11/09/06 — For hunters who love deer season but don’t need or want a freezer full of venison, Hunters Sharing the Harvest has the perfect alternative. Since 1991, the organization’s voluntary venison donation and distribution program has supplied food banks throughout the state with ground venison donated by hunters from within their service areas.
Venison donated by Crawford County hunters, for example, is channeled back into the county through the Erie-based Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest Pennsylvania, which supplies 16 food pantries in Crawford County.
“With extra bonus tags, a lot of hunters might harvest two or three deer, but their families might only consume one in a year,” explained Randy Ferguson, area coordinator for Mercer and Crawford counties. “They might want to donate it, but sometimes it’s hard to figure out how to do that. This is a program that coordinates the whole process.”
In 2005, the organization coordinated the delivery of 200,000 venison meals to hungry Pennsylvanians.
“It’s a great program,” Ferguson said Wednesday. “It’s been around for 15 years, but just hasn’t been real active in Crawford County.”
During the 2006 hunting season, however, Ferguson hopes to breathe new life into the local program.
When a Crawford County hunter takes a deer to a participating processor, Ferguson explained, the processor grinds and packages all the meat in 1- to 2-pound packages of ground venison and delivers it to Second Harvest, which in turn distributes it to Crawford County food pantries. A $15 fee paid by the hunter to the processor for each deer is the hunter’s only financial obligation, Ferguson stressed.
As deer season approaches, Ferguson is looking for both hunters and processors.
The program doesn’t work without processors, Ferguson said, so HSH collects donations from sources including the state Legislature, the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and sponsors. Those funds are used to reimburse the processor for overhead costs associated with the processing. Through participation in the “Give a buck to the pot” program, he added, individuals can easily make tax-deductible donations to the organization.
Learn More
To learn more about Hunters Sharing the Harvest, visit www.sharedeer.org or contact Randy Ferguson at (724) 588-5336 or (724) 813-0839; toll-free at (866) 274-2141; or by e-mail at
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