Read a post on another forum that got me thinking.

A man has an apple orchard which is 500 to 1,000 yards from his barn. Frequently he has deer that come into the orchard and eat his apples. The amount of apples the deer destroy materially eat into his profits and even into whether it is a commercially viable business worthy of hiring employees.

If it were groundhogs eating his apples, no one would think twice about him taking a shot at the groundhogs. But these are deer.

He does have a land-owner permit (don't know the state and regs) which allow him to shoot the deer as vermin.

He has a 300 Magnum varmint rifle and does shoot the deer occasionally from his barn at what most of us would consider too far a distance. But if they were groundhogs or prairie dogs...

He is not "hunting" deer. He is shooting them in his orchard.

If he had to take time to cut the distance for his shot multiple times per day to shoot a deer in the orchard, again he would be seriously cutting into his business work.

This is an interesting shooting situation.

Not sure what I think about it.

Thoughts ?

I am not a farmer, but the few I know hate deer. They look at them as thieves. Every bite they take is money out of thier pockets. I live in an area full of apple orchards. It is all but impossible to secure permission to hunt foxes and coyotes. They eat mice and deer that destroy their trees. I do not know how mice impact an orchard but it seems to be the general thinking in these parts. I have heard of some farmers the next county over shooting deer through the guts so they would not die in the field. This was one or two farmers, not trying to discredit or disrespect any body. In Pa if a farmer claims crop damage I beleive he has to open his property up for hunters to assist in controlling the deer, I think this depends on the amount of destruction they claim. I do not know how much of this is gospil, wives tales or gunshop bullshit.
I think a valid arguement could be made on either side for killing the deer. As far as the shooting goes, I will not pull the trigger if it is not going to be lethal with a bang flop being the desired outcome.I realized shit can go wrong. Animal moves, catch a branch, yank the trigger. In my younger days I pushed shots in brush and took some shots I had no business taking.Losing deer to other hunters and spoilage, long tracking jobs made me rethink things a bit. A 75yard off hand shot ducking under a limb is much harder than shooting a heavy weight rifle fully supported at 500yards.Same time I hunt for and sport, I am not eliminating something taking food off of my table. If I had a choice, I would take a 350yard shot prone off a bi-pod, before I would take a 50 yard shot off-hand. Just my thoughts and opinions, I hope I do not get flamed too bad.

When do we leave?

I met a vegetable farmer who owns a considerable chunk of farmland that attracts lots of deer. He carries a loaded .22 mag with him whenever he travels about on his farm and shoots TO WOUND any deer he sees. He has no desire to have to drag them out of his fields, so he hopes they make it to the woods to die. He does have nuisance permits that allow others to come in and shoot deer for him, but getting shooters is just more work for him. Illegal - yes, could you ever prove anything - doubtful.

On the other hand, I know a dairy farmer that plants plenty of corn and alfalfa. While the deer and turkeys do their share, I think the blackbirds do much more damage by opening the ears at the top, causing the entire ear to rot. I am fairly certain that more than a few ears of highly toxic pesticide soaked corn cobs have been placed out on his property to encourage the blackbirds to move on. He, on the other hand, hunts like the rest of us and puts out over 10 tons of corn every winter for his local deer.

Deer and the larger game have always been treated differently because of the food value they represent, as opposed to the vermin/pest status of woodchucks and the like. I've been around long enough to know that the farmers are going to do what they want to do on their land, but it's a shame if any deer is shot and left instead of the venison going to a needy family.

Let's take this another step.

Assume that the terrain allows full view of the large orchard. Furthermore, we can post highly visible postmarkers in various spots within the orchard and precisely measure their distance to the shooting bench at the barn. Furthermore, we can mount permanent wind flags or other indicators at desired.

What would be the design and caliber of the optimum rifle for this kind of varmint shooting ?

On a side note, have a good friend in Africa who has a citrus orchard. His problem is not deer, but blue wildebeest. He has a 12-foot fence surrounding it. Once a small band of wildebeest find his orchard and bulldoze their way into it, they won't leave as long as there is any fruit left. He has a blind on a steep hill overlooking the orchard. None of the meat goes to waste as it is used to feed his workers or sold in local markets.

My cousin who lives in WVa, has an apple orchard and he use to go down and get an "orchard permit' ... It was real cheap and allowed him to shoot I believer 25 deer on it....

When that was full, he could go down and just get another one... I was thinking the cost was something like $2.00 to $5.00.... but this was in the 1980s....

A good friend I lease hunting land with told me of an article he had read written by a man with an apple orchard and a deer problem. The most effective solution was to spread human hair around the orchard. It does work as per doing it ourselves to divert deer away from hunters setting feeders against our fence line and shooting toward us.

When stationed in Maine in the 75-79 era, a friend asked if I could help his parents out. They had a small farm and deer were eating their profits up. At that time it was legal for them to shoot them and any means was ok. All they had to do was call the Game Warden for a tag after the fact. We would go out at night and spotlight the deer, shoot clean and dress them out and he would call the warden in the morning. I kept 3 families in venison and his parents realized a $3000 profit off their strawberries that year. Not hunting, but vermin eradication and economical survival for a family in an area where the median income was $12k at the time.

Nebraska has (or had, it has been a while since I checked) a law where a land owner of the type you are talking about may get a "predation" permit and cull a certain number of deer. There is some paper work involved, and you need to meet some requirements, but I know of a few farmers that do this.

In fact, my uncle is looking in to it. He lost a lot of corn to a small herd of deer, and wants to remove the problem before next year.

My cousin doing this, didn't do it to really keep the deer out of his apple orchard....

He kept his apple orchard, to be able to have venison, year round legally!

When I was a kid, in the 1950s and use to go down and visit my grandparents, there were a lot of people locally, that took venison year round as a major source of meat...they were poor enough, that if they didn't poach deer, they would have very little meat on their tables...

The state sort of just looked the other way....