Steve Porter’s farm is dead. By order of the state, Porter and almost 100 other Minnesota deer farmers are permanently banned from operation.
“Our story should scare people to the core, because it’s one of the biggest assaults on freedom and the Constitution that you’ll never hear the plain facts about,” Porter says. “The state says no one has the right to farm deer, beef, or anything else, and everyone in media and society is blindly going along with it.”
Minnesota’s deer farm prohibition, ostensibly implemented to fight chronic wasting disease (CWD), is a stunning assertion, and the only blanket phaseout of private industry in the U.S. “It’s 100% political,” Porter contends. “This is the weaponization of legislation.”
Significantly, Porter has never had a single case of CWD in his deer herd. Period. “CWD is just the government’s cover,” he contends. “Think about it: In the name of stopping a pathogen, politicians destroy the fundamental rights of citizens. Sound familiar? How’d that work out with covid?”
“If you care about property rights, business rights, farming rights, or the Bill of Rights, then please listen to what’s happened on our land.”
Stan Tvedt, likewise, a Minnesota deer producer, echoes Porter’s contentions: “We’re not making any of this up. I have a farm I can never pass on to my grandchildren. I have a farm that was intentionally killed by the state.”
A Date With Death
He started with a single buck: In 1992, Porter bought one deer. His curiosity blossomed into a majorly successful herd behind a high-fence operation on 140 acres—Steve Porter’s Trophy Whitetail, based in extreme northwest Minnesota’s Kittson County, bumping North Dakota and Manitoba. In just a handful of years, Porter was presenting his biggest bucks at premier expos and selling breed stock across the country. Artificial insemination, doe urine sales, and guided hunts became part and parcel of his business. (Along the same timeline, Porter served in law enforcement across a 30-year career, first as deputy, and later sheriff, of Kittson County.)
In 2002, 10 years beyond Porter’s start in deer production, Minnesota noted its first CWD case in state history—a captive elk in Aitkin County. In 2006, the first whitetail tested positive for CWD on a deer farm in Lac qui Parle County. Four years later, in 2010, Minnesota’s first wild deer with CWD was recorded in Olmsted County.
CWD is an incurable, fatal disease of the cervid family (deer, elk, moose, and reindeer) damaging brain and nerve tissue, and presumably transmitted via saliva, feces, urine, and other fluids. CWD is not known to occur in other animals or humans.
“DNR and the Board of Animal Health found CWD examples on several deer farms, and as a result, our industry became the canary in the coalmine,” Porter says. “Didn’t matter that hundreds of cases of CWD have been found in the wild. Deer farming gets the blame.”
“In other states, nobody went wild and reacted with a ban. In Oklahoma, for example, they introduced a law for release of a captive deer with genetic CWD resistance into the wild. But in Minnesota? Our politicians and bureaucrats saw CWD as a means to ban deer farming forever. Done.”
In 2023, on the heels of a MDNR/MBHA 2022 report identifying deer farms as a major factor in CWD spread, the Minnesota Legislature passed a total ban on new deer farms (along with a host of tighter restrictions), including the phaseout of every operation in the state. Minnesota’s prohibition is the only total deer farm ban in the United States.
As a result, a Minnesota deer farm can be passed to an immediate family member one time. After the lifetime of that single transfer, the farm is forced to shutter.
“They went scorched earth,” Porter says, “and passed laws that, one, made it illegal to sell our animals in Minnesota. Two, we can’t sell our farm businesses, and we can only give them to a biological child one time and then the farm must die. Three, we must put up an extra $200,000 fence around our existing fence and around our clean, healthy animals if we want to keep farming.”
From a peak of roughly 600 deer farms in the state, approximately 80 survive today—all terminal.
“Our livelihoods, and that of our children, are shut down forever,” Porter exclaims. “Our farm licenses die with us or our sons, take your choice. I have four sons. None of them want to run a farm with a mandatory death date. Remember one of the most shameful parts of this: The government did this even though most all the deer farms in our state never had a single case of CWD.”
