Lucky Outfitters

We are a family run operation, we own just under 5,000 acres with 4,000 being contiguous in Franklin county, which is south central Illinois. We're about 100 miles from St. Louis and four hours south from Chicago.

My father purchased the property in '95 and it was row cropped for awhile. Growing up in Chicago he cherished trips to Wisconsin to escape the concrete. Coming from a large Irish family, family trips weren't frequent but his family and all his brothers and sister were passionate about the outdoors.

He passed away suddenly in 2002 and his business interests suffered without his guidance. My older brother and I stepped up to the plate and fast forward a dozen years later, we have year by year, project by project, been enhancing habitat to realize my fathers dream of restoring the property into its original state pre commercial agricultural production. Essentially, turning my fathers ground into a wildlife refuge. We do continue to have some production agriculture, but its less then 300 acres. The rest is a diverse mixture of varying types of terrain. We have several creeks breaking up the property mixing the terrain of Oak flats and ridges into dense underbrush and creek bottoms that flow into stands of Native warm season grasses and numerous tree plantings Our property drains 160,000 surrounding acres and with 150+ acres of year round food plots there are is no shortage of wildlife who utilize our efforts and call our property home.

In years prior to 2010, our area didn't allow turkey hunting which has since changed due to management efforts from the state of reestablishing turkeys. We have a large population of turkeys who have benefited from our management efforts.

The summer of 2007 we were subjected to EHD and had a large die off of our areas whitetails. Since then, we have implemented 11 different water control structures and improved the flow of water. This is in addition to other property enhancements for future prevention of this disease and also to assist in provide fawning cover, and quality bedding cover.

We are offering a limited number of hunts on our property. I began outfitting in 2011 we run a small camp and its onsite in our brand new facilities built in 2013. I oversee 100% of activities on the property. I emphasis low intrusion and minimal disturbance and we've been blessed with a high rate of success.

To date our hunters have 100% harvest in turkeys (spring)
Our clients chasing whitetails begin in Late October and for four weeks leading into the gun season they have enjoyed *42% harvest in 2013 and 48% in 2012. **We were able to recover one wounded animal from Late October so 10 bucks for 21 clients puts us into 47.6% for 2013

I run a lot of trail cameras on the property and check them once to twice a month. I will begin to start running cameras again in late August and I have provided the link if you wish to view pictures from last season. Illinois doesn't allow the use of bait, attractants of mineral sites but we do fairly well in capturing a large percentage of our resident herd. After gun season, with a property of our size we get a lot of new faces and racks that show up to duck the pressure of the "orange army"

here is the link:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0hv0zjqfntu23ik/HP7eps-YCO

our website is www.luckyoutfitters.com
If you have any questions feel free to respond by e-mail or I can be reached by phone. Thanks for your time.

God bless,

Matt Farrell