Can Nantucket Really Hunt Enough Deer To Help Fight Food Insecurity? And Will People Eat All That Venison?

The ACK Deer Management Project, a small, year-old collection of concerned islanders looking to address the overpopulation of deer on Nantucket, wants to help hunters take 2,000 deer a year on Nantucket and donate a large chunk of the meat to food-insecure island residents. Currently, hunters are taking fewer than 900 deer a year, which could mean that ACK Deer would need to process upwards of 1,100 deer each year. But what would it actually look like to process over a thousand deer for consumption on Nantucket?

The non-profits working to address food insecurity on Nantucket believe that venison could be an important part of their larger efforts.

“It's certainly helpful,” Food Pantry manager Ruth Pitts told the Current. “The addition of the venison is fantastic…in past years, we have benefitted from the deer program for sure.”

Meg Browers, Director of Development and Operations at Nourish Nantucket, also spoke positively about the program. She added that Nourish is working to secure a permanent building that could serve as a base of operations for food insecurity efforts on-island, and that their search for a building “definitely” takes venison processing into consideration.

“We're trying to just connect that final dot to get the venison into the hands of the people who need it,” she said.

Efforts to address Nantucket’s enormous deer population, the densest in the state, are gathering steam. ACK Deer is working with the Nantucket Conservation Foundation and the Land Bank, as well as Nourish. While no one interviewed for this article was able to confirm a timeline, representatives from various organizations expressed optimism about the prospects of establishing a professional-grade venison processing facility on the island in the near future.

The Land Bank is also considering pursuing deer damage permits, which would allow them to let sub-permittees kill deer on their extensive island properties outside the regulated hunting season. And deer season itself was expanded by a full month on Nantucket to encourage hunters to kill more deer.

However, it’s unclear how many people need—or even want—venison on Nantucket.

“It's difficult. From a culinarian's perspective, it was a product that even in restaurants has pretty limited appeal,” said Pitts, who used to work in the restaurant industry. “A lot of my clients are like 'what the heck would I do with it?'”

Browers, Pitts, and ACK Deer co-founder Mike Leavitt all agreed that any effort to significantly increase the amount of venison donated on Nantucket should include an educational component.

“Part of our program is not just to hand out ground venison but to provide recipes,” Leavitt said. “A lot of thought is going into that.”

Leavitt said that ACK Deer wants to distribute meal kits and offer cooking classes, initiatives that Browers and Pitts both independently suggested as well.

“That has to have sautéed onions, carrots, garlic,” Pitts said. “There's a lot that has to go into making those palatable meals.”

The venison donation program already made a difference last year, when the amount of meat donated was far lower than what the ACK Deer Management Project has proposed. An expansion of the program could have even more of an impact, and Leavitt said that, based on his conversations with local food insecurity groups, distribution is feasible.

“They will be able to take and distribute every ounce of meat we provide,” Leavitt said, adding that if there is some meat that can’t be distributed on Nantucket, it can always be sent off-island.

Chris Sleeper, a co-founder of local grocer Pip & Anchor, said that the company’s food security program, the Pip & Anchor Send It service, was prepared to take 160 pounds of venison a week.

“Last year, when available, we were able to distribute to nearly all of our families (besides those who don’t eat meat),” he wrote in a message to the Current. “We’ve seen a significant demand and have storage for it.”

But before the venison gets on anyone’s plates, it has to be processed—and processing over a thousand deer is no small feat.

Nobody knows that better than Jason Pearl, who spearheaded the venison donation program last year, processing deer with his friend Angel Landaverde.

Pearl, a long-time hunter, became involved in the program as a way to give back to the community and support the Food Pantry, and as an attempt to reduce venison waste.

“I grew up eating out of the Food Pantry with a family that didn't have a lot here,” Pearl said. “So for me, [it’s about] being able to put something back in it, and maybe put a spark in a kid in another household.”

Pearl said he was the first person on Nantucket to legally process deer for the state’s “hunters share the harvest” program, which donates venison to those in need.

While managing farmland on Nantucket, Pearl began to shoot deer as a means of crop protection. Under state regulations, it is lawful to shoot any deer that are actively damaging agricultural crops, so Pearl would wait near the farmland and gun down offending deer night after night.

With no use for the deer, Pearl dug a large open hole in the back of the property and loaded the deer carcasses into it. As those carcasses began to decay and the hole filled, Pearl and others aware of the ditch began to call it the “pit of death.”

“I don’t know how many we killed,” he said. “We were filling that hole.”

Later, he estimated that he and Landaverede likely shot dozens of deer.

Frustrated by the amount of venison going to waste—and aware of the unwanted attention the pit of death was beginning to draw—Pearl looked into what he could do with the deer and discovered the Share the Harvest program.

“We knew it was just a huge waste of a resource,” he said. “A lot of eyebrows were going up…it just took the one person to go look at the pit of death for everyone to go look at it. And then red flags were coming up left and right.”

Pearl and Landaverde estimate that they processed around 250-300 deer last year, although not all were processed as part of the Share the Harvest program. Some went to the Food Pantry. Some went off-island to recipients, including the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe.

Going from 300 deer to a thousand would require an enormous investment. Pearl thinks that, if they were working full-time, he and Landaverde could probably pull it off. That’s the kind of time the ACK Deer Management Project might need to invest.

“You couldn't do it part-time,” Pearl said.

Leavitt agrees that ACK Deer would have to pay for the labor, but he thinks that the operation could be streamlined with more professional facilities and larger crews if the number of deer processed started to approach a thousand.

Pearl also spoke in favor of deer damage permits, which he thinks are necessary if there is any hope of containing Nantucket’s staggeringly huge herd. But he worried about the pushback that anyone seeking deer damage permits might face from other hunters who don’t share his perspective.

“You're going to have a whole lot of people who are really upset that you took that availability from them,” he said. “It's not going to cause a massive decline in the deer population, but where it's implemented, that's where you're going to have the pushback. Every hunter who hunts in the areas where you implement that damage permit is not going to like you.”

What everyone interviewed for this article agreed on was that taking more deer—and donating more meat to Nantucketers who need it—would be a good thing for the island.