DUDLEY, Ga. — Farming should be simple.
While bad weather can be a big obstacle for Central Georgia farmers and a bountiful harvest, most of the time, farmers grow the crops and people buy and eat it.
However, farming is expensive these days.
“Everything we buy is probably double, triple parts-wise. Help’s harder to come by so, I've got seed costs, man costs, fuel costs," Cody Lord said.
He’s a Laurens County farmer, and he says expenses eat into his profits.
“We're already kind of on a tight profit margin the last year, or so — and then you've got deer eating stuff right out of your pocket,” he said.
Not John Deere. White-tail deer.
Lord says they’ve been eating and destroying acres of soybean, cotton and peanuts.
“I’ll go show you 300 deer any night you want to see them,” Lord explained. “This year has been the worst we've ever seen them. I have no idea why the population has exploded, but it’s exploded."
He says he had to replant a section of field gobbled up by deer. After having to pay for more seeds, weed killer, fuel and machinery, he says the 140 acres should yield 70 bushels of soybeans. That is equivalent to around $158,000.
However, he says due to deer damage, he might only be making half of that.
“The back sides of this field are just annihilated,” he says.
Lord says he risks losing the beans ready to harvest waiting for the newly planted ones to catch up. He says the problem eats up his patience.
“Like those,” he said. “You can't even cut them right there. They just eat them up to nothing and push them down on the ground. This is just my worst field and one of my bigger fields. It's just disheartening, a little bit."
Lord says if the deer population continues to grow, soon he won't be able to plant the same crops there.
“You're wasting time. It's a zero from the start and you know it,” he said.
Lord says other farmers say they're also losing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“They're getting so bad– my cotton buddies, it's costing them — I got one of my buddies that told me that they're probably costing him $100,000 just this year,” Lord said.
They've expressed their concern to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, but there's only so much the farmers can do.
“Deer hunters, I think there’s less of them according to the DNR. I don’t know how we get over this problem this year,” Lord said.
He just wants farming to be simple again.
According to the DNR website, hunters are only allowed to shoot two bucks and 10 deer during deer season.
We reached out to the department for comment and were not able to reach them.