This time of year, Jim Sweeney’s food plot in Leelanau County doesn’t look like much. It’s a small field with some sparse grasses and a deer blind off to the side. But, come fall, it’s “like a lush lawn,” Sweeney said. Sweeney mostly plants clover, beets and turnips these days. And in places where the soil’s a little better than in northwest Michigan, people plant corn. Baiting—putting out piles of food such as corn to attract deer for hunting—has been illegal in the Lower Peninsula since 2018 to prevent the spread of chronic wasting disease, a fatal, contagious brain disease that’s been found in 14 Lower Peninsula counties and in Dickinson County in the Upper Peninsula. But some think pro-baiting lawmakers have a shiny new bargaining chip: The DNR needs money.
