection of of products for sale.
On their website right now, rods, reels, tackle bags, every type of lure that you can possibly imagine. It is available time to go wild.com. Check them out today. Midwest gun works.com. Use to code Ohio outdoor five to save yourself 5% off of every order. They're gonna be pretty good sale going on right now.
If you're looking to to upgrade your red dot or stock or foreign for your ar whatever whatever platform you got, they've got all of it. If you're looking for parts, they got their parts finder, you just put in your, make your model hit Go and it'll give you a breakdown of all the parts.
Their YouTube is phenomenal. If you're cleaning a gun, trying to fix something, Cameron does a really good job of breaking down firearms and showing you how to properly break those down and reassemble those. So check that out. X vision optics.com. If you're into killing critters at night, we've got coyotes.
If you've seen a bore in the state of Ohio, please let us know. I'm very interested in that. But those are two [00:02:00] animals that you can hunt at night here in the state. Some really neat options for for the predator hunters out there. They do have some pretty cool products scopes, red dots, range finders things of that nature.
So check out their website x vision optics.com. Shout out to to our buddies at Redfin Polarize. Just redfin polarize.com. I'm telling you, I've had Costas, I've had Oakleys. These are without a doubt, the best sunglasses that I have ever owned. I bought the Ty vs. They're great. You're gonna love 'em.
Check 'em out. Their lenses are fantastic. Really good price point on those two, so check them out. Thank you for the support of our show. Man, our buddies from Wisconsin, half rack.com, Ohio Outdoors 15, save yourself 15%. So I don't know who designs these, but on their website, half rack.com, click on lifestyle.
Their shirts are fantastic. They've got some really funny shirts for you to wear during the summer. Non-hunting lifestyle [00:03:00] shirts. Check 'em out. Ohio Outdoors 15, save yourself 15%. Don't wanna miss thanking our friends at First Light. Really appreciate all you guys that, that that trace system that, that has, that thing's pretty sweet.
I like to pick one of those up. So check 'em out. firstlight.com. They got some cool kits on sale right now. So just dive in there and and take a look. Let's let's jump into the news. It's June in Ohio, obviously, like you either coyote hunting or. You're not hunting or you're fishing, or you're getting ready for deer season.
So it's a little slow in the news territory. Sandhill crane numbers have been rising over the last three years. Story from O D N R 30 pre-selected counties were selected. This was sponsored by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, international Crane Foundation and the Ohio Bird Conservation Initiative.
It's good to see nesting pairs of sandhill cranes rising here here in the state, ribeye of the sky. Maybe at some point we'll have a a small hunting season for those guys. But at this point, you gotta travel west for that. So this next story comes from outdoor news.com. This is an Ohio [00:04:00] native William Browning of Doylestown.
Congratulations, William. He is working his tail off to become a member of the 2024 United States Olympic trap shooting team. William, we wish you the absolute best. Please reach out. We'd love to chat with you. It sounds like William is going to to join the army. William, thank you for your your heart of service and for all that you're doing for this country.
Really appreciate your efforts graduated from Chippewa High School in 2022. So what what a fine young man that is. And interesting. William started shooting trap at six years old. So talk about impact. Stuff that we can do with kids, our own kids, family, friends, getting youth involved in the outdoors and the shooting sports, archery, sports, all sorts of programs in the school to get kids active in the outdoors, you can really impact someone's life.
Just getting a young person involved in the outdoors. Great story there. Out of Doylestown. William, good luck to you. Interesting. Obviously, near and dear to my heart. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources is asking hunters. We do this every year, our Turkey surveys. You can get [00:05:00] on the wide Ohio app.
You can and report your surveys, your citing so that the DNR is asking for you to report sightings of gobblers, of Jake's, of pos, of hens, the county that you saw him. Obviously we've talked about Turkey population struggling not just in this country, but all over the country. And this is one of the, one of the tools that, that our scientists, our agency, Mark Wiley and his crew in Ohio State, they use to determine what the wild Turkey population is in this state.
So we need to really do our due diligence as hunters to go out and look, have fun. If you're out scouting for deer, you see some turkeys, boom, hop on the app, submit that sighting. You can also submit sightings of grouse, both mature grouse and young grouse within that app.
So Mark and his staff are asking for for reports of both of those of game birds. So that's obviously a really important topic to take a look at. So take care of it, right? So muster [00:06:00] in the marsh, m u s t e r in the marsh.com, the Backcountry Hunters and Anglers yearly event and con it covered Bridge Outfitter.
You heard our buddy Henry talking about it last week. I was on my way to Missouri, so hopefully you guys could hear me talking. This is going to be a fantastic event. Workshops, education, kids and family event, camping, live music, campfire stories. We've got cow from meat eater. We've got Kevin Murphy from Small Game Nation and Meat Eater are gonna be there.
A ton of hunting and angling outdoors and conservation-minded individuals all in one good place around a campfire on a river. Are you kidding me? That sounds like one dang good time. So check that out. Muster and the Marsh Three day event. You can buy your tickets there. There was a Friday, the conservation dinner.
We'll be there. This is really, this is gonna be a really neat event. I'm glad that they asked us to be a part of it. I'm honored to do that. Mushroom Marsh, can't wait to be there July 21st through the 22nd. 23rd, excuse me. We've [00:07:00] got like I said, we got Doug Dur coming up on today's episode.
Andrew and I have been, we have been feverishly scheduling guests for our summer whitetail series. So we've got a couple habitat managers lined up. You're gonna really enjoy that. Talk about what you as an Ohio hunter can do on your property right now. Vegetation, food plots, forestry, all of the things that you can do in July and August, June, July, and August to get prepared for that deer hunting season.
That's gonna be really neat. We've got some summer scouting tips from some really good hunters from the state and beyond to talk about what you should be doing to scout. That's something that I need to be better at. We got some public land, some private land discussions coming up, so a lot of really good stuff we're gonna get back into into a groove, back into a flow on this show.
Thank you for all that all of your support for us, for the, for our sponsors. We really appreciate each and every one of you. Please enjoy this rerun. This, this episode was probably one of one of my favorites. If you'd listened [00:08:00] to it back in, in August at 2022, listen to it again.
Doug Dur is just an amazing individual. I really enjoyed our time with him and his perspective on life. No f no more talking for me. You got Doug dur.
Andrew Muntz: No problem. Doug, I just gotta start. I think you and I have a little bit of, we just were talking briefly before, but the turf grass world that we live in Okay, I'm gonna back up one second. Let's let go ahead. I think probably most people know who you are, but if you want to give a quick rundown background on yourself what you do we'll talk more about some of your programs down the road, but yeah what's Doug's history?
Doug Duren: I'm a old man these days. I'm 63 years old. Big bald guy with glasses from southwest Wisconsin. And you hear that in my saying, Wisconsin, right? It's I grew up in the area where I currently live the Driftless area of southwest Wisconsin. I am a fifth generation person in this area, four generations [00:09:00] on the farm that I own with my brothers and sisters.
And gee, I've been part of the meat eater group for, I've known Steve, as we were talking about earlier, since before all this meat eater stuff happened and we became, and I've been a part of that. I've been involved with conservation. Some of it unknowingly, I didn't really put that word to it most of my life because.
I grew up in a family of folks who were in the timber industry, the lumber industry, and we had this dairy farm and things like contour strip planting and managing forests and or woods as we call 'em. And, just doing good things for the land was just second nature because the folks that were raising me, my grandfather and my father in terms of working on the land, they had that mentality.
