Beyond Whitetails: What Turkey, Waterfowl, Dove and Hog Leases Actually Cost in 2026

In Nebraska last year, 51% of hunting leases were not for deer. Waterfowl took 19%. Pheasants and quail took 17%. Turkey took 13%. That is not a fringe number from a fringe state — it comes from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln's 2025 Farm Real Estate Market Survey, the same panel of appraisers and land professionals whose cash-rent numbers move real money every spring.

Now go read almost any hunting-lease pricing guide, including most of the ones on this site. Every one of them prices your ground as whitetail ground: acres, deer density, buck age structure, food plots, stand sites. If your property does not check those boxes, the implied conclusion is that you do not have a lease — you have a farm.

That is wrong, and it is expensive. A 40-acre slough that will never hold a mature buck can out-earn a 400-acre timber tract per acre. A cut sunflower field is a business on September 1 and a bare dirt field on September 20. A spring turkey lease is revenue on ground already leased to somebody else in the fall.

Here is what that ground is actually worth, what the numbers do and do not tell us, and the one federal regulation that makes a non-deer lease legally different from a deer lease.

Read This Before You Read the Numbers

We publish first-party and primary-source data on this blog, and we label its limits rather than hide them. The honest state of non-deer lease pricing is this: it is thin.

• The samples are small. The Missouri Extension rate table below reports a waterfowl figure built on a single response. One. We are printing it because it is directionally consistent with everything else, not because it is statistically sound.
• The data is regional. Nebraska's species mix reflects the Platte and the Rainwater Basin. It does not describe Alabama.
• Nobody surveys this well. Extension services survey deer leases because deer leases are most of the market. Non-deer leases get folded into an "any wildlife" line item.
• These are asking and reported rates, not verified signed contracts. Treat every number here as orientation, not authority.

If you want a number specific to your ground, run it through the HuntLease lease price calculator and then adjust with the species logic below. The calculator is built on whitetail-weighted inputs, so read its output as your annual deer-equivalent floor, not your ceiling.

The Species Split Nobody Prices For

Here is the Nebraska distribution in full, by agricultural statistics district. It is the clearest published picture we could find of what hunters are actually leasing when they are not leasing deer ground.

Source: University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Nebraska Farm Real Estate Market Survey, 2025.

The deer share never breaks 57% in any district and falls to 34% in the southwest. And the non-deer share moves with terrain, predictably: waterfowl peaks at 35% in the northwest and 31% in central Nebraska, both following river corridors; turkey peaks at 24% in the north.

The same survey asked what drives lease value. In order: vegetative cover (37%), proximity to water (25%), topography (19%), conservation practices (17%). Note what is not on that list — deer.

Chart 1: What Nebraska Land Professionals Say Drives Lease Value

Chart: HuntLease, built from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Nebraska Farm Real Estate Market Survey (2025). Cover and water — not deer — are what the market says it is paying for.

Waterfowl: The Highest Per-Acre Lease in American Hunting

Every extension service that has looked at this reaches the same conclusion. Mississippi State University Extension puts it plainly: high-quality waterfowl blind leases bring the highest annual return per acre of access of any hunting lease type, while small-game leases can run as low as 50 cents per acre and even high-quality big-game leases top out around $25 per acre in most markets.

The University of Missouri's rate table shows the same thing in a way that is almost startling once you do the arithmetic:

Source: University of Missouri Extension G9420, drawing on MU Extension G427 Cash Rental Rates in Missouri.

Read the last row against the row above it. A deer-only hunter paid an average $1,181 for access to 312 acres. A fowl hunter paid $2,500 for access to 20 acres. That is roughly $125 per acre of access versus $3.79 — a 33x spread.

Chart 2: Dollars Paid Per Acre of Access, Per Hunter

Chart: HuntLease, computed from University of Missouri Extension G9420 per-hunter rents divided by average acres. The deer bars round to a single block at this scale; the fowl bar is 25. Single-respondent figure; direction, not magnitude.

We want to be very clear that this is a single respondent and you should not take $2,500 as a market rate. But the direction is corroborated by Mississippi State, by the Nebraska value-driver data (water is the #2 factor), and by the plain economics of the thing: a duck hunter is not buying acres. He is buying a hole. The unit of value is the blind and the water under it, and a blind occupies about a tenth of an acre.

What Actually Sets a Waterfowl Lease Price

• Reliable water beats big water. A four-acre moist-soil unit you can pump is worth more than a 60-acre bottom that floods when it feels like it.
• Blind infrastructure is the product. A finished pit blind with a dog stand and a functioning water-control structure is a different asset than a hole in a levee. Price the improvement separately.
• Flyway position is not negotiable and not improvable. You are on the Mississippi Flyway or you are not.
• Duck numbers are soft, and that is priced in. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's 2025 Waterfowl Population Status put total breeding ducks in the traditional survey area at 34 million — flat year over year and 4% below the long-term average, with mallards at 6.6 million (17% below average) and May pond counts at 4.2 million, down 19%. Water is scarce, which is exactly why your water gets bid up.

