One day in 1997, a man named Rick Wilson passed a woman on the side of the road while driving. He stopped to help her, thinking her car had broken down, only to discover she was dragging a dead buck to her car to take home, desperate to feed her hungry family. It was in that moment that Wilson saw a need that he could not overlook. And in that moment 26 years ago, the idea for Farmers & Hunters Feeding the Hungry (FHFH) was born.
Since then, Wilson’s mission – “transforming a God-given resource of deer and livestock into food for those in need” – has grown into a multistate operation that has provided 22.5 million servings of meat since its founding. The organization has created a network through which hunters can donate deer they have killed to the program and area butchers process the meat, which then gets donated to local food pantries and homeless shelters. One deer can provide roughly 160 meals to a family in need, according to Farmers & Hunters Feeding the Hungry’s website.
The organization, which is now run by Rick Wilson’s son, Josh, was recently featured in an article on Cleveland.com for the contributions Northeast Ohio hunters and butchers are making to help feed those in need in the region. Among the volunteer hunters who support the cause is Kent State University’s own Rick Ferdig, Ph.D., Summit Professor of Learning Technologies and professor of educational technology in the College of Education, Health and Human Services.
In college and grad school in Michigan, Ferdig said hunting deer provided a significant portion of the food for his family for the year. “Hunting for sustenance has always been an important part of my life,” he said.
When Ferdig became a Kent State faculty member in 2009, he continued to hunt, now in Ohio. In 2013, he went into a butcher shop to get his deer processed and saw a sign that said, “Donate your deer to the homeless,” and that’s how he got involved with Farmers & Hunters Feeding the Hungry.
Ferdig, who has been involved with the organization as an active donor since 2013, officially became a volunteer coordinator of the Northeast Ohio chapter in 2021. This year, Ferdig said the Northeast Ohio chapter expects to put through anywhere from 125 to 150 deer, which will provide somewhere around 20,000 servings of meat to people in the community. Locally, the chapter’s deer are processed by Duma Deer Processing in Mogadore, Ohio.
“This is a tremendous effort by the butchers as well,” he said. “Essentially, the butchers are willing to provide FHFH the ability to process deer at a lower cost than what they would typically charge, which is their donation to us, if you will. We wouldn’t be able to do this without them either.”
In addition to helping those in need, Ferdig said the volunteers reap so many benefits as well. In the state of Ohio, the number of deer a hunter can gather in one year depends on the county you are in. While hunters may only need one deer to feed their own family, they may have the ability to get four deer for the year, Ferdig explained. Many hunters don’t however, because they don’t know what to do with the extra deer meat. With Farmers & Hunters Feeding the Hungry, the surplus can now go to a great cause.
“Now they have this opportunity to go and feed the hungry with this, and it gives them the opportunity to get out and hunt,” Ferdig said. “The farmers have similar issues. Deer are a beautiful, majestic, amazing part of God’s creation, but they do a ton of damage to farms. So, farmers want to get rid of them, but what do you do with them? Again, this provides them with an opportunity to donate as well.
“It also provides me, as a dad, [with] an opportunity to not only teach my kids about the outdoors and about where food comes from, but it also gives me an opportunity to teach them about the hungry and the less fortunate,” he added. “I feel like there are so many benefits for all these people, let alone the most important people – the people who are going without meals.”
For more information about Farmers & Hunters Feeding the Hungry and to donate to the organization, visit www.feedingthehungry.org/OH33.
Photos courtesy of Rick Ferdig