And it wasn't just about what we can get off of it now. It was, it was a more thoughtful process like that.[00:10:00] And so I've been, involved with conservation issues for a while. Some of the know me from my work with chronic wasting disease and that's pretty much my background.
The only thing I else I'd say is thanks for the notes that you sent me, and I guess what you'll have to decide is if we wanna quick hit all of the things that you sent questions or subjects, if you wanna quick hit 'em all or if we want to deep dive into one of them, I guess we'll see how it goes.
Paul Campbell: I wanna start the first question that I have, and I'm gonna jump in here real quick and this is a very popular term nowadays, and I think a lot of people on social media put it in their profile and it makes 'em feel warm and fuzzy and it's, you've already said it, conservationist.
So what is your definition of a conservationist? Because I, I hold the definition of a conservationist in high regard. Those are, to me, it's people that have their hands in the dirt, so to speak, when it comes to wildlife management. So I don't, I think that's rarefied air for me. So [00:11:00] that's just me personally.
What's your definition of a conservationist?
Doug Duren: It's funny that you say that because as I was I think I said before, it's like I didn't even know what that word meant really when I was younger. In fact my uncle Larry Duran, who was a really funny guy, used to talk about conservationists and environmentalists, and he'd always say it in the, those sort of terms, like separating the two, right?
Yeah. Yeah. And then the one you can always add in there too is preservationist. And those and conservationist preservationists are very different. My definition of is definition is of a conservationist is one who's in the present thinking about what's happened in the past and learning from that, working, thinking and working in the presence with an eye towards the future.
And that's not just with wildlife it's more importantly, I think with the land. Here's a great example of something I also think gets a little Backwards sometimes hunting is conservation and I always take a big breath [00:12:00] and go maybe hunting is extraction, right? So when we're hunting, we're taking something from the land.
My question is, what's the land get out of that? And in some cases, the land gets something out of it. If you have overpopulated deer herd and you're taking deer out the land, the ecosystem is getting something out of that, right? So you're reducing the amount of animals on the landscape, and it's gonna be better for the, it's going to be better for the land.
Where I like to think that conservation's the big picture and hunting is a part of that. Does that make sense? It does.
Paul Campbell: Just a tool, if you will,
Andrew : yeah, I agree a hundred percent on that. Yeah. So my first question, I have to get this out of the way. We were talking earlier, my job is to I have a bachelor's in horticulture and my master's is in turf grass.
Now I'm in, in the world of sales where I sell grass seeded. I sell herbicides, fungicides, fertilizer, some of these icky, nasty things that are not supposed to be good for the environment. And I struggle sometimes, like [00:13:00] internally that this is how I feed my family. But at the same time, I have this platform with Paul to talk about, and we are big conservation into conservation.
We love that idea. We love the idea of, the wildlife and biodiversity and all this kinda stuff. And here I am selling essentially monocultures for people's front yards and that kind of stuff. You've done work with athletic fields in the past and currently, but and there's, I think that there are times you have to use a herbicide like Roundup gets a really bad rap, but there are times where you don't, we don't really have anything else to use that's going to do that job to get that taken care of.
And now, We could talk all day long about the benefits of grass and turf grasses and that kinda stuff. But I'm just curious what your kind of thought process is because I do, I struggle with that on a daily basis and it's deeper than that. It, when I'm driving down the road and they just cleared out a wood lot and it's gonna become a housing development that I know I probably sell grass seeded too, so that will help me.
[00:14:00] But at the same time, like there's more habitat that's gone. So it's a double-edged sword,
Paul Campbell: right?
Doug Duren: Oh boy. I wasn't, I guess I wasn't really expecting that one, but yeah, I will say this about that to my mind. Good turf grass belongs on athletic fields and we are going to do everything we can to make that turf grass and those athletic fields safe and playable.
My, I don't. I do a little bit of overeating, but I don't treat it with herbicides. I don't treat it with any kind of pesticide. I mow it high. I'm not a fan of the obsession, sorry, but I'm not a fan of the obsession with the turf, with the bluegrass lawn. It seems a in a lot of ways, a waste of resources.
So that's one part of it. The other part of it is when we're, when I'm managing turf grass fields we do it and you [00:15:00] certainly know this term, integrated pest management. So we're constantly paying attention to what those fields, what kinda shape those fields in are in and planning and adapting as needed when we manage them.
And as I was telling you before we, we started recording, I've been doing this long enough, but that stuff that I abandoned years ago, I'm starting to use again, like a sand top dressing to protect the root crowns and make that feel more safe and more playable. So I think that as long as we are making thoughtful choices about what we're doing, that's the, the end of it.
We could talk about agriculture for a long time. You go buy you go out, drive around in the country out here right now in, in the Driftless area, which is very varied topography a lot of slopes. And so we have a lot of contour strip planting, or at least we did when I was younger.
Now there's a lot more stem to stern planting and there's a lot of fence rows gone. And that's because [00:16:00] of. Commodity work, right on our farm rounding farms. It used to be pretty much everything that you produced on your farm went into the animals that you produced to produce the milk or to produce the meat.
And maybe you sold a little bit extra, but now man, most of the land around here is corn and beans and it ain't good corn and bean ground, it's a lot of small plots and that's, and that sort of thing. But then I look at those fields and, I'm, I don't wanna disparage anybody here, brothers and sisters, but that idea of monoculture row cropping in the long term, I don't know if that's the best policy because of what it does to the soil, because of what it's doing to, to everything else.
And I also have seen that. Be the big part of the downfall of the economy of our area. It used to be a lot of small farms, small dairy farms, self-sustaining, neighbors helping neighbors kind of stuff. And now it's just [00:17:00] very rare to have a small dairy farm or something like that. At the same time, change is inevitable and the economy changes, people change.
There's a lot of benefits to all of these things too. So I think we're always trying to achieve that balance, and I think as long as we're thoughtful about it and making decisions with our eyes wide open, that, we'll get to a good place. And I'm happy to hear that, you're being thoughtful about what you're doing.
I get it, man. It's
Andrew : funny and Paul could tell you my, when we talked about this in one of the emails or something before we got this set up, One time I heard in I think my landscape design class in college that, you should treat a lawn like a rug and not a carpet. So around your home that has a functional purpose for kids to play and the dog and, reduce pests.
They talk about ticks being the worst and the high grass and stuff. Doug, it's funny, I was the president of the Ohio Turf Grass Foundation a couple years ago, and I got a letter one day in the mail. We had just bought a new house and I decided to [00:18:00] do this rug versus carpet thing, and a lot of the grass around the outside of the property had just gone high.
One of my neighbors didn't appreciate that. So they had sent a letter or called the. Township auditor or something, and we're out in the country. But so she had come and basically told me if I don't mow it, they're gonna come mow it. And I, so I had to call her and explain that I'm, I am the president of this group that oversees grass management for the entire state of Ohio.
She's oh, yeah, I did realize up close to the house. It looked nice. I didn't quite understand what you're doing, but now it makes sense. Anyhow, I think, I love the idea you put in there with the ipm, the integrated pest management, the idea of putting together a program, trying to do things to the best way that you can reevaluate, try again the next year, however, that needs to be using different men mentalities methods, cultural practices.
It's not just, spray, get your sprayer out and just keep spraying nonstop. But it's a balance of different
Doug Duren: things. Yeah. It really is. And I you use that term that I like an awful lot. And that's cultural practices, turf grass [00:19:00] loves aeration, it likes water, especially bluegrass.
Bluegrass likes water. And I applaud the industry for, working on developing varieties that use less water and, and turf type fescues, which we're using on non irrigated fields and all of those things. To the point, right? As opposed to maybe in the industry, it's the money's in fertilizing and herbicide and they're running through a neighborhood spreading fertilizer and spraying herbicide, and I get it, that's where the money is.
