Hunters Can Spread the Wealth with Venison Donations

Venison donation services are easy to find and use, and a great way to prolong your deer season while helping your neighbors.

August 27, 2025 By Andrew McKean

Randy Ferguson describes deer hunting as a social service. He’s not talking about hunters’ mutually beneficial relationship with farmers in his native Pennsylvania, or the social and economic fabric that’s knit by hunters and their traditions in rural communities around the country.

Instead, he’s talking about the million pounds of venison that Pennsylvania hunters have donated to public food banks in the Keystone State over the last 5 years. “We’ve been breaking records every year with the donated portion of the deer harvest,” says Ferguson, executive director of Pennsylvania’s chapter of Hunters Sharing the Harvest (HSH) program, now in its 34th year. “Last season, hunters donated 262,000 pounds from about 6,900 deer. That’s an all-time record for us, topping the 235,000 pounds from the year before. When you compound the wild-game donation programs all across the country, it really puts this social service in perspective. American hunters are feeding the nation.”

While those are impressive numbers, they could be even higher if more hunters knew about venison-donation programs and planned ahead to make their own donations. Donations would increase if there were more deer-country butchers to process donated venison. And more food-insecure Americans could be sustained if there was more capacity in the system that not only takes overpopulated deer off the landscape, but allows hunters more time in the field while filling a big and growing demand for healthy wild protein in America’s food system.

The harvest of surplus whitetail deer, almost all of them antlerless, is also an important wildlife management tool.

“By reducing the number of does, hunters help prevent overpopulation, which can lead to negative environmental impacts and increased vehicle collisions,” notes the National Deer Alliance, a leading voice for whitetail management and a link in venison-donation programs in every state.

Venison donation is an important benchmark in the century-long task of restoring America’s deer herd. Generations ago, management meant conservatively limiting harvest to bucks. Then, as the nation’s whitetails expanded, so did season lengths and bag limits. Current management emphasizes doe harvest—and the more the better in many parts of the whitetail’s range that have more deer than food or the space for them. Overpopulated deer cause substantial crop damage, and concentrations of deer can lead to disease and malnutrition.

“We’ve shifted from managing deer in a climate of scarcity to managing in a climate of abundance,” says Boone and Crockett Club professional member Charlie Booher. “I’d argue that just as restraint was a key quality of hunters in the early years of whitetail restoration, the key quality of deer hunters in many parts of the country now is maximizing harvest.”

HEALTHFUL HARVEST

As much as hunters enjoy consuming the venison they harvest, there are only so many meals in a year, and a majority of hunters say they would kill additional does if they had a destination for the meat. That’s why the nation’s venison-donation services are an important gear in the engine of wildlife management. They convert venison from surplus deer into meals that feed the nation’s food-insecure population, which is disproportionately located in rural America. It’s an elegant solution with strong social-service benefits, says Ferguson, but he stresses that a few pinch points prevent the venison donation pipeline from expanding to balance supply with demand.

“The objective of the Pennsylvania Game Commission is to manage the deer herd, and they generally do that by allocating antlerless tags to control the population to a sustainable level,” he says. “But demand by hunters is declining while the need to issue more tags is growing. If a hunter’s freezer is full, they aren’t inclined to harvest another deer without an end-use in mind. A further deterrent is price. A hunter doesn’t want to pay $100 or $150 in processing a deer they don’t have a need for.”

That’s where groups like Ferguson’s, the NRA’s Hunters for the Hungry, Farmers & Hunters Feeding the Hungry, Sportsmen Against Hunger and a dozen more can help put more venison on America’s dinner tables.

Funding to reimburse processors and distribute venison burger comes from voluntary donations, a tax credit in some states, donations from hunters and non-hunters alike and funds from the federal Department of Agriculture’s Emergency Food Assistance Program that can be used to process and distribute venison. Donations and grant revenue pay processors to convert donated venison into ground deer meat that’s distributed to food banks. Ferguson says the need of public food banks for organic, lean protein has never been higher as more Americans are squeezed by the rising price of groceries.

“Our program meshes well with the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s herd-management objectives and our belief in the social-service aspect of hunting, but also rising food insecurity in this country,” says Ferguson. “Ours is a vehicle to say to hunters: Spend more of the days afield that you love. Don’t be so concerned about those extra tags and where you’ll put the venison to use. We have a processor near where you harvest that deer and you won’t have any charge associated with processing. You’ll be feeding people in your local community that can use that premium protein source that they don’t get very often. We’re solving a lot of problems at once.”

Ferguson reports that benefits of Pennsylvania’s venison donation program go well beyond the caloric field-to-table progression. Recognizing the lack of independent butchers and the rising need for venison donations, the state is including meat-cutting trades and butchery in vocational-technical programs.

“A county in western PA just finished expanding a vo-tech center where they’re teaching meat-cutting as a trade, and that center just signed on to be a venison donation site,” says Ferguson. “So, kids in that program will have hands-on instruction in deer processing, learning a trade while they’re helping local farmers to reduce overpopulations of deer while serving their neighbors by providing them with healthy, lean protein. That’s what I’m talking about when I talk about the social service of deer hunting.”