Ryan Sabalow

ryan.sabalow@indystar.com

"I am the king behind my fence. These are my deer." — Marty Berry, Texas deer breeder

BALTIC, Ohio – In 1974, Amish dairy farmer Abe Miller bought two white-tailed fawns to keep as pets, and he ended up helping launch an industry — one whose practices would later give him pause.

Miller never imagined that the offspring of those two deer would help fuel a new enterprise devoted to breeding big-antlered deer.

Wildlife officials also never saw it coming.

"If everybody could step back in time 30 years, or if we had a crystal ball back then, probably the states would have been much more restrictive," said Harry Jacobson, a professor emeritus of wildlife ecology and management at Mississippi State University. "And it would have never, never come to this."

Though wildlife officials now roundly advise against taking in wild deer, back then, Pennsylvania's wildlife officers sometimes sold wild fawns to farmers after well-meaning people captured them, believing their mothers had died or abandoned them.

Miller had a man drive him to Pennsylvania, where he paid $75 apiece for a doe and a buck. They put them in a large drum in the back of the van and took them home to the rolling hills of eastern Ohio, where the roads are rutted by the constant traffic of buggy wheels.

The family named them Bobby and Betsy. Bobby was later nicknamed "Buster." They were an instant hit.

"We had a little baby girl that summer in August, and that month after we'd gotten these fawns, we got a lot of visitors, supposedly to see the baby," Miller said. "But they wanted to see the fawns. My dad always teased me. He said, 'More people are coming to look at the deer than the baby.' "

At age 2, Betsy had two fawns, and when they were old enough, Miller released them into the wild with permission from an Ohio wildlife official.

Releasing farm-raised deer into the wild now is expressly forbidden in almost every state. But back then, some deer breeders had permission to restock the wild herds, which were rebounding after being wiped out by habitat loss and over-hunting in many parts of the country.

Soon, everyone seemed to want in on Miller's hobby.

Deer hobby breeds profit

Some of Miller's Amish neighbors wanted their own deer. The first fawns he sold went for $75 each. There was so much demand for his deer that he stopped releasing them into the wild about 1980. At first, he said, his neighbors wanted them as pets.

"At that time, most were more like myself," he said. "They were people that loved deer and just wanted to have a few deer around."

But they also took pride in breeding deer with big antlers.

Miller eventually bred Buster with a doe named Nanny. In 1983, Nanny had a single buck fawn that would turn Miller's hobby — and that of others like him — into an industry that now finds itself at odds with the same wildlife agencies that permitted the breeding operations.

The deer's name was Patrick. And his antlers grew at a shocking rate.

He sprouted 12 full points as a yearling, a time when most bucks' antlers are little taller than their ears. A couple of years later, he sprouted nontypical points, which are regarded as rare and desirable by trophy hunters because the tines jut out at odd angles.

"I kept telling my wife, 'Man, I'd like to have a nice nontypical buck,' " Miller said, grinning and nearly giggling at the memory. "Here he came."

Patrick became a sensation.

Tales of Patrick's incredible rack spread to Texas, where there was a growing demand for big-bodied Midwestern bucks to breed with the slender whitetails that lived amid the mesquite trees and cacti.

"Word got around," Miller said. "And we got a nice price for him."

Miller received $7,500 for Patrick in 1987, when he was shipped to Texas. But Miller kept some of Patrick's fawns.

"People would come from all over the country to buy stock from Patrick," Miller said. "Anything they could buy, you know."

By the 1990s prices for big breeder deer started skyrocketing. The hobby was now a full-blown industry.

Fast-forward to today

At the North American Deer Farmers Association annual conference last spring in Cincinnati, Amish men with black flat-brimmed hats shot tranquilizer darts at a target. Onlookers rooted them on.

Glossy pamphlets with huge bucks on the cover advertised vials of deer semen from bucks with names such as Ballistic, Cardiac Kid, Fear Factor and Primetime. Antlers were mounted on display booths as far as the eye could see.

