Hunters vs. developers: Counting down to when no ‘country’ is left

Raise your hand if you think the deer population is on the rise in Orangeburg County and there was never any need for the deer tags.

OK, now that we have that settled, let’s talk about something more important. Where are we going to be hunting in the very, very near future? How much more development can we withstand and still have areas suitable for hunting as well as farming?

I’m a middle-aged guy and I have seen a lot of land get screwed up through the years, but never have I seen land get destroyed at the rate it is being destroyed lately.

I wrote an article back in 2009 about farmland and hunting land disappearing to development, and a lot of people scoffed at me. Even one of my best friends, who actually grew up on a farm and spent most of his life hunting with me, laughed at me.

He told me, “Development of land has no effect on us hunting!” I wonder if he still stands by his statement. I get it, if you’ve struggled on a farm all your life and you get a chance to sell your land at an incredibly high price, I guess it would be hard to turn down.

But my land will never be for sale as long as I’m alive. If I was starving to death, I would probably crawl down the sidewalk and beg for food before I sold any land. And fortunately for me, my son feels the same way.

I wish more landowners felt the same. It just doesn’t make any sense to me how folks spend a lifetime buying tracts of land, especially adjoining tracts of land, and let it all go for the almighty dollar.

I see these same people look around after most of their land is gone and say things like, “Well, I was going to plant a dove field here but can’t drop birdshot on that new house without them calling DNR,” or “Can’t have a man drive for deer because if we sling buckshot either way, we gonna hit the panels in that solar farm.” They don’t seem to realize when it’s gone, it’s gone. Houses are usually the last crop grown on a farm.

A similar issue I have quite often with rented land is when families let a family member build a house in the middle of a field I have been farming. They get upset because I’m not interested in farming the land anymore. So I have to go through the whole spiel with them and explain to them why it’s just not worth it.

Of course they don’t understand that planting a bunch of short rows is too aggravating, and Dicamba or Roundup herbicides drifting over grass, flowers or shrubbery are deadly and a good way to get sued. Also, the new kids in the house never realize that throwing pruned limbs 3 inches in diameter in the edge of my field is very problematic. (I’ve seen it all.)

I’m a small farmer by most standards if you look at the acreage I farm, but I lost a total of 342 acres in 2023 alone!

That’s correct, in one year I lost a total of 342 acres of rented land to development. Now all of the land lost was not just open land, part of it was wooded. However, it’s still a big loss to me as a farmer and outdoorsman, and land that will never be farmed or hunted again.

I mentioned solar farms earlier. Can anyone explain the advantage of putting up all these seemingly hazardous panels in a field over growing crops in a field?

There’s no way it’s cheaper in the long run for producing electricity. Water running over an already existing dam seems pretty clever and economical to me.

Maybe natural gas would even be a better option. I actually asked a lawyer this question. He told me that there are no advantages with solar farms, and it’s all BS subsidized by the government. He said in a nutshell, the government is taking tax dollars and helping destroy our lands.

Are there no elected officials willing to take a stand and make an attempt at curtailing some of this development? I never liked government interference in very many things, but this needs to be a priority before it’s too late.

Farmers like myself can’t afford to compete for land with government-subsidized companies, or with developers who constantly sneak around offering large sums of money to local landowners.

We have developers in our region southern born and bred that love to hunt, but what buying tracts of land and booting the farmers and hunters out mean absolutely nothing to them.

What’s even sadder is to see them cater their development plan to people from foreign countries. I turn my TV off every time I see that commercial promoting South Carolina for people to move here — “Smiling Faces and Beautiful Places.”

Developers are instead destroying the beautiful places and putting frowns on a lot of faces.

People, put your land in some type of conservation reserve that protects it from development, offer your land to a local farmer before you consider selling to someone else, help your kids remodel an existing home or buy them a lot in town. Leave them a place in the county to enjoy before there is no “country” left.