But I don't know if that's the best thing for for the environment. And yeah, I, I could rant about that stuff, but I just think that if we're doing, if we're being thoughtful about it, I really liked your rug analogy because the, that idea that. I have fair amount of turf of lawn.
I wouldn't call it turf grass, a lawn here around our place, but we're also right on Lee Lake. I step out the door here and hit the, without even tossing, underhand hit the lake. We have 125 feet of lake frontage, so we have a buffer zone pollinator [00:20:00] habitat and taller grasses. So I'm careful about what I'm done on the, because it's going directly into the water.
And then the other part of it is I've also done a lot of naturalization and restoration in my landscape career. And the tall fescues, the NoMo fescues, that kind of stuff where people don't have to mow it all the time, but yet you have, turf grass is, is a good way to go.
And then I've just, I'm just a big fan of short grass prairies and tall grass prairies and that kind stuff. But it's, everything's got, its. Place. And I've actually used the rug not a carpet analogy before. So thanks for that. Good.
Andrew : I'm sure the three listeners that we have that care about turfgrass are now fully satisfied.
We
Paul Campbell: know who you are, but the we got a couple superintendents and athletic field managers that that tune in every week, so
Doug Duren: Oh great. And, I hope I don't come across as a know-it-all with all that. It's just a lot of lot of experience and if I've learned one thing in conservation and turf grass is a, is a great example of that.
I have an earth science background and I've [00:21:00] taken a couple of short courses in turf grass and years of experience with it and growing up on a farm and that being farming. But I'll tell you what we were talking about Wayne Horman a little bit ago, and, and experts in the field, I'll, those are the first people I call.
My suppliers, they have people who have dedicated their lives to this. I, those are the people I want to hear from, and I don't care what it is in conservation. I'm a generalist in life. And one of the things I've learned is I don't need to know everything. I just need to be able to find people who know more.
Yes, exactly. I love
Andrew : that. I love that.
Paul Campbell: I wanna just touch on one thing that you said in an email, and it was, my opinions are mine and they're also subject to change. And I really like that. I've been going through this. Evolution. Just personally about, I, same thing. I was in the turf grass industry for 15 years.
I was on golf courses, private, public, high-end places. So you're talking about just a ton of input manicured, and then my mindset just started to shift just recently, within the last 18 months about conservation and ecosystems [00:22:00] and just instead of, literally what's in front of me, my, my grass, my golf course, whatever it is to more big picture, like I said, ecosystems, wildlife interactions, pollinators, all these things.
I think that's a very personal journey for a lot of people. You've really just gone down the rabbit hole, it sounds in a good way with kind of your evolution of conservation ecosystems, man, managed the land. And I heard you talk one time in a podcast. It was, you stopped managing for big deer and started managing for overall land health, which equates to.
Better deer health. So how, just talk about like your evolution where you started. How long you been hunting? I thought you, I heard you say one time this, you just finished up your 50th year as a hunter and so Yeah, that's right. That's, that's fantastic. So there must have been just massive mindset changes for you personally.
And I know that's a loaded topic and we could talk for hours about that, but when was kinda like your transition from, okay, I'm managing for big deer on my farm, big [00:23:00] bucks and all the things that come with that to good land management stewardship,
Doug Duren: if you will. Yeah, I think the stewardship has always been there.
And our commitment to big buck, big giant buck management wasn't it wasn't a real devout one, I guess is how I would put it. We and some of that has to do with my dad. W when I was a kid when I was 15, when I was 12 or 10 or 12 and 12 was when you could start hunting here in Wisconsin or you could, you could deer hunt.
And we certainly went with him before that, for small game and that kind of stuff. You saw a deer with an antler on it, shot it and cuz you got one buck tag. And you, in those days if you wanted to get a do dough tag, four hunters had to get together and Apply together for what was called a party tag.
And you would apply, you'd fill out this stuff and everything was done by, on paper in those days, and you send it in with 20 bucks or whatever it was. I think
Andrew : Pennsylvania still does it that way, but[00:24:00]
Doug Duren: and anyway I don't know enough about Pennsylvania's issues. I do know they have some C W D issues and I scratched my head about how they're approaching those there.
But but anyway, sorry. So you had to, yeah, sorry, but, so you had to apply, this is just a great example, right? So four people had to apply for a party tag and you'd get this cool little armband that, that person wearing the armband is the only one who could shoot the dough. And and so you got one dough for four hunters in my county.
Now you get a buck tag and you're immediately issued four antlerless tags. For each weapon. So I'm a conservation patrons holder, license holder. So I get a buck tag for bow hunting and I get a buck tag for gun hunting, and I get four antlerless tags with each one of those license, which can be applied.
So I can shoot, actually shoot eight antlerless deer with my gun. So you can use the, you can only use the buck tag with the [00:25:00] weapon, but the DOE tags can go to anything. Oh, wow. So in 50 years that's been the big change is just the man whitetail deer by the state of Wisconsin has been a huge success story to the point where people got used to this incredible amount of deer, which weren't necessarily good for the ecosystem.
Oh, and then guess what? We end up with this disease that spreads more quickly through a bigger population and. It's hard to put the brakes on that, especially in an area I'm not answering your question, but especially in an where 85% of our area is deer habitat. And the deer incredibly faun.
We have 1.5 fawns for every dough. And a dough, lives to be four years old. You can do the math there really quick. She's replaced herself six times or more. She's having, depends on the individual dough or, but anyway so that's, that's the, that was, [00:26:00] that's one of the changes that's happened and that's been a part of my evolution in it.
And as I said, when. When I was a kid and we went deer hunting. You shot an, you saw an antler deer, you shot it. Then over time it's gee, it's cool. And it's not just a one antler thing, which was my first buck, by the way. And and then, or a forkey or something like that.
It's cool when it's something that's bigger than that. And then I shoot this big giant 192 inch buck in 2005, and boy, I'd be like, be, it's cool to have more of that, but so we were, what happened was we started again, think about let me go back to the forestry thing. So my family was in, we have, our farm is 400 acres, but 240 acres of its woods, 60 acres pasture, hundred tillable.
That 240 acres of woods have been managed by four generations. Over time, that management changed too because, it used to go like that. Now it goes like this. You learn but some really good solid foundational stuff. And part of the [00:27:00] management of that woodland is wait a minute, if we have too many deer, we're not getting regeneration of oaks because there's too many deer.
And we had a neighbor who shot, he had ag tanks cuz he was having ag damage and sh shot like 22 or 23 and they had to be antlerless deer as I recall. Post season man, that's gotta be late nineties, early two thousands. And the next year, all of a sudden we got. Really nicer bucks. And the light goes on as a part on the buck end of it.
Okay, we have, we were thinking about the wood end of wood's end of it, and then the buck end of it. Gee, if we kill more, do and we keep that population in check, it seems like we see more bucks and there's a lot of different reasons for that. Or we see bigger bucks or whatever. And I think some of the reasons for that is if you have fewer dose, the bigger bucks aren't just laying around waiting for 'em to come to them.
They're out pursuing them. So that's a part of it. And then the other part of it, if you're concentrating making sure that you're [00:28:00] taking dose and keeping that population in check there's less competition, less stress, all that for food, all those kinds of things. And suddenly you're getting but it was never like, oh you can't, if you shoot a younger buck, you're a son of a bitch or something like that.
And and then you go through a whole process with that and
It really started with shooting, taking antler deer and doing what was best for the land. But that evolution, conservation wise is really having learned from people who intuitively my dad, my grandfather and through UW Extension and that sort of thing where it came out and they laid out contour strips and you saw, okay, why are you doing that?
