Our Story

Our roots in Pennsylvania deer farming and scent collection began in 1988 with a small whitetail herd and an early deer-scent brand called Real Scent. The focus was simple: raise whitetails, collect natural deer scent, and learn by working directly with the animals.

Those early years created the foundation for what the operation would become: working directly with whitetails, learning how natural scent changes after collection, and continually looking for better ways to collect, handle, and use it.

In 2004, our family took over the operation and entered its next stage with a new Pennsylvania deer farm and scent collection facility.

The larger facility created room for the herd to grow while allowing the collection process to become more organized and efficient. Purpose-built collection facilities would eventually become an important part of the operation, helping us collect natural deer urine from the animals we raise and move it through the collection process quickly.

In 2009, the next generation of the family took over the growing scent operation. Around the same time, bulk and wholesale deer scent became a major part of the business, supplying natural deer scent to other hunting brands and businesses across the industry.

Much of that work happened behind the scenes, and wholesale became an important driver of the operation’s growth.

That wholesale experience helped support the growth of the herd and collection facilities while giving us years of hands-on experience raising deer, collecting scent, handling natural urine, and seeing firsthand how the product changes over time. Those lessons later helped shape RAW Frozen Scents.

As concerns around Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) and natural cervid scents grew, we worked with other scent manufacturers and the Archery Trade Association to help develop additional industry safeguards for natural deer urine products. That work eventually helped lead to what is now the Responsible Hunting Scent Association and its Deer Protection Program.

Today, those safeguards include RT-QuIC testing of the urine itself. RT-QuIC — short for Real-Time Quaking-Induced Conversion — is an extremely sensitive laboratory test designed to detect very small amounts of the abnormal prions associated with CWD. Each lot of urine we use is tested before distribution, and the result must show no detectable CWD prions.

That testing is especially important because some states only allow natural cervid urine products that meet specific certification and RT-QuIC testing requirements.

A second Pennsylvania whitetail farm and collection facility significantly expanded the operation, increasing both herd size and scent collection capacity.

More animals and additional collection capacity gave us greater opportunities to work with different deer, improve collection methods, and continue learning from the herd. By this point, what had started as a small deer operation had grown into a substantial scent collection business.

One of the biggest questions we faced was simple: how do you keep natural deer urine as close as possible to the way it was when it was collected?

Deer urine is a natural biological product, and it changes over time. After years of research into preservation, we began freezing deer urine to slow that breakdown and preserve the scent as close as possible to its condition at collection.

That idea became the foundation of RAW Frozen Scents: nothing added, nothing removed. Just RAW deer urine.

Freezing is how RAW stays fresh. While frozen, the scent is protected from spoilage and degradation. Thaw it when you’re ready to hunt, and you get fresh deer urine with its natural scent preserved.

As RAW took shape, estrogen testing became part of how we evaluated estrus urine. Rather than relying only on timing or appearance, hormone testing helped us identify and verify high-estrogen urine. That work evolved into RAW 30+ Peak Estrus, which is independently lab tested and certified at 30+ pg/mL estrogen. Rather than relying on an “estrus” label alone, hunters know the urine has been verified to meet a measurable peak-estrus standard.

In 2019, we launched Outdoor Hunting Lab to expand beyond RAW Frozen Scents and offer hunters a broader range of scent and hunting products, including non-frozen deer scent options. It gave us a platform to develop products beyond the premium frozen scents RAW was known for.

That same year, we launched ESH Custom Calls as our premium turkey call brand. Champion caller and call builder Pat Strawser has played a major role in shaping ESH, helping design, test, and fine-tune calls for realistic sound and dependable performance in the turkey woods. The brand has since grown to include field-proven hunting calls, champion signature calls, and limited-edition calls that showcase the craftsmanship and calling expertise behind ESH.

In 2020, we added an elk herd and elk scent collection facility.

The addition of elk allowed us to apply years of experience with whitetails to another species and broaden what we could collect, study, and develop. The elk herd remains part of our Pennsylvania operation today.

The addition of a third Pennsylvania deer farm brought the operation to more than 600 whitetails across three farms. With a herd of that size, we can collect and work with scent on a much larger and more consistent scale than we could in the early years.

It also gives us the opportunity to closely observe deer behavior, breeding cycles, scent communication, and how whitetails interact with natural odors throughout the year. Those observations help shape how we collect scent, develop new products, and teach hunters to use scent more effectively in the field.

That firsthand experience is one of the biggest differences between simply selling deer scent and actually raising the deer behind it.

In 2024, Outdoor Hunting Lab evolved from its own hunting-product brand into the central home for RAW Frozen Scents and ESH Custom Calls.

RAW stayed RAW. ESH stayed ESH. But bringing the brands together under Outdoor Hunting Lab gave hunters one place to find the products, education, and brands we had been building for years. It also gave us a clearer platform for future product development and innovation across deer and turkey hunting.

In 2026, we introduced Gland Slam, a new approach to deer scent built from what we had learned through decades of working directly with whitetails.

Rather than being another urine product, Gland Slam is a real glandular scent collected from the preorbital, forehead, nasal, and salivary glands of live whitetails. These are the types of glandular scents deer naturally leave when working licking branches and scrapes.

For hunters, Gland Slam provides the glandular side of the scrape setup. Apply it to a licking branch, vine, or rope above the scrape while using deer urine in the scrape below, helping recreate more of the natural scent communication deer leave at an active scrape.

Its development represents where Outdoor Hunting Lab is headed: continuing to learn from live animals, applying decades of experience, and turning those observations into practical products for hunters.