Hunting Lease

A Business, Not A Hunting Club

We have been in the hunting lease business for the do it yourself hunter since 1965 giving us over 40 years of hunting land lease experience. And yes, the staff hunts as well and can talk knowledgeably about how to make a hunt work.

Not only have we been leasing land for a long time we have concentrated that leasing effort in Kansas, Missouri and Iowa. We will contract the right habitat within the right region of each state that has a history of production. We take the mystery away of where to hunt.

Hunters' Choice

The first choice is to advanced to a favored hunt discipline of upland bird, waterfowl, deer or turkey to get discipline specific information. Another choice is to continue reading our general discussion below.

Our entire approach to self guided hunts is to provide a lot of hunt options or lease land choices for the do it yourself hunter.

In the simplest form we lease the private land conducting all legal and insurance requirements and the hunter hunts. He simply hunts as often as he would like, hunts on his schedule, for deer, turkey, waterfowl and upland birds and has the added adventure of exploring new lease land each trip out.

That hunter also hunts without any need to contact the landowner, administer the lease or any requirement other than making a telephone reservation with the MAHA office. The hunter drives to the lease land, parks and hunts. That lease land is well documented on county road maps and are posted with unique Association signage.

Within our system a hunter is not locked into a single farm or lease. For turkey and deer lease land this means that the hunter does not have to have an all or nothing proposition. He may pre-season scout any lease we hold and select which one or several he wants to hunt. And, typically he does hunt more than one lease through the entire season. And, for those that do not have time to scout we can recommend several leases for a good hunt or several.

Deer Lease Example

Our deer lease approach provides us another example of how we manage lease land as we all should agree that deer change their movement patterns from pre, peak and post rut and as their patterns change so does their location. In this case each deer hunter may select and hunt several farms making up for changes between pre-season scouting and actual hunts.

With our system of allowing year round access to our lease land the hunter may select the habitat across several lease parcels most likely to yield a chance at a trophy whitetail during the portion of the rut he selects to hunt. Contrasting our approach to a deer hunter locked into one deer lease either has success or failure based on the chances a trophy whitetail comes to any one piece of ground or not. For most of our deer hunters they typically scout 2,000+ acres of land settling on two to three farms to hunt from about six or nine stands. At this point the hunter will be arguing with himself as where to hunt and not settling on a single spot as occurs on a small acreage private lease.

Hunt With Hunt Quality Controls

The lease land reservation system ensure the hunter is on that lease alone during the hunt. That one aspect alone brings our hunters back year after year through avoidance of knock on door and public lands hunter mentality. All leases are posted on a county road map that is maintained up to date of all current leases on a password protected map web site. When we recommend a lease to the first year member he can look at the same lease map sheet that we are referencing right down to the individually numbered farm. That system insures accuracy when recommending which land to start the membership hunt effort.

Size Matters

We are a large acreage hunting lease operation with a limit on the total number of hunters and monitor the primary and secondary interest of each hunter to ensure we never have too many of any one type of hunter.

That limit on self guided hunters is largely dictated by that about all the two Association land managers can handle within one year in terms of hunting lease land is around 220,000 acres of ground. That amount of lease acreage within the central mid-west composed of Great Plains states of Missouri, Iowa and Kansas where agriculture is king typically means within the soft 800's on members at any time.

The membership cap being soft is a result that we can always take more archery hunters for example as there are not enough in the entire USA to occupy our lease acreage. Where as our duck hunters are limited by the number of blinds we will maintain rather than wetlands lease acreage. That one aspect alone shows that while not all leases are equal, lease hunter access is in terms none are ever denied a hunt due to competition from other MAHA members.

While we have lease land that may fill the deer hunter's objective of the best quality deer habitat, we also cater to the turkey, upland and waterfowl hunter as well. This multi use hunting lease approach is a matter of economics. An example would be the prime deer regions the lease land is expensive and any one member's membership cost most likely will not cover that cost per any one lease by himself, however when combined with others the net result is better habitat in better state regions.

That deer hunter occupying a stand at a time on one lease will typically take a day per spot. Opposed to this is the pheasant hunter that will cover 400 to 600 acres a day on a lease that may have a gross acreage of 1,200 and that land is the cheapest to lease. For both the pheasant and deer hunter each may overlap on occasion on the same lease on different weeks. In the end it all balances as long as we do a good job of managing the membership's primary and secondary hunter interests to that of the lease land profile by region and acreage.

And, it continues to be better as within our approach to private land lease operations and hunters they are not limited to one game species or lease. We have Mule and Whitetail Deer, duck and goose, pheasant and quail, Eastern and Rio Grande Turkey. Each hunter may hunt any season, on any lease in the three states where we manage lease land, Kansas, Iowa or Missouri.

This lease approach to allowing all to hunt all they would like makes for a more enjoyable year as most will hunt more than one discipline. Rarely does any one hunt more than two disciplines within one year and those that do, do not have sufficient time to impact any one of those disciplines.

Wetlands

Our duck hunting wetlands are enhanced pre-existing wetlands and developed by ourselves. And, just like our deer lease land our do it yourself duck hunters are not locked into just one duck blind lease or wetlands lease.

We have several wetlands leases with 30+ duck blinds and every hunter has equal access to all of them. No one duck hunter can hunt them all and as all may move from blind to blind or wetlands to wetlands following the migration none will get bored with the same water.

Controls

The limiting factor to our self guided hunting lease operation is the amount of time and road miles that partners Jon Nee and John Wenzel have to acquire private lease land and the critical factor is that each lease and landowner is visited twice a year.

One visit during the season and once off season we survey each private land lease as best we can and attempt to cover all the land each year. These visits serve to remind the landowner we are watching the habitat and land use as it must substantially remain the same and in compliance with our written lease contract from the time we sign the lease until its closure. And, as long as the landowner knows we are watching him and the lease we will not be taken advantage of by the landowner attempting to stretch the limits of the contract.

When it comes to landowners and lease contracts the ideal of the example set by the book and TV show Little House On The Prairie where all things are accomplished with a wink of the eye and a handshake still does occur in the central mid-west. However, a far more prevalent example are set by those landowners that smile when a non-resident license plate drives into the farmer's driveway.

That landowner has the idea that the small group of non-resident hunters will pay a large lease amount for a small bit of acreage and before and after that group hunts the landowner will attempt to have other non-residents lease the same land. The difference between what the hunter and the landowner's lease objectives are at this point are great with the average work-a-day hunter powerless to enforce his lease desires.

Under our wild game, natural habitat private land lease approach we manage the landowner's actions and serve to support the do it yourself hunter's desires as well. With MAHA acting as the hunter's advocate we lease for our hunters the right habitat in the right region of the state and then manage the hunter to ensure non-competitive hunts.

There is more about the hunt quality we offer and that is best discussed in a tailored telephone conversation that focuses ont he specific hunt plans of the individual hunter. Feel free to call 9 to 9 on most days for a specific and detailed discussion.

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