And they go because it's less erosion. Oh. And all those sort, you see when if you're doing something and damage from it, if you have any concern about that at all, you're gonna back up. So that's, time is, I think if you don't evolve over time that You're not paying attention.
And yeah, I reserve the right to change my mind about things. I and some [00:29:00] might call that flip flopping, but when I really made the decision about attacking and doing more about c w d, it was really born out of the idea that I do wanna be able to call myself a conservationist.
And if I'm gonna do that, I need to do what's best for the resource not just what's best for me.
Paul Campbell: I definitely wanna touch on the C w D it, during this talk Your kind of your mantra is, it's not ours, it's just our time or our turn, if you will. So I actually messaged you on Instagram and you responded, the first time that I had heard that mantra was earlier this year.
And just a, a real quick story. I heard that.
Andrew : Are you gonna tell him the story about where we went and got that tattooed on our lower
Paul Campbell: back? No. We, no, we are not. We're still waiting. We're, yeah, I'm waiting
Doug Duren: for that man. I, wait.
Paul Campbell: Yeah, so I was on a, I was on a Turkey hunt this year in the state of Alabama, and it was my first time in Alabama and a really neat piece of property.
Been in this family for, I don't know, 40 or 50 years [00:30:00] at this point, and 15 to 1700 acres. So it's a really nice piece of property and wow. The family had done just a ton of work doing the right things. To manage the land. And they're just a really good family. They're really in tune with, doing the things that are necessary for the land.
Just an interesting story, right before we had gotten there, maybe in January or sometime they had done some clear cutting and they found the grave site of the family that had settled this farm. 18, 1840s, 1850s, sometime in, in that point. Wow. And it was just, oh my gosh. It was just, it was really neat.
So the land owner took us up there during this Turkey hunt, and he wanted to talk about these people. And I'm standing there, and this is above ground stone. I'll send you a picture of a stone grave site with a giant slab of granite or marble, whatever the stone is in Alabama sitting on top of this.
And there's three of 'em. And the names are carved on this, on the stone. So he's talking about these families. And I look down, I'm standing on, and I'm not a farmer, but I'm standing on just a one of the [00:31:00] tines that they would use to plow this dirt. And I'm stepping on it as I'm looking at these people.
And I picked that up and that that just rang in my head. It floored me. And I asked Leonard if I could take that piece. And I have it sitting in my office and I look at it every day when I walk by it. And that just, it's not. Ours. It's just our turn. And that was one of those moments where that solidified in my head for the rest of my life that none of we don't own anything.
We are just here to take care of it at this time. I think it's a very important lesson. So that was a long introduction to talk about that. Talk about It's not ours, it's just our turn.
Doug Duren: Man, I don't know if I can say any more about it than what you just did. You can, because
Paul Campbell: you went through it, man.
You've been through it. I want to hear your perspective cause I know it's better than that.
Doug Duren: So our farm has been in my family for it's close enough that I can call it 120 years. And as I said, it was managed, the woodland was managed pretty well. My great-grandfather actually, my great-great-grandfather and [00:32:00] great-grandfather had a sawmill.
On Durin Road about a mile from our farm. And to this day, I don't know, cause they're not around anymore to I don't know whether one day they were driving around and, or going around in their buggy or whatever and saw this sign that said Durin Road and said gee, maybe we ought to put our sawmill over there.
Or if the road got named after the sawmill I'm not sure which happened there. But anyway, that's a little rural humor.
Paul Campbell: I'm the chicken and egg theory here is what we're talking about.
Doug Duren: Yeah, exactly. And so they bought this land because it had a bunch of timber on it. And to feed that sawmill that was a mile away.
And interestingly enough, at least to me, in four generations, I was the first journey to live on that farm. I grew up with that farm, not on that farm. So we grew up in Ca Casnovia, the town that I'm sitting in right now and We didn't have to do chores in the morning and we didn't really have to do chores in the evening either.
We did all of the field work, we [00:33:00] did all the fence fixing, and then we, the guy who milked cows out there, we gave him every other weekend off and we had to milk cows. And then over time, we, my brothers and I ended up taking that over for a while until we quit dairy farming in 1988. But I always like to say the difference between growing up on a farm and growing up with a farm is that you don't smell like cow shit when you get on the bus.
But also raw humor,
Paul Campbell: right? I'm sure there's some listeners that are going that's damn right.
Doug Duren: Oh yeah. For sure. I disparaging anybody, just remember going, oh, yeah. Anyway the stuff you remember man, the stuff you remember, and that is all part of that journey too. So we were managing our part of our woodland that had not been cut.
In 120 years. There had been some work done in there, but my great-grandfather, grandparents, I should say, bought that land. It was little Oak saplings 115 years later, cuz we [00:34:00] finished that. And this 35 acres of 240 acres of woods, we did a shelter, wood harvest. And the idea was that we try to regenerate oaks in there.
When, this was during the time that my dad was handing off the management to me, he died five years ago now. And so we were doing this for forestry planning and talking with experts and you know about here's the, some of the things that you can do, right? And there are multiple things that, different trails you can go down.
And I one of the other things that I like to say is it seemed like a good idea at the time, and because sometimes you make mistakes and you, as long as you're making an informed decision, and then you make. Work out. You go, wow, it seemed like a good idea at the time. And then maybe that's where you adapt and change.
Anyway, we were doing this shelter, wood harvest, which is a technique of for regenerating oaks, which can be really difficult, especially because of Deere, but but also because of what oaks need in order to regenerate. I'm up there working with this forester from the [00:35:00] Department of Natural Resources, who's become a very good friend of mine now.
And we were walking off the ridge and what we had done was going up and evaluated how it had been marked by the consulting forester that we used, and then what our, how would that match with our goals and objectives and the plan that we had in place and all of that. But a shelter would, harvest is a damn aggressive way of going in.
And you're really my dad, this is a great example. My dad said to me, Douglass, I know this needed to be done. I just didn't wanna be the one to do it. And part of that was my dad was 92 when he died. But what we were doing was trying to regenerate oaks, but also capture the peak.
And Oak lived to be a couple hundred years old, but they aren't all gonna live to be that long. And we were seeing trees starting to fall because of the, the age and the, and you're losing economic value. So go, it goes back to that thing we said before, right? We're trying to balance all this different stuff.
Anyway, Mike and I, Mike Finley's, his name, we're walking off of the it's up on this ridge and we're walking down off of there [00:36:00] and we stopped and paused for a minute, probably. Let me catch my breath. And he, applauding the fact that we were doing this and it's, he says This isn't, this is aggressive and this is hard.
And I know a lot of people like to hold their. Woods right where it is. And you can't really do that. No man, no, no plan and no management is a strategy. It's probably just not a very, really good one. But anyway, he said, I really applaud that your family is willing. And in that moment I, it's, it was an epiphany moment.
And I was thinking about my great grandparents. My grandparents and my parents. My parents were both alive yet at that time. They're both gone now. And the fact that all of this had work had been done and this, and this land was still in our family. And that's when I just said out loud I guess it's not ours, it's just our turn.
And Mike looked at me and said, you gotta write that down. And I did. And but that really is it, [00:37:00] right? One of the other moments that I have more regularly now as I'm get getting older and when I think about my dad being gone now cause I spent a lot of time out there with him. Is that I tip over right now, everything that's out there is still there and it's that, that understanding of that is that you're just here for this time.