Thirty-nine years after Miller took in Bobby and Betsy, this is what the deer-breeding industry looks like today.

The four-day conference at the Millennium Hotel drew 750 people from across the country.

Amish women wearing bonnets pushed strollers through the aisles. But there were plenty of non-Amish, too. Camouflage-clad farmers from as far away as Texas sat behind many of the booths.

They all employ methods developed by high-dollar race horse breeders and corporate cattle operations. The result is a high-end market in deer with the best genetics as well as a booming interstate semen trade.

Top deer are DNA-tested and have long, elaborate pedigrees. The deer farmers' association national DNA registry boasts "145,000 animals tested." The animals with the best certified lines fetch top dollar.

At the conference's auction, the day's top seller was a deer that went for $115,000. Three does sold for a total of $225,000. The previous year, a group of six bucks sold for $750,000.

Lester Eicher, an Amish farmer from Grabill, Ind., has had some success at such auctions, though not the six-figure kind. One of his does sold for $20,000 at a 2012 auction.

Eicher was particularly proud of selling a "really powerhouse doe" on the open market for $65,000. Not bad for a farmer who works a 10-acre plot of land, a 2½-hour drive from Indianapolis. He keeps 83 deer.

"I have a construction business, too," said Eicher, speaking slowly and deliberately with the faintest hint of a Pennsylvania Dutch accent. "But this has been doing really well for us. We was in the horses, you know, buying and selling horses. But deer have, by far, raised us more money."

Boost to rural economies

These financial successes are why deer breeding has caught on fast and won the support of some farm-friendly lawmakers.

In depressed rural areas, where it's increasingly hard to make a living on small farms and populations have been on the decline, a landowner with a few acres can raise scores of deer that command hefty prices.

"It's the best income you can do in agriculture at this point," said Eddie Ray Borkholder, Bremen, Ind., one of the founders of the Midwest deer-breeding industry. He started with 8 acres.

That's just a fraction of the land federal environmental officials say it would take for a traditional Midwest farmer to make a living.

It's perhaps no wonder, then, that a 2007 study by Texas A&M University concluded that deer and elk breeding is, "perhaps, the fastest growing industry in rural America."

That's partly because a profitable deer farm doesn't require prime farmland. Deer do just fine on rocky hillsides that would snag a plow. Thirty years after Borkholder sold his first deer, his family's operation typically has more than 100 deer.

It became so successful that he took a voluntary layoff from a nearby trailer factory and used the profits from the deer-breeding operation to open a wood-moulding shop up the road from his home.

It now employs 17 people who operate the shop's computerized saws and pressurized wood-staining room.

"The deer," he said, "was what did all that."

Shooters and breeders rule

Shawn Schafer, the North American Deer Farmers Association's executive director, said about 25 percent of deer and elk farmers diversify their incomes by selling venison to specialty meat markets. Others also supply elk-antler velvet to companies selling sprays to athletes as steroid alternatives. Some collect urine from does in heat to be sold as randy buck attractants used by hunters, Schafer said at the Cincinnati conference.

But the big money and the largest segment of the industry are in breeding and selling what are known as "shooter bucks," animals to be hunted on fenced preserves.

In the beginning, top dollars were paid for "breeder bucks," but deer farmers have since discovered does often carry the genetics that produce big racks. They, too, now command high prices.

"When you're focusing on the antlers, you're only looking at 50 percent, and some people will tell you it's actually less than that," said Schafer, a deer farmer from North Dakota.

Schafer, a snake's rattle dangling from the band of his black cowboy hat, hurried from place to place at the conference, coordinating vendors and the speakers holding panels on such topics as "Update on Anesthetics for Deer," "Fawn Management and Colostrum" and "Biosecurity on Deer Farms."

Miller gave a presentation called the "Modern History of Deer Farming," in which he told the story of Bobby, Betsy and Patrick to a standing-room-only crowd.

"That first time, you know, it's kinda like having your first baby," Miller said.

Now? "It's really a total different ballgame than when we started." (continued)

Tales from the deer trade

A video posted on several deer-breeding websites provides a glimpse into a world Miller never envisioned. The video opens with five men wrestling a white-tailed buck into a metal chute. The deer's eyeballs bulge as the animal thrashes in pure terror. One man crams a cuplike device wrapped in duct tape over the buck's mouth and nose. It's connected to a tube pumping tranquilizer gas. They wrap a pink blanket over the buck's eyes. Its thrashing slowly subsides.

One of the men gets to work on the deer's hindquarters.

He inserts a probe into the deer's anus and places a camouflage-covered bag with a funnel attachment over the deer's genitals. He gradually turns a knob on a yellow box. The deer's back legs shake as the probe's electrical current causes the deer to ejaculate into the funnel.

After collecting the semen, the men saw off the animal's antlers for safety in the pens.

The last shot of this video, set to cheerful music, shows the wobbly legged buck with just nubs on its head being released into its pen.

The video demonstrates one method used to harvest one of the most lucrative products: semen.

That harvest has proved to be particularly bountiful for Borkholder. He stores thousands of containers of semen from about 40 bucks in a liquid nitrogen-filled tank. Each container, called a straw, holds enough semen to impregnate two does through artificial insemination.

Some straws, he said, could sell for as much as $20,000 if the high-demand buck has died. Most of the semen Borkholder has for sale ranges from $450 to $2,500 per straw.

Borkholder says he typically extracts semen once each fall, sometimes twice. Each buck averages 80 to 90 straws in a single extraction.

"I've had as much as 200 straws," Borkholder said, "but that's an exception."

He said farmers could extract semen more than twice a year, but he prefers not to because it causes too much stress. Several deer farmers told The Indianapolis Star that stress is a leading cause of death among their skittish animals, and it's a main reason tranquilizer darts and gas are used when handling the deer.

Patrick makes X-Factor

In the mid-1990s, as the sale of shooter bucks took off, Borkholder paid $500 each for three does from Patrick's line. He wasn't alone.

Miller said that if you could trace most of the white-tailed deer standing in America's deer pens — and, by extension, the trophies hanging on many preserve hunters' walls — their pedigrees would include some of Patrick's line.

One of them is an Indiana buck with legendary status. The buck, which sports a tangled crest of tines and drooping points, is kept at a Peru, Ind., deer farm. Its antlers are so large that the 285-pound deer loses more than 100 pounds to grow them each spring.

His name is X-Factor.

Borkholder said he is a 25 percent co-owner of the deer, which includes the Patrick lineage on his mother's side.

Hyped as the "largest deer in the world," X-Factor has a rack that measures 580 inches using the breeders' complicated antler scoring formula. That's nearly twice the size of the established world record for a wild whitetail. For farm-bred deer, it was considered huge in his day, though he has since been eclipsed by bigger bucks.

Now described as an "old man" on his breeders' Facebook page, X-Factor still has a fantastic reputation — and price tag.

Industry insiders say X-Factor likely was worth $1 million in his prime and probably at least $500,000 now. His semen is still listed at $2,500 a straw.

Miller views all of this with mixed emotions.

He is thrilled that so many of his friends and fellow breeders have seen so much success, and he credits deer for helping his family pay off its farm when many small livestock operations were struggling. But not every change he has witnessed is for the better.

He said some of the modern breeders' techniques — the artificial insemination and the use of tranquilizer darts — make him uncomfortable. And he isn't exactly an ardent supporter of high-fence hunting preserves, which he calls "hunting in pens."

"I'd want to hunt the deer out in the wild," he said. "At the same time, if somebody has the money to spend, that's their business."

But those aren't the issues that caused him to sell off his last deer in 2012. It was something beyond his control — the regulations and testing meant to stop the spread of disease.

Call Star reporter Ryan Sabalow at (317) 444-6179. Follow him on Twitter: @ryansabalow.