Mathew D. Ross QDMA’s Certification Programs Manager

Bruce: Four, three, two, one. Welcome to another episode of Whitetail Rendezvous. This is your host, Bruce Hutcheon, and we're heading to upstate New York today and we're gonna talk to Matt Ross. Matt's currently with QDMA and he is the certification programs manager. Matt, welcome to the show. Mathew D. Ross QDMA’s Certification Programs Manager

Matt: Thanks for having me, Bruce.

Bruce: So our listeners understand specifically what you do as QDMA's certification programs manager, could you expand upon that a little bit?

Matt: Sure. Yeah, QDMA has our education and outreach programs called REACH. It's an acronym. Stands for research, educate, advocate, certify, and hunt, and each one of those serves part of our core mission. The second to last letter, certify, is the program I oversee and there's two specific programs within that umbrella that we do at QDMA. One is our Deer Steward program. That is a class-driven training for people to take. Landowners, deer hunters, even some professionals in the natural resource field, like foresters or biologists. It's a multi-day training. It's got multiple levels and if you come to Deer Steward, our goal is to educate the attendee to the point where when they're done, they can write and implement their own property-specific deer management plans. Mathew D. Ross QDMA’s Certification Programs Manager

So for the person that's out there that always wanted to be a deer biologist or never went to school for it, you could come and learn how to manage deer. We go through everything from making harvest prescriptions to habitat management, everything that goes into a holistic management plan. And part of it's classroom style. It's multiple steps. The second level's actually more hands-on. You're doing stuff in the field. You're measuring fetuses. You're doing trail camera surveys. You're getting your hands dirty, so that's Deer Steward. It's for the DIY kind of personality where somebody wants to learn how to do it themselves.

The other program is called Land Certification Program and that certifies the property instead of the individual, where you might have a property that's really well-managed. It recognizes those properties across the country. You get a really nice sign and it says this person or this property is well-managed, but probably the best indirect benefit that that program provides is for the person that owns the land and wants advice and site-specific advice on how they can improve their property.

What it does is it pairs you up with a professional in the field. I'm in upstate New York, you just said to your listeners.

Somebody from Florida or Texas, the last thing they wanna do is have somebody, a biologist working from New York to come down and look at their property because I just don't know that environment as well as I do where I live and manage, so we, QDMA, have thousands of members that are professional biologists and foresters, so it's the QDMA version of match.com. We put the landowner that wants advice, site-specific advice, in touch with one of our members that's a professional. They come and visit your property, they look at it, they check off a bunch of boxes based on an analysis or assessment of the property. They tell you what you're doing good at, what you're doing poor, and those poor areas are where you identify what you need to improve the property, so those are the two programs that I oversee primarily, but I got my hands in a lot of other stuff as well.

Bruce: Thanks for that. Matt, for our listeners that say, "Hey, wait a minute. I wanna find out more about this Deer Steward program," tell them specifically where they can go on the QDMA website to get that information.

Matt: Sure. You go onto our homepage and you look at the menu option Advanced Education. You click on that and it gives a drop-down box and there's a couple different options.