And that that, that length of time that, that, that's been in our family, that land's been in my family, it's a little easier. It was a little easier step for me, I think, as opposed to, somebody younger or not having that experience or that family history looking at it and going what can I get out of this?
Because that's human nature too, right? It's what's in this for me? Or I've gotta make this land work for me. I'm in a position, I don't have to make that farm work for us. All it has to be is financially viable as opposed to someone who. Owns a piece of property and is trying to pay it off and doing all that.
And man, they're looking to [00:38:00] maximize. And I can understand that and the need for that, right? But at the same time, there's an opportunity to balance all of those things as well. So that's where it ca comes from. And that's I'm glad you wrote that
Andrew : down. We'll send you pictures when we get
Doug Duren: those tattoos.
So I can't wait
Andrew : now. Real quick, I just want the cwd, it can be a hot topic, whatever. I just wanna touch briefly on it, and I don't want to get really deep on it, but in Ohio we have a small area where in, in a three DS three county or dsa, they're modifying some of the bag dates, limits, all that kind of stuff.
Paul Campbell: Season opens two weeks earlier, early, there's early gun season. Yeah.
Andrew : What are some of the, and I don't know how familiar you are with what Ohio has done to. Slow this, I think, I don't know you'll ever stop it, but slow it. Is there anything from somebody who's dealt with it for a while that you could give a couple bullet points of what we [00:39:00] should expect or look for or do to make sure we're doing things the right way down here?
Doug Duren: The hardest part is that if the control measures as they will, depending on what they are, and no, I haven't really looked at what Ohio is doing yet, but my guess is that they've learned the lessons of Wisconsin as many states have, and they're being pretty aggressive about it because when Wisconsin was aggressive about it, the disease was con confined to an area and the prevalence was low.
As soon as we stopped doing. The area grew and the prevalence grew along with it. So I'll sum that up in, I like to think in bumper stickers, sometimes people, it's easier to remember things. It's not ours, it's just our turn. If you don't have it, if you don't have c w d, you don't want it tell you that.
And if you do have it, you want as little as possible. [00:40:00] So act accordingly. The pushback on some of that from some, from some folks was we did all this work at doing it, and it, we didn't have any issues. It didn't seem to be spreading. We didn't have any, what's the big deal? And then, Really starting in about 2007 cuz it was discovered in 2002 and for about five years it went on the, there was sharp shooting, earn a buck really working at keeping it in that area.
And I'll be honest, if I'd have been in that c w d hot zone, my farm would've been there. I'd had a hell of a lot of questions about, what are we doing exactly and why 20 years ago we've learned a heck of a lot in 20 years about it. And as soon as we started to do less through political pressure, not because that was what the biologists wanted to do political pressure and then things changed that.
Prevalence grew and the disease has spread in 2002. When they [00:41:00] were testing in 2002 up until I told you I killed the standard in 2000 or the, what's the only deer we've ever named on our farm is the standard. The standard by which all deer going forward will be judged by the big one that I shot.
I actually shot that deer with a rifle on October 31st, and our normal gun season doesn't start until the third week in November. I shot him at 35 yards with a 30 0 6. If I'd been there with a bow, I'd have killed him too, but he was real dead when I shot him with that rifle. Didn't get 20.
Yeah. It wasn't any no getting freaked out or anything like that. And anyway, we didn't have c w D on our farm until it's been five years now. And we were testing, I. First, whatever they would let us test. And then when it got to the point where testing was completely voluntary, you could get every deer tested.
And we've been doing that for six years now. We went from zero to one to five, and four years of 120 deer killed. [00:42:00] So about, I don't know, do the math for me, 4% to last year where we had, I wrote it down in adult deer, we had 35% of the deer tested positive at, of 10 or bucks last year, six of them tested positive.
Wow. One of them was the five and a half year old, 10 pointer that he, if you go back in my Instagram stories, you can see this. He stood in the middle of the driveway and looked at me like he had no idea what I was, and I got to take great pictures of him. He looked healthy and everything, but he just had a look on his face of.
It was just blank. Yeah. Adult buck doesn't do that in the middle of October. He de he doesn't do it anytime. He ended up going down to the creek and just getting a drink of water and I watched him for a long time thinking to myself, wow, that's really cool. Where's the dough that he's tending?
He wasn't ta he ended up, buddy of mine, ended up killing him a couple of weeks later. And and I said d w d positive, let's see. And sure enough he was and [00:43:00] then 10% of the adult dose. So we killed 40 deer on our farm. On the 600 acres that we, that I hunt and manage, some of it's our farm, some of it's place next door.
We killed 40 deer in an area where we only 65 deer per square mile. So if that's the case, we killed two thirds of the deer in that square mile of habitat. And three weeks after the season we did a drone. Survey and a drive around, we counted 85 deer.
Paul Campbell: So you're not seeing an impact, a detrimental impact to the herd population.
If you're that's a, that's an incredible stat.
Doug Duren: Yeah, no, that is interesting, isn't it? Yeah. So there, there are different ways of looking at chronic disease. One of them is, what's the big deal? It's not having a population level impact. In, in Doug's area. Now you can go down in Iowa County and anecdotally, which is south of us from where it started one of the counties where it was first discovered.
And I was just on a piece of property down there [00:44:00] recently and looking with, working with the landowner and the sharing land thing that I'd like to talk about a little bit too, but, and I just didn't see deer sign like what you do on our place, in our area. Remember that 85% of the county is in the area really is deer habitat, but 95% of it is privately owned.
So that's can both be a benefit and a detriment to management. So anyway, but I'm looking around hunters. It's part of why they're interested in sharing the land is they having other hunters on? I was like, how, what's a deer population around, looking like around here? Oh, we got some on the cameras that we have out, but I just didn't see signs of a lot of deer.
I talked to a fellow who was a part of a lease very near that property. In the same watershed and actually really close to it. They gave up their lease because every deer, they sh [00:45:00] every buck, I'm sorry, every buck they shot antler buck. They shot in the last three years tested positive for C W D.
Every buck they tested. So they're given that lease up, even though they were still seeing plenty of deer. And he said, the other part of it is we don't see four and five year old deer bucks anymore. Now think about that. Okay. So a deer, as I told you before, they're very fa I love using that word. I learned it from Renell.
So this high, we're not gonna run outta deer because they're, they reproduce so well. They're gonna run outta whitetail deer folks. And CWD isn't gonna run us outta whitetail deer either. What is gonna happen though is because it's a disease that takes two years to kill a deer as prevalence increases is your herd is gonna trend younger and younger.
There's a a friend of mine, landowner, a guy who's becoming a friend of mine, landowner south of us here, runs about 900 acres, owns about 900 acres. He originally bought it, kept putting these pieces of land together for deer management and it's got farmland on it and [00:46:00] everything too. And about.
Four years ago, he gave, came to our county Deer Advisory Council meeting, and that's, I'm on that county council and we help to shape deer management as to a certain degree for our county. And he came in and says, we have to do something about C W D. Let me tell you my story. And he, they used to kill four and five year old bucks.
And four years ago they started finding him dead in the woods. And now, and it was a sad story to listen to him. Part of the reason I did this was so that we could manage for that. And the last time I talked to Mike, he said, you know what? The cool thing has happened. Here's what CWD has given us.
You, I talking about a guy, you can look for a silver lining. He said, we've just become deer hunters again. I don't have, I. Any restrictions on what deer anybody can shoot. We do have a, they have a skunk hat that you have to wear if you if you take more than one shot to kill a deer or if you [00:47:00] miss, I guess I don't remember exactly what it is, but his point is that we're really focusing on good marksmanship and that sort of thing.
