Maui ranchers have said for years that axis deer are eating them out of business. Now there are numbers.
A new University of Hawaiʻi study in Rangeland Ecology & Management Journal, the world’s premier peer-reviewed scientific journal dedicated to rangeland ecosystems (it serves as the flagship publication for the Society for Range Management (SRM), is the first to measure how much forage wild animals remove from Hawaiʻi’s working ranches and found forage loss at two-thirds of the 35 sites surveyed on Maui and Hawaiʻi Island. On Maui, cameras detected axis deer at 19 of 20 sites, in groups as large as 127 individuals. Where axis deer dominated, forage production ran about a quarter lower than in fenced-off plots. At the worst site, wild ungulates (free-roaming hoofed animals such as deer, pigs, and goats) removed 1,942 kilograms of forage per hectare over the two-week monitoring period.
The authors are careful. Monitoring was brief, it covered four ranches, and elevation influenced forage more than deer numbers did. But the deer effect was statistically significant, and it matches what ranchers describe. Fireweed, a toxic weed that crowds out grasses like Kikuyu, turned up at 70% of sites, and several sites sat in areas burned in the August 2023 Maui wildfires. Overgrazed land recovers slowly from fire.
My family’s roots on Maui go back to 1899. I served as a Maui County commissioner, worked at UH Maui College and contributed to the Maui County Department of Agriculture’s strategic plan. I have watched our working lands decline with growing alarm.
None of this is new. Just nine axis deer were released on Maui in 1959 and 1960. By 2011, the herd was estimated at 12,000, and former Mayor Alan Arakawa warned that many farmers, unable to afford full fencing, “may literally lose a crop overnight.” The state has since issued 29 emergency proclamations on axis deer, beginning under Gov. David Ige, with the latest on September 8. Yet the pastures keep eroding.
A kupuna cattleman who has ranched Kula, Kaupo and Kihei for more than half a century described the losses to me. “Five deer drink the equivalent water of one cow,” he said. In droughts, thousands of deer compete with his cattle for water and feed, and he has imported emergency feed at tens of thousands of dollars a month. Ranchers told the study’s authors they have cut livestock by 25% to 30%. A statewide producer survey put annual damage, control, and repair costs from wild ungulates at $3.6 million to $7.5 million, plus more than $2 million in upfront fencing.
The burden falls unevenly. Fences protect individual pastures but do not reduce deer numbers, and the study’s authors warn that excluded animals simply shift onto neighboring unfenced land. That means smaller farms. Coffee growers and family ranches near homes often cannot hunt because safety distances rule out rifles. They cannot afford the expensive fences and cannot use the guns.
Hunting helps, and the UH team calls for expanded community hunting access along with large-scale removal by trapping or aerial shooting. But hunting tends to favor bucks, and a federal-state modeling study found that holding Maui’s herd down takes removing 20% to 30% of it every year, with a heavier share of does. UH College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resilience (CTAHR) professor Melissa Price told Hawaiʻi Public Radio that targeting does can reach the same population goal while removing far fewer animals overall. Night shooting near working pastures carries its own risk: some ranchers reported losing cattle to stray bullets and never getting reimbursed.
The scale is daunting. Herds can grow 20% to 30% a year, so roughly a fifth must be removed annually just to hold numbers steady. Depending on whose count you trust, that is about 5,000 to 12,000 deer. The state put $6.1 million into a 2024-25 control program paying landowners $25 to $50 a deer yet harvests still trail growth.
Rules compound the problem. When cattlemen proposed infrared-triggered water-trough traps that can capture 50 deer in a night, they ran into meat-inspection requirements. As ranchers describe them, a certified inspector must be present at harvest before venison can go to a food bank. The Legislature created a meat-processing task force to fix this, and it was still asking for more time.
Underneath it all is a data gap. In 2011, Maui’s herd was estimated at 12,000. A survey in 2021–22 put it near 47,000, shortly after a drought crash. State wildlife officials estimated 34,000 in late 2023 and 26,000 across Maui, Molokaʻi and Lānaʻi in 2025, while the governor’s proclamation cites about 60,000. In 2024 the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at Arizona State University estimated that the total deer herd across Maui County (which includes the islands of Maui, Molokaʻi, and Lānaʻi) was between 145,000 and 167,000 individuals. The ASU study broke this total down as 60,000 to 70,000 deer on Maui, 60,000 on Molokaʻi, and 25,000 to 37,000 on Lānaʻi (on the latter island, there are only 3,300 human residents).
Different dates, geographies, and methods mean no one can say whether the herd is shrinking or growing, set a credible removal target or judge any program. No agency publishes a single dashboard combining population estimates, DLNR culling permits, rancher reports, and poaching estimates. Without one, agencies play defense while working ranches burn through capital.
Deer have also fed Maui families for generations, so any solution must work with hunters. But if leaders mean it when they call agriculture and food security priorities, they must stop relying on what has not worked on its own: hunting that skips the does, and rules that keep venison out of the food supply. Without change, Maui’s small ranches and farms will not survive.
In Column Two, we look at how Arkansas and New Zealand turned deer into protein and revenue, and what Maui County can do next.
Ray Tsuchiyama’s series explores one central question: How does Hawai‘i use the wealth and land it already has to create its next economic future? He can be reached at ray@guild.im
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