NATCHEZ — The deer population at Anna’s Bottom are going out to eat every night.

Unfortunately, what they are eating is the soybean crop of the area farmers.

Deer that have been driven from their habitat by the rising waters of the Mississippi River are taking refuge in wheat and soybean fields and destroying the crops.

“The deer have been run out of their homes and are eating out every night,” farmer Ross McGehee said. “They don’t know where they are or why they’re there, and they’ll eat the first thing they find, which is the soybeans.”

And McGehee said there’s not a lot that can be done about it.

“We used to shoot them, but the hunters and landlords won’t let us now,” McGehee said. “We put up electric fences, but the deer have gotten smart. The deer will gather in a pack and stare at the fence, then they’ll all take off and run through the fence together. It diffuses the electrical charge I guess. It’s maddening.”

McGehee said a friend of his came up with the idea of propane cannons that went off on timers and mimicked the sound of shotgun blasts. That kept the deer away for a little while, but after a week they got used to the noise and now it doesn’t affect them.

And since the deer can’t be driven out of the fields, they are basically free to eat as much as they want.

“They’ll wipe out a 20-acre field of soybeans in one night,” McGehee said. “That’s $100 per acre walking out the door. If they eat up a 20-acre field, that’s $2,000 per night.”

McGehee said while farmers plant more than they need in case they lose some of their crops, the deer are eating much more.

“We can’t afford to lose half the crop,” McGehee said. “We’re losing three-fourths of them anyway.”

It’s the second consecutive year the Mississippi River has flooded, but McGehee said last year’s flood wasn’t a problem for farmers at Anna’ Bottom because it came before planting season.

“When we flooded last year, we hadn’t planted the beans yet,” McGehee said. “The deer went up into the bluffs and it wasn’t a problem. But this year, they’re causing a huge headache.”

So there’s nothing else for the farmers to do but wait for the water to go back down and the deer to return to their homes. But even that won’t stop the scavenging, McGehee said.

“We just have to wait for the water to go down and them to go back,” he said. “But when they do go back home, there won’t be any food in the places they lived because it was underwater. So they’ll find the same thing to eat that they have been eating, which is the soybeans.”