Dove: The Cheapest Ground to Put Into Play

The mourning dove is the most harvested migratory game bird in North America and it is not close. USFWS estimated the 2023 U.S. harvest at 16,759,700 birds taken by 1,018,100 hunters over 3,262,000 days afield, against a September population of roughly 346 million birds.

A million hunters, most of them chasing a handful of managed fields on one weekend in September. That is the most concentrated demand event in American hunting, and it happens on ground that costs almost nothing to prepare — a cut sunflower, milo, or wheat field, mowed on a schedule.

Dove ground is leased three ways: per gun, per day (the dominant model — a spot on the field for opening weekend and again late season); as a seasonal field lease to a club that manages its own guns; or thrown in free with the annual deer lease, which is the most common arrangement and the one that costs landowners real money.

Dove is the clearest illustration of the stacking argument at the center of this post: a September dove field and a November deer woods on the same 200 acres are two products with two customers, and there is no reason to sell them to one person for one price. See our breakdown of per-hunter versus per-acre lease pricing for how to structure the per-gun side.

Turkey: The Spring Lease, and the Problem Underneath It

Turkey leases are structurally interesting because spring is dead season for almost every other lease type. A landowner with an annual deer lease running September through January has four months of nothing. A spring turkey lease is pure incremental revenue on ground already producing.

The Nebraska data shows turkey at 13% of leases statewide but 24% in the north and 19–21% in the south and southeast — meaning in the right country it is a real market, not a courtesy add-on.

But you need to price it against an honest population picture. National wild turkey numbers are estimated at roughly 6 to 6.2 million birds, down about 15% over the past two decades, and the regional declines are much steeper than the national average — reported drops on the order of 40% in New York, 50% in Missouri, and 65% in Arkansas. Biologists point primarily at poult production: hens nesting in poor cover, fewer broods, fewer poults surviving to fall.

What that means for a lease:

• Nesting and brood cover is now the priced asset. Native warm-season grass, field borders, and light disturbance are worth more per acre to a turkey lessee than mast is.
• Bird numbers should be in the lease, not in the pitch. If you have not run a gobbler count, say so. A turkey tenant who does not hear a bird for three weeks does not renew.
• Habitat cost-share pays for the exact work turkeys need. Several federal programs fund nesting-cover practices directly — see our guide to CRP, EQIP and CSP for landowners.

Hogs, Upland and Small Game: The Floor, and the Inversion

Small-game access is the cheapest lease on the board — MSU Extension's 50-cents-per-acre figure is the realistic bottom of the market. Upland prices higher where there is managed cover; Nebraska shows pheasant and quail at 29% of leases in the southwest, which is bird country with a bird-hunting culture behind it.

Feral hogs invert the model entirely. USDA APHIS reports feral swine have expanded from 17 states to 38 over roughly three decades and cause an estimated $2.5 billion a year in damage and control costs nationally, about $800 million of it in agriculture directly.

If you are farming in hog country, hog hunters are not buying recreation from you — they are providing a service. In practice that means free or nominal access in exchange for real pressure on the population, or a year-round hog clause bolted onto a deer lease at zero cost. A genuinely paid hog lease usually only happens where hogs are an attraction rather than an infestation, or where the landowner is selling guided and lodged hunts rather than raw access.

Do not price hogs as game. Price them as a management problem you are outsourcing, and write the outsourcing into the agreement.

The Legal Trap That Only Exists on Non-Deer Ground

Read this one twice. It does not apply to deer at all, and it catches experienced landowners every September.

Migratory birds are federal. Under 50 CFR § 20.21(i), it is illegal to take migratory game birds by the aid of baiting or over a baited area where the hunter knows or reasonably should know the area is or has been baited. There are exceptions — and they are not the same for every bird:

• For all migratory game birds including waterfowl, § 20.21(i)(1) permits hunting over standing crops or flooded standing crops; standing, flooded, or manipulated natural vegetation; flooded harvested croplands; and areas where seed was scattered solely as a result of normal agricultural planting, harvesting, post-harvest manipulation, rice ratooning, post-disaster flooding, or normal soil stabilization practice.
• For migratory game birds except waterfowl, coots and cranes, § 20.21(i)(2) adds a second, broader exception: hunting is permitted where feed has been scattered solely as the result of manipulation of an agricultural crop on the land where grown, or solely as the result of a normal agricultural operation.

Read those two together and the practical rule falls out. You may bush-hog a standing sunflower field and shoot doves over it. You may not do the same thing and shoot ducks over it. Doves get the crop-manipulation exception. Ducks do not.

Chart 3: The Same Field, Two Different Answers

Chart: HuntLease, built from the text of 50 CFR § 20.21(i)(1) and (i)(2). The single row that differs between the two columns is the one that ends seasons. Federal law sits on top of state rules — verify both before every season.