All the deer get tested and they're still running positive rates, about 65 to 70% of the bucks that they kill tested, and they're younger bucks. So even though, a dough, let's say and they've had fawns test positive there. By the way, as have some people south of me, that's not happening on our place.
Although we've had year and a half old bucks and year and a half old dose test positive, depending on when that shows up and what the stage are in the disease, a d can still replace herself two or three times before she would succumb to the disease. So you're gonna, you can see where you would keep producing deer, but that herd is gonna keep trending younger and then.
Logically it makes sense that you get to a tipping point in prevalence that You're gonna end up having a population concerns. And there are some studies out there where there is showing that there are population impacts as a result of C W D. [00:48:00] So we're trying to avoid that.
Andrew : Yeah. That's good insight from somebody who's been on the front lines.
Paul Campbell: So I just real quick. On your farm personally? Have you seen one, one of the, one of the things that's real popular on social media is there's no pictures of Deere with cwd. You want me to send you some?
And that's exactly right. So you start digging, you see 'em, but people equate c w D to e H D and e h D is just devastating. You'll find 'em in your ponds. And so people are, I think overall the perception is e h D is worse. And the reality is that's a blip in the pan for a year or two, and then it moves on.
And and nature kind of stabilizes itself. C w D I think it's definitely one of those things that is, there's a larger impact over a greater time. You're talking, you've been dealing with it for. 25 plus years at this point in Wisconsin. So what are some of the things that you've seen on your farm personally, other than the buck that, that you saw?
Have you seen just those And What I'm looking for is those horror stories that people were always digging around looking for [00:49:00] deer, drooling, and, falling over. That's what people want, right? That's, and I'm not saying that's what I'm looking for, but people don't believe things if it's just, CWD is almost perceived as like a boogieman in the woods that kills a deer every once in a while.
Doug Duren: Yeah. I get calls on a regular basis in the fall when people are in the woods. Hey, I found this deer. What do you think? And what I usually say is there's, looks like it had a problem. It's either dead or it's dying and. So what do I do? Call the warden. They'll let you put it down and then get its head cut off and get it tested, because that's the only way, there's other reasons that Deere looks sick, right?
Yes. I've had sick looking deer on cameras. Ha I have not had one stumbling through the woods, on its last legs. As I said, that Big 10 pointer looked perfectly healthy. He just didn't act perfectly healthy. And that's a part of the process of the disease as well, right?
That it's just like Christ Fel Jacobs or dementia or whatever you want call him. [00:50:00] And Kratts, Krefeld Jacob's disease in us is the PreOn disease, the equivalent of CWD and deer. And there's nothing seems to be wrong for a while. And then suddenly it's eh, I can't remember anything, which might be a function of age too, but things start to happen and then all of a sudden the wasting part of it ends, ends up happening.
And having had relatives and in-laws who succumb to Alzheimer's and it wasn't Grace felt the occupancy, but it's very similar dementia. That is not a, that is not a pretty site. And that's one of the things about it last year when we were doing our DO derby, and you can see that on, you can see this on my Instagram, and I think I've posted it at least twice.
A friend of mine was hunting south of us, so we had a do derby going during the four day antlerless hunt where we were, having a, not a contest, but a drawing. If you brought in your deer you killed an antler steer, you locked his head off. We got it tested. You got a entry into a drawing.
So we were encouraging both the taking of antler, the steer and the testing. So [00:51:00] Andrew comes up and he's Look at this buck in the back of my truck. I was like, this is a dope thing, man. It's an antler, this deer thing. He goes, oh, it's antlers. We're gone. So this is December 13th and that bucket already dropped his antlers as he was a three, three and a half year old buck.
And this is south of me a few miles. And he said, we pulled in to go hunting. And they, it's a lease that they have and they pull in off the road and they're on the field road and here laying next to the, to the road is this buck. And he's just laying there shaking and, drooling and the whole thing.
And he, so he takes a video of it and then he shoots it and then he brings it up and we test it. And I said to the crowd, Hey, anybody wanna lay a bet on this bail? Lay a pay, paycheck on that, this boy's positive. And there are people out there, you maybe even know the names of a couple of them who would say, or certainly one of 'em who would say c w D didn't kill that deer, that guy shooting it, killed it.
I was like okay, so he should have let it lay there [00:52:00] and suffer. Is that, what, is that what they're getting at? So yes, we're seeing that I have yet to see, I have yet to kill a deer on my farm that stumbling around drooling. I don't wanna be hyperbolic about it, but I'm also on the northern edge of it, south of me less than 10 miles.
One of the, in our, still in our county, one of the cac members has called the warden three times, got a buck standing in my yard. Here's the picture, shoot it three times. So yes, it's happening. And you know where all the dead deer. The other part of it is it's not E h d where you got a bunch of dead deer who are out, they're all thirsty because that's what part of what e h d does to 'em.
And then they all die around the water. That doesn't mean that they all died at the same time, it's just that they all went to the same place to die. And deer don't do that. And I don't know, if you go out and the woods at this time of the year one, how hard would it be to find a deer? You'd have to follow your nose to find a dead deer in the woods.
I watched a [00:53:00] deer disintegrate by the highway up here. I called the highway department and said, Hey, there's a deer here. I, and I don't have a dumpster out at this point of the year. And they came up and they just dragged it off to the side of the road, so it wasn't sitting on the, and I just watched it disintegrate.
It was gone in less than two weeks. And part of that was scavengers, part of it was just rot and all of that. So how fast did you know, nature reclaim those sort of things as well? If you don't have it, you don't want it. If you do have it, you want as little as possible, act accordingly. That is not to say that you shouldn't be engaged with the, whatever your D N R is called.
Your Department of Natural Resources is called there and engage in all that and understand what it is that they're doing and look at the research because man, we're still learning. We know a hell of a lot more about C W D than we did 20 years ago. And when we're still learning about it, anecdotally the data is following the same experience that I had.
So on the front edge of it, it was younger deer who were first testing. Cuz those are the ones who are [00:54:00] getting kicked out of or leaving, in search of new territory, leaving the hot, hotter zones and moving out, right? The younger, just like people, right? The younger people are the ones who move out.
The old folks stay in the same place. And and as a result, that's what we see. And the studies have shown this too, that's how the disease is being spread. It's being growing in prevalence in a in the area where it's already established by high population. Because the more just like other diseases, right?
The more opportunity there is to be exposed to it, the more opportunity is that you're going to get sick. And that's, so those are the two things. So you have to act a little, you have to think a little bit differently. And I, at the end of the day, just keep going deer hunting and get your deer tested.
Be smart about it. We're still having a hell of a time. Hell, we're having a great time deer hunting on our farm.
Paul Campbell: Do you eat those c w d positive deer?
Doug Duren: I do not. Okay. Yeah. And here's what I'll, can I say something about that? Yeah. [00:55:00] Everybody's gotta make that choice. Every deer that gets shot on our farm gets tested because I wanna know.
I don't tell people, don't eat it. It's entirely up to you if you personally want to eat it. I would have some questions about and one of the things I do say is don't, if you are decide to eat it, you eat it and don't unknowingly at least feed it to anybody else. And if that stuff would kill you, I'd be dead by now.
You hear all that kind of thing. It's like that deer on my Instagram, you gotta go back a ways and maybe I repost it, but that deer is wasted away. It's, sick, it's drooling, it's all of that. It's got the same disease that, that deer, that looks healthy. Has, and the studies have shown that it's in the meat, so you're making those decisions.
