Outdoor Observations: An open letter to Michigan farmers to help hunters take more deer

Michigan’s agriculture community is at or near the top of the list among those concerned with the state’s growing deer population. Yet modern-day farming practices of plowing under crops as soon as they are harvested works against the desire of many farmers that hunters kill more deer.
I remember hunting farm country in the 1980s and ’90s when cut corn fields and bean stubble fields were magnets for whitetails. Once fields were harvested, the remains were left until spring and hunters had ample opportunities to harvest deer, which continued to feed on the leftovers. Sometime in the early 2000s farming practices changed.