A state guide that maps tracts of public land open to hunting in North Dakota was outdated as soon as it was published, a state official says. Almost daily, farmers lured by high commodity prices are closing their fields to hunters in favor of crops.

The state publishes a free guide each year to land in the PLOTS program, short for Private Lands Open to Sportsmen. Kevin Kading, the Game and Fish Department's private lands coordinator, said hunters cannot rely on its accuracy, even though this year's guide has been out only for a few days.

PLOTS offers payments to landowners who agree to keep their property open to public hunting. About 1,800 landowners are enrolled in the program this year, down from 2,139 last year, Kading said.

PLOTS land that had been marked by yellow inverted triangular signs are increasingly giving way to "No Hunting" postings, Kading said.

"Don't be surprised if land you see in the PLOTS guide is not there anymore," he said.

Dean Hildebrand, the Game and Fish Department's former top administrator, established the PLOTS program in 1997. Hildebrand died this week after a battle with cancer. License fees paid by hunters funds the PLOTS program's $4 million annual budget, Kading said.

Gov. John Hoeven announced last year that the state had reached a milestone of more than 1 million acres enrolled in the state program. The program had grown from only 42,000 acres a decade earlier.

Last year's total peaked at about 1,050,000 acres, but at least 30,000 acres have been pulled out by landowners in recent months, Kading said. He expects the program will dip well below 1 million acres this time next year.

Abandonment of the PLOTS program follows an exodus of land enrolled in the federal Conservation Reserve Program that pays landowners to idle land for conservation, Kading said.

Half the land enrolled in the PLOTS program also is designated as CRP, he said.

"We've plateaued and things are changing and changing fast and changing faster than we anticipated," Kading said. "We are losing PLOTS agreements almost daily, and it's all attributed to the loss of CRP."

In mid-April, there were 34.6 million acres enrolled in CRP, down about 2 million from a year ago, the Agriculture Department said. North Dakota had about 3 million acres enrolled in CRP, after losing about 400,000 acres from contracts that were not renewed last year, the agency said.

It was the biggest exodus of program acres of any state, the agency said then.

The reduction of PLOTS land comes at a time of growing deer and pheasant populations attributed to more habitat from conservation programs.

The state Game and Fish Department said North Dakota hunters killed some 100,000 deer during the 2007 hunting season. North Dakota has 149,400 deer licenses available this fall, or 850 more than last year, to try to further reduce the deer population.

The state reported a record number of pheasant hunters last fall, topping the 100,000 mark for the first time. The Game and Fish Department said hunters killed 907,434 pheasant roosters, compared with 750,787 in 2006. The number of resident and nonresident hunters reached all-time highs.

Mark Resner of Mott said he sees fewer PLOTS signs in Hettinger County, in southwest North Dakota, one of the state's prime pheasant hunting areas.

"There were not very many of those PLOTS signs to begin with, and now we have fewer," said Resner, a board member of United Sportsmen of North Dakota. "I don't hunt as much as I want to because access is real limited."

Resner said he sees no immediate end to conservation land giving way to crop land.

"When we lose habitat, we lose wildlife," he said. "I think anybody you talk to knows that."