Now picture a property with a September dove field and a December duck hole leased to two different tenants. The landowner mows a strip of standing milo in August for the dove crowd; water backs into the low end of that same field in November; the duck lessee sets up. That tenant may now be hunting over a baited area, and "knows or reasonably should know" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

This is not a hypothetical drafting problem — it is the strongest argument there is for writing multi-species leases carefully instead of casually. It is also federal law layered on top of whatever your state requires, so verify current rules with your state wildlife agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service before every season.

Five Clauses a Non-Deer Lease Needs and a Deer Lease Doesn't

1. Name the species, and name the ones excluded. "Hunting rights" is not a species grant. If you are selling spring turkey only, the document should say that the lessee has no fall deer, waterfowl, or dove rights on the property.
2. Define the season window by date, not by season name. State frameworks move. Write actual calendar dates and a renewal mechanism.
3. Put an agricultural-practices clause in writing. Specify who may manipulate crops, when, and with what notice to other tenants. This is the baiting problem solved on paper. Our sample hunting lease agreement is the right starting point to build from.
4. Assign ownership of blinds, pits and water-control structures. A pit blind is a permanent improvement to your real property. Decide up front who paid for it, who maintains it, and who owns it when the lease ends.
5. Add a non-interference clause between seasonal tenants. If you are stacking a spring turkey lease over a fall deer lease, the two tenants will eventually want the same field on the same weekend. Decide now, in writing, rather than in April.

Charging a fee also changes your liability posture in most states — the recreational-use statute that protects you when access is free generally stops protecting you the moment money changes hands. That is worth understanding before you sign anything: see our landowner liability guide.

How to Price Non-Deer Ground in Four Steps

1. Stop pricing per acre. The Nebraska panel said it directly: hunters value contiguous access and distinctive features, which makes per-acre estimation difficult on this kind of ground. Waterfowl and dove leases price per gun, per day, or per blind. Use per-acre only for annual, general-access leases.
2. Price the season, not the year. A spring turkey lease and a fall deer lease are two products. Nebraska's income data shows 62% of leases earning under $2,500 a year and only 1% clearing $10,000 — most of that gap is landowners selling one annual lease where two or three seasonal ones would fit.
3. Price the improvement separately from the ground. Blinds, pits, pumps, planted fields and food are the reason a 20-acre lease can be worth more than a 300-acre one. Bill for them as line items so the value is visible.
4. Sanity-check against your deer-equivalent floor. Run the property through the calculator to get the whitetail-weighted number, then ask whether stacked seasonal leases beat it. On water, on a dove field, or on good spring turkey ground, they often do. Our pricing-by-acreage benchmarks are the right comparison set for that floor.

FAQ

Is a waterfowl lease really worth more per acre than a deer lease?

Per acre of access, the available extension data and the underlying economics both say yes, often by a wide margin. Per total dollars, a large deer lease usually still writes the bigger check, because it covers hundreds of acres instead of twenty. Both things are true at once.

Can I lease the same property to a deer club and a turkey hunter?

Yes, and it is one of the most under-used moves in leasing. The two seasons barely overlap. What you need is a non-interference clause and a shared calendar, plus clarity on who may run food plots, burns and disking in spring — those are exactly the practices that collide with turkey season.

How much does a dove field lease cost?

There is no reliable published rate, and we are not going to invent one. Dove access is overwhelmingly sold per gun per day, so the honest guidance is to price it against what a guided or club spot costs in your county and what your field preparation actually cost you. Then adjust for how many opening-weekend guns the field can safely hold.

Do I need a written lease for a one-day dove hunt?

Yes. The liability exposure created by charging a fee does not scale with the length of the lease. A one-page short-term agreement with a signed release is the minimum, and it should name the species and the date.

The Point

The industry prices American hunting ground as though whitetails are the only crop. In the one state where somebody bothered to survey it properly, they are barely half the market.

If your ground holds water, grows grain, carries brood cover, or sits in a flyway, you do not have a deer property that fell short. You have a different property that has been priced with the wrong instrument. Run the numbers, then write the lease around the species — not the other way around.

Ready to find out what your ground is worth? Start with the free HuntLease lease price calculator, then see how listing works for landowners. Hunters looking for ground can browse current listings — and if you are trying to size up an asking price, our breakdown of what is actually inside a lease price is the fastest way to tell a fair number from a hopeful one.

Sources: University of Nebraska–Lincoln Farm Real Estate Market Survey (2025); University of Missouri Extension G9420 and G427; Mississippi State University Extension; U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Waterfowl Population Status 2025 and Mourning Dove Population Status 2024; 50 CFR § 20.21; USDA APHIS National Feral Swine Damage Management Program; National Wild Turkey Federation. Regulations change annually — verify current rules with your state wildlife agency before every season. This article is general information, not legal advice.

Last updated August 2026.