It's never, but at the same time, c w D is, the PreOn based disease has never jumped to humans that we know of. There are changes in PreOn and there's, I follow this stuff all the time. I'm just not one, I'm not taking that chance. And two I wouldn't make that decision for [00:56:00] anybody else, especially a kid.
Cuz again, it's a long, there's a long arc of this disease. So you wanna make that decision for yourself. Great. And I, no judgment for me, I'm just not doing it. Here's actually how we're handling it in our, how I'm handling it, our farm. So of those seven deer that tested positive last year, four of them went to the donation program.
We didn't know they were positive. But they were older deer. I butchered two deer for myself last year. They were fawns, so they were deer of the year, right? So they were six months old. Way less like chronic wasting disease or at least way less likely for it to show up. Cuz there's a whole nother discussion about that, that we don't have time for right now.
But just because it says it's not detected doesn't mean it's negative. That's, there's those two very different things, right? But so our, the folks hunting with me who are concerned about that, I'm like,[00:57:00] go ahead, shoot your buck hunt. And I want everybody to fill their buck tag if they can.
But man, when it comes to keeping those young ones taste real good too, and because we have, so we, one, we have so many deer and we have all those tags. Go ahead and take a couple of 'em if you want. And yeah, we killed 40 deer last year.
Andrew : W Wonderful. And one of the things you talked about there with the research and stuff, we had Lindsey Thomas Jr.
On a little while back. And it sounds like there really are, is a lot of good research continuing to happen and learning new things. So I want to end on a positive note though, Doug, let's let's talk about the Sharing the Land program. And I know this is something that's near and dear to your heart.
I'm gonna be honest with you I looked it up before our conversation here just to get interested, but I kinda like it, it looks really cool. So do you want to give the listeners a quick rundown on what that program's
Doug Duren: sure. I'll try to real quick. So sharing the land dot com easy enough to find it.
It's based on the a couple of things, this based on something that El Leopold did back in the day called the Riley Game [00:58:00] Cooperative. And it was simply he and his buddies improving the habitat on some land that they didn't own, but working with a farmer to improve the habitat on his land in exchange for the opportunity to hunt it.
And pretty simple concept. And when I was a kid, we could hunt wherever the hell we wanted to. Around here in homemaking, nobody, nobody cared. No trespassing signs were something that didn't happen. But land also wasn't purchased for hunting. It wasn't purchased for recreation. As I think I mentioned before, 65% of our county is now owned by people who don't live here.
Not, it's not a value judgment, it's just the way it is. And some of them bought that land for hunting. So you can understand if you paid a bunch of money for a piece of property, you're not gonna let a bunch of other people on there. Most of the, and some of those folks are my clients, my land management clients.
And what I notice about them is they tend to share their property with people that they know, friends, family, that kind of stuff. And those traditions continue. But as we [00:59:00] know in hunter recruitment, there are two, the two biggest impediments to getting people involved with hunting is a place to go and somebody to go with.
And sharing the land is about Co, connecting landowners and access seekers with conservation in mind. So if you look at it, if you go on the website, you'll see the Venn diagram. There's people, there's land, and then there's the ethic. And in the middle of that is sharing the land. So there are plenty of programs like voluntary public access and the walk-in programs and all of that are funded by the government.
Essentially, the government rents your land from leases, your land from youth. So anybody can go on it in our area. And I don't know what it's like there. I know out west that people are, they've got 10,000 acres and so it's very different. Here, forties and eighties are more common. And the voluntary public access properties tend to not be liked very much by neighbors because as the one guy said to me, dammit, Doug, it seems every day I got a new neighbor over there.
And and you hit a deer, especially [01:00:00] archery, and it runs into his property. And then next thing you know, you got people knocking on the door or not, who are just going after it. In Wisconsin, if you're on somebody's property without permission, you're trespassing. There's no game recovery law or anything like that where you can pursue game cuz people screwed that up years ago.
Anyway, sharing land takes this, but in those programs, I'm sorry. So voluntary public access, walk-in access. We know what the landowner gets out of it. They get paid, we know what the access seekers get out of it. They get to go on land that they don't have an, they're just going in to take something off of it.
They're going in for extraction. My question is what's the land get out of that and then where's the education part of that? One of the cool parts of sharing the land is like the folks who are my cooperators, we call 'em, they have really gotten to know our property. They've put.
Some sweat equity into it, but they've really gotten to know our property too, because they're doing work on, it's like it's theirs, right? It's not our turn. It's their turn. I don't know. It's not my turn. [01:01:00] It's their turn. And that really is a part of, I think it's important for people to understand when they're asking the favor of access to pursue game, that it takes a lot to manage a property, especially in the Midwest where we are, where land has been manipulated and managed, hopefully managed, but certainly manipulated for a long time by folks.
And if you were to just abandon it and let nature take its course it'd be full of invasive species. And just as a Forester said to me doing nothing is a management plan. It's just not one of the things that most of my clients have said to me, landowner clients have said to me, is, boy, a piece of there.
Cause they're, most of 'em tend to be new landowners. They're like, wow, that's a lot of work. And I come up here for the weekend sometimes I always wanna hang out, but there's like all of this stuff that you gotta do. And I'm like, and that's why I don't boat hunt very much. It's just, it's hard to sit in a tree going, oh, I got all this stuff I gotta do.
[01:02:00] So you want some help with that. There are people who are willing to put equity, sweat equity into a property for the opportunity. And because landowners want, there are some landowners who wanna share their land, but who do I decide? Do I let on there? Just the guy who comes and knocks on the door.
And you can listen to Mark Kenyon and those guys talk about permissions and how you get access and all of that. And of course leasing is more and more popular and that's okay too. Cause that works for some people. But.
Damn it, who they are and that they're good people. How do you find that out? Part of it is having a relationship with them and having a having a conversation with them. And so what we're really doing with sharing the land is developing this, taking Leopold's land ethic and his Riley game cooperative idea and bringing it forward to the 21st century.
And you can look that up on sharing [01:03:00] land.com and we only put the website up, I don't know, in March. And It's a bicycle that we're, I like to say we're building this bicycle as we ride it. If you, we're getting a lot of access seekers from across the country, and we're getting more landowners now, but it's probably 10 to one.
So it's, that's, but if you're a landowner and you're interested in getting some help on your land we're providing resources. We're giving examples, we've got sponsors and it's a, it's not for everybody, but I think it's a great opportunity for people to continue on their conservation journey, become conservationists and learn about land, and learn about hunting and.
And all kinds of access. So
Andrew : yeah. And I'm on the website here now, and just to give people an idea, so basically you go on and you can choose if you're a landowner or if you are a, somebody looking for access, right? And then you fill out essentially a resume. It's like indeed [01:04:00] for hunting, right?
And or. Finding somebody to, to hunt on your land. And you can say, I've got a strong back, weak mind. I'm good at prescribed burns. I'm good at whatever. And your background. And then the landowner can go find you in your region and say, oh, I need that prescribed burn and I need that stuff moved.
So maybe I'll talk to this guy. Is that how, essentially how it works?
Doug Duren: Yeah, that's essentially how it works. We're discovering on the backend that we need to be building a sorting mechanism that we didn't have in place. We've been doing it manually. So it takes, it takes a lot of time right now, but that conservation resume is a cool idea, right?
And it's something that you can, that can change over time. As you develop, you can come in and redo it. We're working with right now we're working with Onyx to do some mapping, cool mapping stuff that'll help access seeker go well, gee I'm in. Wherever, Ohio and, oh, there's a sharing land.