“And here’s the part that everyone ignores, heads in the sand,” he adds. “The same politicians, right up to the attorney general’s office, are on record saying they can do it again to any part of agriculture.”
A Clean Farm
The government ban essentially dropped breed stock value to zero.
Minnesota deer producers couldn’t sell in-state product. “Walz had a full Democrat majority and could pass any law that he wanted. They said, ‘Go sell out of Minnesota.’ What kind of idiocy is that for long-term thinking? They also banned deer importation into Minnesota, and then they pretend that other states will say, ‘Hey, we’ll be happy to take your deer when you don’t take ours.’”
Additionally, exclusionary fencing requirements went nuclear. According to the state, all deer operations must bolster fencing via four options:
One, double fencing with 2 separate 8’-high fences 4’ apart. Two, a secondary mesh fence with no holes bigger than 2”-by-4”, attached to the primary fence with 1’ spacers. Three, attach a wood, tin, or shade cloth reaching to at least 5’. Four, deploy a multistrand electric 5,000-volt fence with battery backup and alarm system.
“That’s about a $200,000 cost to do it right on my operation, partly because of trees and a swampy area. Try getting a loan for a $200,000 fence from a banker when your business is banned. And the whole time, I don’t have CWD and never have. I’ve done state testing for years on hundreds of my deer, with not a single positive for CWD. Doesn’t matter.”
“Please understand the insanity of our situation,” Porter emphasizes. “If I ever did have a positive CWD case, the USDA indemnification is $3,200 a deer. Let’s say, for example, my herd size was 150. If I tested CWD positive, I’d be done farming, and they’d give me $3,200 a deer. They’d come in and kill all my animals, times 150, and I could retire with a small cushion. But since I don’t have CWD, and I’ve never had it, the goal is just to steal my clean farm, steal my entity, and make me go away.”
CWD is a secondary player in the state’s motivation, Porter insists. “Tim Walz had a trifecta by Democrat control of the governorship, House, and Senate, along with his partner, Attorney General Keith Ellison. I believe they wanted to run us all out of business and were offended by what we do and how we have hunts on our properties.”
“Our political class in Minneapolis is probably the most disconnected bunch from hunting, wildlife, rural life, and agriculture of any political group in the country. In my sincere opinion, if we’d have been from Somalia or transgender, then Gov. Walz would have ignored us. To pretend this is about CWD is covering up the truth.”
Deeply Rooted Right
When Minnesota replaced regulation with outright prohibition, Porter bucked the state. He became the central figure of opposition to Minnesota’s captive deer crackdown, and defended his operation, stating his deer were livestock, and protected by existing state law in Statute 17.452 and 35.155.
The Minnesota Deer Farmers Association (MDFA) filed a lawsuit against the state arguing that residents have a constitutional right to farm, and that state policies violate the 14th Amendment.
At one level of litigation after another, MDFA lost, as courts ruled deer producers had no right to farm. In January 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
“When they weaponize legislation, you’re on your own,” Porter says. “We raised $200,000 and fought for the Constitution. At one point, during appeals, assistant attorney general Phillip Pulitzer essentially said there was no right to farm or raise beef. Think about the diabolical intent of that statement, especially coming from the same office as Attorney General Keith Ellison and Governor Tim Walz. Pulitzer was saying exactly what they all seem to believe.”
Porter appears to be accurate regarding Pulitzer’s position. During an appellate level hearing, before a three-judge panel:
Judge:… twice in the state’s brief, you say that there is no constitutional right to farm. Is it the position of the state of Minnesota that the legislature could, if they wanted to, entirely ban the raising of livestock and not violate the constitution?
Pulitzer: This court has held in the Plume decision that there’s no fundamental right to farming.
…
Judge: Let’s suppose that the legislature decides that to combat climate change they’re going to ban the production of all beef in Minnesota. Would that implicate the constitution?
Pulitzer: It would certainly raise, uh, be subject to rational basis review and to the question would be (crosstalk)
Judge: You don’t think that there’s a deeply rooted right to raise livestock embedded in our nation’s history?
