Pheasant hunting offers a chance for shared camaraderie among rural and urban sportsmen and women

Nick Jorgensen and family host about 500 hunters in
Ideal, S.D. (Photo by Ariana Schumacher, Agweek)

A farming family in Ideal, South Dakota, is using its hunting lodge as a venue to teach urban hunters about food and farming. Over a weekend, barriers come down, and both sides enjoy the hunt and find some surprisingly common ground, reports Ariana Schumacher of Agweek.

The Jorgensens family owns the Lazysee Lazy J Grand Lodge and Jorgensen Land and Cattle, which hosts about 500 pheasant hunters a year. One of the appeals of pheasant hunting is camaraderie built on the challenge finding the sneaky quarry; pheasants can cleverly avoid becoming prey by circling just behind hunters.

Beyond the hunt, the Jorgensens "see the hunting lodge as an opportunity to teach visitors about agriculture and where their food comes from," Schumacher writes. Nick Jorgensen, CEO of Jorgensen Land and Cattle, told Schumacher, "We view this as an opportunity for our business to do what we call agriculture advocacy. . . . [Guests come] from large metro areas, on the coast, Nashville, Houston, California ... and they are very disconnected from agriculture."

A farm tour is a required part of the hunting experience, Jorgensen told Schumacher. "So, we load them on a bus. We drive them 4 miles away to the feedlot. We go drive through the pens. We go show them a farm field that maybe has some cover crop growing in it. We stop and look at the cows out in the grass, and it’s just an opportunity for us to tell our story on how food is made."

"While many guests come in thinking this operation is a far cry from the business world they know, they soon learn that there is common ground to be found," Schumacher reports. Jorgensen told her: "They get to our operation where we farm 15,000 acres, we have a large feedlot, we have a large cow-calf herd, we are the largest seedstock producer in the United States ... and they think, 'Wow, this is a big business, and these are largely business people. We can talk about how raising food really is a business."

Pheasants came to America from China in the 1880s.
(Photo via Meadowbrook Game Farm, Tenn.)

Because the lodge is a hunting preserve, each pheasant taken on a hunt is replaced. "They want guests to have success without diminishing the wild population," Schumacher explains. "Operating this way allows hunters to take between 4,000 to 5,000 roosters a season. . . . They hope that with this experience, their guests walk away with some agricultural knowledge while enjoying the South Dakota landscape and one of the state’s most popular pastimes: hunting."