I'm not sure that we have any landowners in Ohio. I know we've got some access seekers. And that in whatever county there's a, some land and it doesn't just like the lease sites where [01:05:00] it doesn't tell you exactly where the property is, but it shows you the property. And then what we're trying to build there is taking that cooperating land profile that you see on there, and that'll be on there so that people can look at it and go, oh yeah, I'd be interested in that property, or, no, I'll pass.
So that selection starts happening as opposed to my assistant and I, and we're, we're not making money at this. We're breaking even with our sponsors and thank goodness for Onyx and Vortex and Savage Arms and nickles lures, and map My Ranch is another one and guide fitter.
And it's just great that these people are, getting behind this thing and helping us pay for the costs of building this. And we're gonna be building content and it's, the whole thing is gonna be built out. But this idea that that an access seeker could look at a piece of property and go, yeah, that's a place I'd be interested in, versus me saying here's an opportunity.
This, so there can be some self-selection there. And that's what we're working through on the backend right now. It's [01:06:00] been pretty popular. If you're a landowner and you're interested in this certainly go on there or reach out to us via email and it's all on, on the website. The hardest thing to, for us to do is get enough landowners who are interested in it.
But boy, the ones so far have been really happy with it. And as we progress through this first year that we'll be telling stories and producing content and whatnot, that'll explain it all. And the idea is that it'll be here for the long. It's a model that people will be able to be to, will be able to follow.
And
Andrew : just to be very clear, it is, even though you're based in Wisconsin, this is not just Wisconsin. We, there is, you can choose Ohio and the different tabs. Anybody in Ohio that's listening definitely something that you want to check out.
Doug Duren: So how, oh yeah, we've got,
Paul Campbell: oh, I'm sorry. I see. So how's it work?
So I'm an access seeker. Andrew's a landowner. So if I'm signed up, so is it just facilitating contact between Andrew and I or if I see that Andrew has property in Chicago or whatever I can just go in and hunt that place. Chicago's like a terrible [01:07:00] reference, but so I just go, I was gonna say, I don't know what kinda hunt you do.
Yeah I was thinking I was gonna say where we live and I was like, I don't wanna do that. But can so can I just go in or do I get a written permission. I You facilitate contact? Is that what this is? Yeah. Actually have
Doug Duren: a, yeah. Really what we're doing is facilitating contact. Okay. So I give you an example.
I just sent four conservation resumes to a landowner who's looking for one person. And so I looked at the people in that area who had submitted a conservation resume and I'm like, oh, here's one of each, right? He wanted, I'm interested in maybe a new hunter I might be interested in somebody who's really, and he went through the process.
He goes, Boy, it'd be cool for me to take out a new hunter, but I really do need more help with someone who's really experienced with some of the land management stuff. And so if it was just about land management, I would take this person. If it was just about taking a new hunter, I would take that person and I say maybe do part-time with the two of them.
And then the other two, I, he just actually knew one of 'em and he's oh and she'll probably be coming out here from time to [01:08:00] time anyway, so he went from, I was like, wait a minute, you just said you wanted one person. He goes or three part-time people. And that's that's some of the beauty too, right?
Cuz people center it around deer hunting and it's not, we got people who are just interested in foraging and they just like to have permission to be able to go somewhere and they're willing to do, something for that. But so the idea is that you submit that, but no, you cannot At this point, you won't even, you're not even aware of who, where the properties are.
When you fill out your conservation resume, you'll get a thank you and say, and it also says something to the effect that understand that we don't have landowners anywhere, but thanks for submitting and everywhere. But keep, keep in touch, we'll send your resume to, to appropriate places.
Eventually we'll get out of that part of the business like that. They'll just self-select. And a landowner will go, oh, here's some people that are available. Why don't I contact them? Because that's the relationship they have to have. We actually have an agreement that we that's available for them to use.
It's here's what I'm [01:09:00] willing to give the access I'm willing to give. Here's what I'm looking for in return. And then there's a hold harmless part of it. Like for obvious liability issues, we suggest that landowners deal with, in fact, I have a call coming up with an insurance company who does just outdoor insurance.
Like leasing insurance and that kind of stuff. And that they, because like on my farm we, I have a additional rider for hunting activities on the farm, and it really is not that expensive. It's a few hundred dollars and okay, I'd rather have that, we have liability insurance, but we also have some that's specific to hunting.
And you reduce liability anyway, because that's always number one question landowners what about liability? And I'm like you're never gonna remove it completely. But if you know the person. You have a relationship with them and they sign a, an agreement and you sign that agreement, you're eliminating a lot of that.
And then you have insurance in place that's gonna cover some of that. And then in Wisconsin, and I don't know whether it's true in Ohio or [01:10:00] not, but we've got a recreational access law that as long as you're not receiving, there's a ceiling on how much value you're receiving, that you are protected from liability because you granted access which you would think wouldn't be necessary.
But we're a little bit of a litigious society. But when you think about that hunting leases are the same thing, right? And so actually, if you look, NDA is a great example. In fact, it's their insurance company that I'm talk who provides their insurance hunting, lease insurance. So this, it's the same company that I'm going to be talking to and figure, or that we're talking to and trying to figure out.
Given, I'm gonna give 'em the opportunity to sponsor of course, but is that, will this work for theirs or would they hone their insurance that it would work for this as well, as opposed to a hunting club or a lease where you're very specific about it, but this is all very specific as well. My insurance company's yeah, no problem.
They were like,[01:11:00] as far as having the additional rider for liability while they're hunting. You're never going to eliminate it completely. But, and I will tell you this, I've been doing this for several years now, and I've had people that I've had to say it's been really nice having you here, but you can't come back.
You're coming. Yeah. You're gonna have some of that, right? But it's very different than wide open access. You don't know who's there. And there's a respect and a relationship as a result. The one person that I said goodbye to, he and I are still friends, and he knows, he screwed up and he knew it, and I don't have, you don't get a second chance with some of that stuff.
And because, as I told him what he did was pretty egregious and doesn't matter what it was, but but I said, if I allowed you back and it happened again and somebody did get hurt this time, what's the first thing that the. Attorney for the other side would say Mr. Durrin, have you had experience like that with this person before?
And I, it's a valuable piece of property and I'm only 20% owner of it and all that. I have to protect that stuff. I'd love to have this guy [01:12:00] back, but I just can't. Yeah.
Paul Campbell: It
Andrew : sounds like a wonderful program. Doug, I appreciate your time that you've given us today. It's been fascinating.
I think we could talk for a lot longer, but do you want to give the listeners real quick rundown if they don't know or follow you already where they can find you on everything?
Doug Duren: Appreciate that. Yeah. I'm pretty simple. On Instagram, it's at Doug Duran, d o u g d u r e n. Facebook, it's Doug Duren.
It's not ours, it's just our turn is the public page. My website is www.dougduran.com. It ain't hard. And somebody told me once in marketing, you gotta make it simple, man. And then sharing the land is sharing the land.com, and those two, my website and that website are tied together.
But at some point, Doug Duran's not gonna be around anymore, and I want sharing the land to to move forward. And right now it's a.com. So it is a quote unquote business. As I said, it is just not a profitable one. Eventually we've been looking at do we become a [01:13:00] nonprofit or what? And the analogy, maybe I already said it we're building this bicycle as we're riding it.
That's. Just in the spirit of all of this, understand that we're figuring a lot of this out as we go too. But understand that we're trying to what the spirit of it is. And I think if you go on there and look at it, we, I think we've explained it pretty well on the basic website that we have up there right now.
It's great. Better than I have it here in our conversation. Anyway.
Paul Campbell: No, Doug, thank you so much. This has been really good. Yep. Take care Doug. Appreciate it.
Doug Duren: You bet. Thanks fellas. Yep. Bye.
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