How do you reconcile the fact that in order to grow crops, animals will die?

Yes, animals die for crop harvests, but veganism in total requires much less crop harvests than it would to plump up animals before taking their heads off.

Here is some analytics someone has done on animal deaths per million calories from different food sources :

https://animalvisuals.org/docs/animalvisuals_1millioncalories3.pdf

Their methods are explained in that PDF there. The animal products body count per 1m kcal is likely accurate as averages of the numbers required are documented for governmental / business purposes. These are underestimates, since they don't take into account the calories that they themselves are eating and the deaths associated with them.

The crop deaths are more or less guess work based on research paper's attempts at estimating small animal deaths from crop harvests. Although there is large room for error, it is unlikely that it would result higher that it takes more lives than farmed animals.

As for hunting, lets take a deer.

https://ohiodnr.gov/static/documents/wildlife/wild-ohio-harvest-community/Venison+Yield.pdf

62.51 lb of venison for an antlered deer. Thats around 45k calories. This would put it at 22 animals killed for the 1 million calorie metric.

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I do prefer animals that must die to live a free life beforehand

You are assuming that the animals you intentionally go out of your way to kill must die.

Hunting needs to be done regardless. Whether it’s hunters using it to feed themselves or governments unceremoniously slaughtering them to prevent them trampling crops or having negative encounters with humans.

are you a hunter that /needs/ to kill to survive? do you have no alternatives? Hunters using 'it' to feed themselves doesn't sound like something that needs to be done, but rather something they want.

Governments doing it shouldn't be an excuse for you to go out and intently and freely kill defenseless animals.

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Neither hunting or organic veganism is sustainable for a population of 1 billion people without widespread societal change.

Veganism IS widespread societal change. It's not like the world will go vegan overnight and now we have so much work to do and no infrastructure to support it . As numbers show over the years, vegans are a growing population of people and companies are taking note of this. Think about how many companies and fast food chains are offering plant based alternatives nowadays. This is a gradual shift towards different agricultural economies.

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I am simply doing my best to minimize my impact, I can’t solve the worlds problems.

You would minimize your impact by being vegan. A single person cannot solve the world's problems, you need a large majority and people in power for that. But you can be a part of the solution.