Pulitzer: I think it would involve that Gluxburg analysis, yes. I would turn to the Plume case which I don’t have in front of me to push back on the suggestion that it’s not.
“That was all said in open court,” Porter notes. “Imagine what they say in private.”
Fast Train to Extinction
If deer farms can be erased by government, what else could follow? Anything and everything, Porter contends.
Consider avian influenza (bird flu), a heavy threat to the turkey industry, which also affects the dairy industry, and can be transmitted via the pork industry. Bird flu sometimes triggers multi-million bird culls in the turkey industry. Additionally, the disease is transmissible to humans and potentially fatal.
“The government’s reaction to bird flu is never, never to even consider permanently shutting down the U.S. turkey industry,” Porter says. “Instead, when it gets into a turkey barn, the government comes alongside the farmer and helps kill all the turkeys, but they pay the turkey farmer. It’s a disease and the solution is to eliminate the infected birds—not kick every turkey farmer out of agriculture forever.”
“Same thing in the dairy industry. No one in their right mind would ban dairy farms because cows keep getting bird flu.”
“But with CWD, which doesn’t have a single documented transmission to a human, the government’s response is a wink-wind and nod-nod to get rid of deer farms forever on this planet and pay nothing to make a farmer whole. The state says we’ll take away deer producer income through legislation, and increase their expenses, and that’ll make them all disappear.”
At present, Minnesota deer farmers are on a fast train to extinction. Porter, with 30 years of law enforcement under his belt, has a safety net via a sheriff’s retirement. However, other producers, such as Stan Tvedt, have their entire nest egg within their high-fence operations.
In Red Lake County, roughly 75 miles southeast of Porter, Tvedt, 66, was in dairy production for decades, but struggled on small acreage. He switched to alternative livestock—deer, and built a successful business, Open Trails Trophy Whitetails.
“Everything I own is in my deer farm. I paid taxes all my life in agriculture,” Tvedt says. “I paid taxes on my land. I paid taxes on my dairy and deer farm. I worked as hard as a man could and was grateful for what I had. In return, the state blamed me for CWD and attacked my deer farm to put me out of business. Then, they took my tax money from my deer farm and land and gave it to fraudsters.”
“I’ll ask anyone out there who follows the law and works for a living: ‘How would you function if you lost your income and could not make a penny from this day forward, and you’re left with a burden of animals that you have to kill and bury on a farm that holds your whole life savings? And then you heard from judge after judge that the Constitution means nothing and you have no right to your livelihood? What would happen to you?’”
No Compliance
Porter refuses to erect a second fence around his operation.
If he maintains the fence refusal, the state will revoke his farm license. “Let’em. I’ve already been charged. Their statute (35.155 subd 4) says once they take my license, they get to come and kill all the deer on my property.”
“I’m not a violent man. I wouldn’t resist violently. But I will insist on a court order with a judge’s signature. That’ll be the day to video-record a slaughter and show the people of Minnesota how the state operates.”
“You’d think our story would’ve made national media headlines across the country over and over, but we’ve pretty much been ignored,” Porter adds. “The big agriculture entities are mainly silent. They lobby both sides of the aisle and there’s no way the big ag organizations will stick their neck out for us. They’d rather we go extinct.”
Right or wrong, Minnesota is setting historic precedent through the forced elimination of deer farms.
“We now have a state government saying out loud—and getting away with it—that there’s no right to farm,” Porter concludes. “The state says it can do whatever it wants and eliminate whatever it wants in the name of natural resources. The Constitution says otherwise. Bureaucrats do not know best.”
For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told
How the Deep State Tried, and Failed, to Crush an American Farmer
Game of Horns: Iowa Poacher’s Antler Addiction Leads to Historic Bust
Ghost Cattle: $650M Ponzi Rocks Livestock Industry, Money Still Missing
When Conservation Backfires: Landowner Defeats Feds in Mindboggling Private Property Case
