Deer farming worth effort
MARION TWP — Deer farming can be exhausting, but when Rocco Sloboda sits on his porch at night and sees his deer playing together, it's all worth it.
“I see those fawns running around out there, and playing and bucking like wild horses,” Sloboda said. “It's just unbelievable.”
Sloboda, 68, runs Fantasy Whitetails, a deer farm in Boyers. He breeds, raises and sells deer to people who run hunting preserves.
“(Hunting is) part of my genetics,” Sloboda said.
The Sloboda family has lived and hunted deer in Western Pennsylvania for generations. During tough times, the family relied on deer meat for food, and Sloboda was taught to never hunt an animal he wasn't going to eat.
It wasn't just about survival; Sloboda also enjoys the culture of hunting.
“It's always been the camaraderie,” he said. “We all got together at (my grandfather's) house, and we got breakfast. Eggs, bacon, toast at 3 or 4 in the morning.”
As Sloboda grew older, he continued to hunt and owned about 450 acres of property in Boyers. His son, Aaron Sloboda, moved his family onto the property.
Not long after, Rocco Sloboda cooked up the idea to run a deer farm, and opened Fantasy Whitetails in 2005.
“When I thought of a name for this place, it's every hunter's dream,” Sloboda said. “His fantasy is to shoot the biggest buck there is.”The Slobodas started with two bucks and two does, and at their peak they had 170 deer. They match up deer with strong genetics to birth fawns.Rocco and Aaron Sloboda do much of the work, but are helped by family members. For the first few months of the fawns' lives, they bottle-feed them four times per day.The deer have a diet that is 16 percent protein, and they receive vaccinations to keep them healthy.The farm is about 30 acres of the property, and includes eight spacious pens for the deer. It is a place not only for work, but for the Sloboda family to enjoy time with the deer.“(My granddaughter Claudia) and my wife would go into the pen and sit down with apples and animal crackers, and they would just feed them out of their hand,” Sloboda said.After about three years, some of the bucks are sold to be hunted on preserves.“I can truly understand where somebody would say, 'that's a canned hunt,'” Sloboda said. “But some of these ranches in Texas, they're thousands of acres.”Sloboda also explained how he had affection for the deer and also sold them to be hunted.“To me, in a way, it's no different from going to the grocery market and getting some steaks (or) some roast,” he said.However, deer farming has changed the way he hunts; he's reluctant to shoot does.“That mother had to get through so much to get those fawns on the ground, and sometimes I think we don't even think about that.”Bucks used to be sold based on their point size. Point size is determined by a combination of measurements of the buck's antlers.However, Sloboda said that the trend is to buy bucks with antlers that look “typical,” because many hunters want to mount the buck's head on a wall.He also said the market value for bucks has gone down, and that a 200-point buck, once worth about $10,000, is now worth a little more than $3,000.That, factored in with the cost of running a deer farm, means that Sloboda doesn't make much money off the farm. For he and his family, it's the experience that counts.Sloboda recounts a story of Howie, a tame buck who used to use his horns to flick his pen's light switch on and off at night.“These deer all have personalities,” Sloboda said.The farm sustained a setback when an electrical fire burned up a barn in November 2016, and six fawns in an adjacent pen died.Sloboda and his son, Aaron, initially saved three of the six fawns, but the fawns later died of their injuries. Aaron suffered severe smoke inhalation, while Rocco Sloboda suffered burns on his arm.They both recuperated. However, Rocco Sloboda was sidelined by two hip replacements this year before jumping back into the mix full-time this summer.A new barn, made of steel, was constructed. Sloboda also moved the pen away from the barn to prevent deer being injured in case of another fire.He will be 69 in December and knows he can't run the farm forever.“The older I get, the more work it is for me,” Sloboda said.He has been mulling over turning his property into a hunting preserve, so he could cut out the middle man and have his deer hunted on his property for a fee.Sloboda said he is unsure if his son will continue working on the farm after he is done with it, but noted that his grandson, Cole, 15, has shown interest.“He has been my helper all summer and he fed the fawns,” Sloboda said.So, for the time being, Fantasy Whitetails will continue to raise farm deer with high-quality genetics.As Sloboda said, “it'll be here for a while yet.”
