Tired of Deer Damage? Updates to the Red Tag Program Might Help

Sep 26, 2022

By Heidi Reed

Unfortunately, we haven't found a miracle cure for deer damage to crops just yet. However, updates to The Pennsylvania Game Commission's Agricultural Deer Control (Red Tag) Program could make use of the program slightly easier for landowners.

Changes were announced in April 2022, with the new regulations to start in November 2022.

The main changes are as follows:

Old Rule	New Rule
Hunter may obtain one permit per Red Tag property	Hunter may obtain up to four permits per Red Tag Property
Permits are valid from July 1-September 28, then February 1-May 15, excluding Sundays	Permits valid from August 1-September 15, then February 1-April 15, excluding Sundays
Program is closed for summer period May 16-June 30	Program is closed for summer period April 16-July 31
Landowner is required to report Red Tag harvests	Hunter reports for each permit, regardless of harvest success
Only licensed hunters that are Pennsylvania residents qualify for Red Tag permits	All licensed hunters qualify for Red Tag permits, including out-of-state hunters
Red snap tags are used	Standard harvest tags issued through HuntFishPA are used
Landowners need to enroll in the Game Commission’s Hunter Access Program	Landowners do not need to enroll in the Hunter Access program

Permits will be issued for the license year that begins July 1 and goes through June 30.

Hopefully these changes, plus the additional 23,000 doe tags for the 2022-2023 season, will help better manage deer populations and reduce crop damage.

Source : psu.edu

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids