It's easy to mistake the La Crescent food shelf in Houston, Minn., for a small market.
Nestled between an elementary school and sunny suburbia, the food shelf blends in to give those who need it seamless, easy access to rows of food and freezers of meat.
Inside, a freezer is partially empty. But last fall was a different story.
“When we had all that venison coming in, we just had so much venison we didn't have room for any other products. This whole area here was filled up with venison,” said Susan Oddsen, La Crescent's program manager. She said people were happy to see the meat.
Minnesota's Hunter-Harvested Venison Donation Program has been around since 2007, but it's growing more popular.
The idea is simple: Hunters donate deer to local processors, who prep it for food shelves and feeding programs. In 2025, the program saw a 50 percent jump in donations compared to the previous year, according to the Minnesota Department of Agriculture.
That’s roughly 14,000 pounds of venison in all.
La Crescent joined the program in 2024 after a local processor reached out.
“We had not been a part of that before because I didn’t see any local processor that was a part of the program,” Oddsen said.
Oddsen said the catalyst for joining the program was a call from Big Valley Meats’ Molly Frickson, who told her that she was part of the program.
Up a gravel driveway, Big Valley Meats sits inside a barn surrounded by animals awaiting their fate and cats enjoying the view.
“We just basically took the front quarter of our barn and turned it into a processing area for deer,” said Frickson.
Inside, the dirt and wood quickly turned into a sanitized table and scrubbed concrete floor.
Frickson has only been part of the program for two years. The first year, she had more than 50 deer come in for processing.
“And then this year, we just skyrocketed,” Frickson said. “We had a lot of deer come in, and it was pretty much skinning and deboning deer for every day for many weeks straight.”
Chad Garteski, a real estate agent working in Chatfield, said he and his friends donated around 20 deer in 2025.
"Part of it was that one of my clients that I had sold several farms to over the last couple years determined that they had too many deer on their farms,” Garteski said. “And you know, as far as responsible conservation practices, they wanted to get a group of people together to go out there and try to reduce the deer numbers a little bit on these particular farms.”
He said the venison donation program is a win-win all around.
"If you knew how many deer you drove past today, there’s a lot of, let’s call it protein there that’s now available to people. It breaks my heart to see all the deer lying along the side of the road, you know, the ones that get hit by cars. That's just a lot of wasted, wasted meat."
You can find information about the Hunter Harvested Venison Donation Program at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture website.
