While rifle hunting in Minnesota will end, Wisconsin’s deer hunting season will soon begin. Hunting is a yearly tradition in the Northland, and it helps bring in millions of dollars both in state revenue and profit for businesses.

Paul Burr with the Minnesota DNR said a person can purchase multiple hunting licenses depending on how you’re hunting. If people there’s still a chance to get a deer this weekend.

“Close to half a million people hunt and there’s a lot there’s a lot of trickle effects,” Burr said. “From out-of-state hunters or hunters traveling throughout the state, going to restaurants, purchasing firearms, ammo, clothes, all sorts of stuff.”

Looking at numbers from Minnesota and Wisconsin, there’s a rough estimate of nearly 1 million hunters from both states. With all those hunters that’s brings huge economic impacts to both states and businesses during the hunting season.

“As far as a direct effect, it’s about $500 million,” Burr said. “We’re sitting around 133 total deer harvested. If you go to the Minnesota DNR website, those numbers are broken down by by region, by firearm or weapon type as well. So right now, it’s about 114,000 firearm harvest and another 18,000 archery.”

If you don’t have time this weekend, you can get a license in Wisconsin, their hunting season kicks off this weekend. Jeff Pritzl with the Wisconsin DNR, says this weekend is significant for many small businesses.

“Licensed hunters is around 600,000 in the state. We do have about 50,000 that are strictly archers,” Pritzl said. “The gun deer season is the big deal, of course. And so there’ll be about 550,000 people out there this weekend. We’re running about 1% behind last year.”

Tourism dollars are associated with deer hunting. However, the millions of dollars brought in for state revenue could change. Pritzl said there’s an annual 2% decrease of hunting license sales.

“We’ve been just having this really slow decline in numbers,” Pritzl said. “That’s just connected to the slow retirement of the of the baby boomer generation. They’re our senior hunters now and and they’re slowly retiring out of deer hunting. They’re such a big portion of our deer hunting population that that’s what’s really driving our license sale numbers.”

If you want to continue hunting in Minnesota you can look at getting a Muzzleloader license. For more information about registering online for Wisconsin’s Deer Hunting season you can read more here. Also for other Deer hunting stories you can read more here.