Agents of the North Dakota Game & Fish Department (NDG&F) are putting increased funding and manpower to use, as members of the agency’s Private Lands Initiative (PLI) added 36,000 acres to the state’s Private Land Open to Sportsmen (PLOTS) program over the past year, according to Kevin Kading, PLI Section Leader. “We had a pretty good year. We grew the program by about 36,000 acres this year, so we’re at 836,000 acres going into this fall, so that’s a nice increase,” Kading touts; “it really does vary in different parts of the state. In some parts of the state, we’re looking at it from an upland game hunting standpoint, and other times it might be a big game or a waterfowl standpoint. So there’s really not a standard procedure that we look at, it’s got to have that hunting value, and it’s got to be accessible,” he concludes.
Added Acres are High Quality. The additional acres in PLOTS consisted of a number of new grassland plantings and acres recently enrolled in the federal Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), likely to remain in that status for at least another decade. With the limited amount of CRP available under the current farm bill in place with the federal government, other marginal acres were converted to grassland habitat through various programs with federal and state agencies and their partners.
“There were some notable increases in some areas, and some nice additions; new grass plantings on the landscape with 1,600 acres of new grass being planted through different programs. About 1,700 new acres of CRP were planted through the program as well,” Kading details, adding, “there’s also a lot of different federal programs out there, and other dollars available, that we’re trying to match and leverage, and trying to get our hands on some of those and work with a lot of different partners to provide additional incentives for the PLOTS program, and for just enrolling in habitat as well.”
The 36,000 additional acres show an increase in PLOTS enrollment by landowners and operators in the state of 4.5 percent year-over-year. This is in line with the NDG&F goal of returning to more than 1 million acres in the program by 2028, an addition of slightly more than 40,000 acres per year over the next four years. This has been made possible due to recent focus by the agency on higher-quality acres and the state legislature’s funding of the programs and new positions in PLI which support the PLOTS program and the group’s efforts in securing more land for hunters, with access to quality
hunting areas being a top concern perennially among sportsmen.
Effective Use for the Future. One change hunters may notice about PLOTS areas this fall is the limited number of
signs posted around each parcel. This is the start of a planned trend by the NDG&F to utilize online and digital boundaries that hunters are turning to more frequently to establish the edges of a hunting area, and that in turn will help lower the cost in both field hours and actual dollars spent on placing, updating, fixing and re-installing the yellow triangle signs affiliated with the PLOTS program. Kading reveals that most corners of each PLOTS area currently have two signs on them, and the agency looks to remove duplicative signs while still providing enough signage to define PLOTS boundaries, saving significant money in the future that can be used for habitat acquisition instead.
The 2024 PLOTS guide is available online at gf.nd.gov/plots/guide in digital format and will likely be incorporated into online hunting applications such as onX in the coming days. Print versions of the guide are being processed this week and will be available at sporting goods stores and license vendors throughout North Dakota by the end of August.
By Nick Simonson is the lead writer and editor of Dakota Edge Outdoors.