Processing deer to eliminate food insecurity

ASTRID RIECKEN // The Washington Post via Getty Images It’s been 48 years since Kip Padgelek and his dad launched their custom deer processing business. After a career revolving around all things meat, including an education at the Culinary Institute of America, Padgelek, now almost 70, has no plans to retire, The Daily Yonder reports. That’s good news for the many customers of his business, which is located in a suburb west of Pittsburgh (his shop’s specialty is a Philly cheesesteak brat). But it’s even better news for those who rely on the 40,000 pounds of venison–roughly 160,000 servings–from Pennsylvania’s free-roaming deer that Padgelek and his staff butchered, ground, and distributed into the greater Allegheny County charitable food network last year.  Food insecurity in Pennsylvania is a big issue–one that impacts rural areas, urban areas, and everywhere in between, Randy Ferguson, executive director of Hunters Sharing the Harvest program, or HSH, a non-profit headed into its 34th year of operation, said.  He puts the statewide population of folks who don’t know where their next meal will come from at around 1.5 million, or around 12%. That’s lower than the nationwide rate of roughly 13.5%, according to the USDA, but not by much. And according to Julia Bancroft, the CEO of Feeding PA, of the 1.5 million food insecure Pennsylvanians, around 400,000 are children.   “Hungry people are eating this tremendous protein source that they typically don’t see in the charitable food system,” Ferguson said. “They’re used to peanut butter and canned tuna. So maybe people have never experienced venison before, but they’re given it in a meal at a soup kitchen, and they’re making a connection with people they don’t know who are out there hunting and providing this resource to them.”  Ferguson and Padgelek cite a memory from a distribution day at Padgelek’s shop when a line of people queued up to accept ground venison practically circled the block. But there’s something deeper going on here, too, Ferguson said.  In states like Pennsylvania, Texas, and Illinois, where the urban-rural divide seems to deepen with every passing election cycle, venison becomes something of a bridge–a show of communal care passed from hunters to their neighbors in need, near and far. “Participation in our program comes from hunters [and food banks] in both metropolitan areas and the rural areas around the state,” Ferguson said. “In a roundabout way, you’re connecting two very different segments of the population. I don’t think the vast majority of the general population has any idea what type of impact the hunting community is having on hunger within their states. And this is happening at a huge scale, not just here in Pennsylvania. As we start to quantify the millions of pounds of venison and other wild game that are being donated each year to help fight hunger, we realize what a tremendous impact it has.” In 2024, the venison processed by Padgelek went to food banks, soup kitchens, and even the Salvation Army. Padgelek’s shop butchered and processed around 1,300 donated deer–most of them legally hunter-harvested within the principles of fair chase and marked with a tag bought from the Pennsylvania Game Commission, or PGC. Other donated deer came from heavily regulated management culls in suburban and urban parks where deer were overpopulated, but hunting wasn’t allowed, Padgelek pointed out.  Padgelek’s shop is just one of roughly 100 independent processors from across the state who do the messy, tiresome work of turning donated deer into ground meat–work they do on top of their regular custom wild game processing business from September to January.  They’re compensated for butchering the donated deer through Pennsylvania’s HSH program. It compensates participating butchers with money that comes partially from corporate sponsors and non-profit partners of HSH and partially through the USDA’s Emergency Food Assistance Program, or TEFAP, administered by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.  The USDA allocates TEFAP dollars to each state to be spent directly on stocking food pantry shelves and soup kitchen refrigerators. But there’s a little-known piece of language in the law establishing TEFAP that explicitly allows the funding to be spent on ” intrastate and interstate transport, storing, handling, repackaging, processing, and distribution of foods (including donated wild game)” in addition to other commodity proteins regulated by the USDA like chicken and beef.  This small piece of language is at the heart of many venison donation programs across the country, of which there are almost 60 in 42 states. Many of those organizations are also called “Hunters Sharing the Harvest” even though there is no central body connecting them. However, a few nationwide programs also exist. Deer hunters in Pennsylvania harvested over 430,000 deer during the 2023-2024 season and purchased well over one million antlerless tags alone. The proceeds from all those deer tags, plus excise taxes on the firearms, ammunition, archery equipment, and other gear used to hunt deer, will eventually go back into PGC’s operating budget–a feedback loop formed by the Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act of 1937 and known more broadly as part of the North American model of wildlife conservation.  In combination with other wildlife management tools like the Endangered Species Act and the Lacey Act, Pittman-Robertson and its fish-related cousin the Dingell-Johnson Act of 1950 are largely responsible for the recovery of wildlife populations across the nation from near-extinction at the beginning of the 20th century.  In other words, the more hunters hunt, the more they fund research and science-backed management of game and nongame wildlife populations–including strict quotas on annual deer harvest.  “We manage deer populations by Wildlife Management Unit (WMU),” PGC spokesperson Travis Lau said. There are 22 WMUs in Pennsylvania. “In each WMU, we allocate antlerless licenses at a number that seeks to reach a deer population objective–either to increase, decrease, or hold steady deer numbers.”  Pennsylvania’s deer population is high and, in many places, too high for available habitat, which increases deer crowding and associated risk of disease spread. Pennsylvania’s first confirmed case of chronic wasting disease, or CWD, popped up in free-roaming white-tailed deer in 2012. (HSH has a mandatory CWD protocol in place to keep venison from CWD-positive deer out of the charitable food network.)  Deer populations in 11 of the state’s 23 WMUs actually need to decrease, according to PGC’s latest data. “Agricultural damage is a big [issue], but in our large forests, habitat destruction by overbrowsing is a concern, too,” Lau said. “In more populated areas, deer conflicts might more often include vehicle collisions or damage to personal property like gardens. These issues exist regardless of the size of the population, but increase in bigger populations.” National Deer Association (NDA) chief conservation officer Kip Adams points out that, for many state wildlife agencies across the nation, hunters aren’t harvesting enough antlerless deer to reach population quotas because they don’t know what to do with the venison. He chalks this hesitation up, at least in part, to a shrinking availability of deer processing services in rural areas.  “A lot of state wildlife agencies today are asking hunters to shoot more antlerless deer, but hunters aren’t doing it,” Adams said. “Not because the opportunity isn’t there, not because they don’t have the tags, not because the deer aren’t there, but they’re just choosing to not shoot additional antlerless deer.” Hunters who have already filled their freezers don’t want to pay for additional butchering services and don’t want to take an animal’s life just to waste it, which is illegal in most states anyway. So, the NDA is working both at the federal level to increase the availability of TEFAP funding and at the local level to support the knowledge-sharing necessary to get new butchers into the industry. They’re also working on a nationwide deer processor map.  “Part of the issue here is that deer processors are often hard to find,” NDA director of policy Catherine Appling-Pooler said. “NDA is in the middle of this comprehensive mapping effort, that will be made available to the public and to policymakers, to make sure that processing facilities and resources on the landscape are well subscribed and that voids on the map can be filled by entrepreneurs across the country.”  Once completed, the map would identify every custom wild game processor in the nation, making it easier for hunters to pinpoint their nearest butcher and for aspiring butchers to identify regional gaps where they could provide a necessary service. But ultimately, NDA’s goal is to get more butchers paid to process hunter-donated deer, so that hunters don’t need to shell out the funds themselves. “We remain committed to ensuring that funds from [TEFAP] continue to be made available for reimbursing venison processors,” Appling-Pooler said. “Our local and statewide partners do incredible work in putting these abundant wildlife resources to good use, and we want to support them however we can.”  Ferguson reiterated the importance of paying butchers to process donated venison. Getting HSH to its current state as one of the nation’s leading venison donation programs has been a work in progress since its founding by state legislator Ken Brandt and PGC staffer John Plowman in 1991. “These guys were trying to formalize an activity that, to a certain extent, was already happening with game wardens,” Ferguson explained. “If the wardens had confiscated deer [from poachers] or mistaken kills, they would typically find a local family in need and donate the deer to them. The wardens often knew about those folks because they were from those communities. So John and Ken saw a tremendous opportunity to formalize that activity and expand it out to hunters to donate deer to people in their communities that needed food.”  But Brandt and Plowman knew that the idea would never work if hunters had to fork over processing fees, which start at $60 for skinning and quartering a deer at Padgelek’s shop. So they started working with program sponsors to drum up a reimbursement fund. Initially, they asked hunters for a $15 copay, but oil and gas companies taking advantage of the mid-2000s Pennsylvania shale boom came in and took that cost off hunters’ plates, too, Ferguson said. Today, hunters harvest, tag, and field dress their deer, bring that deer into their local participating processor, fill out a donor receipt, and go on their way. The processors grind and package every usable portion of meat, then coordinate deliveries with charitable food distribution centers in their area. At the end of the season, they return their donor receipts to HSH for reimbursement. This model has flourished. “Pennsylvania hunters just keep wanting to break the record,” Ferguson said. “Last year, they set an all-time record of 262,000 pounds of venison donated in one hunting season … our reimbursement costs were just shy of $500,000. That’s up from around $300,000 when I started with the program in 2021.”  It’s rare for any sort of multi-stakeholder system to be without losers today. Maybe that’s what has driven the nationwide growth of the venison donation model over the last few decades: the rarity of a win-win-win-win. This story was produced by The Daily Yonder and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.