PowerPlant Timing is Everything

By Hollis Ayres



Whether you’re talking about food plots, hunting, business or anything else, timing is always important. And when it comes to PowerPlant, that’s especially true in two ways:

 (1) order early, and

(2) wait to plant PowerPlant until soil reaches a consistent (day and night) temperature of at least 65 degrees.

DO YOU NEED POWERPLANT?

If you want the bucks you hunt next fall to have the opportunity to grow the most impressive antlers they can, the answer is “Absolutely!” The nutritional path to maximized antler growth is pretty straightforward: provide your deer with the required nutritional resources during the spring and summer, and the most important of these is protein. PowerPlant is tailor-made to do exactly that — and do it in spades.

From the end of winter through summer, deer need high levels of protein on a continuing basis for antler growth, doe pregnancy, doe lactation, fawn growth and a host of other biological functions. Describing the roles protein plays in all these processes would take (and has taken) volumes, so here we’ll hit the high points of just one: antler growth in bucks.

When it comes to growing antlers, bucks need lots — lots— of protein, and they need that high level on a consistent basis throughout the spring and summer. Remember, bucks must completely re-grow their antlers every year, and they have a limited amount of time (about 200 days) in which to do it. This period is commonly referred to as the “antler-growing” window of spring and summer. The window may start and end on slightly different dates depending on where your property is located, but this much is certain: no matter where you are, the antler-growing window has a start and a stop date, the window only lasts about 200 days, and all the antler your bucks are going to grow that year will be grown between those dates.

It’s amazing that a buck can grow a full set of antlers in only 200 days. That being the case, it’s no shock that antlers are one of the fastest growing types of animal tissue there is. And when you consider that a buck’s growing (“velvet”) antler is made up of about 80 percent protein, you can understand how critical it is that bucks have access to lots of high protein food during the antler-growing season, especially if they’re going to maximize antler growth.

Unfortunately, Mother Nature rarely provides enough protein for bucks to maximize antler growth, and what she does provide is often of limited availability or palatability. Generally speaking, deer need about 16-18 percent protein in their diets for antler growth. Mother Nature, though, usually provides much less — most natural food sources have about 8-10 percent protein, which leaves a protein shortfall of 6-10 percent! And to make matters even worse, the palatability and availability of most natural food sources to deer is relatively short. Most quickly become stemmy and can be exhausted in fairly short order during the spring and summer, which can further limit the amount of naturally available protein deer can ingest.

In almost all areas, you’ll need to supplement the protein Mother Nature provides if your goal is to truly maximize the size of the antlers your bucks can grow, and PowerPlant does just that. PowerPlant helps make up the natural shortfalls in the protein content, palatability and availability of natural forages, and in a big way. PowerPlant’s protein content is huge — more than 30 percent — plenty for bucks to really push the envelope in antler size.

And PowerPlant does much more than just contain high levels of protein. Even a high-protein product won’t help your deer if the deer won’t eat it, or if your deer quickly exhaust it. And that’s perhaps where PowerPlant shines the brightest: it is specifically designed to be highly palatable and to better withstand grazing so that all that protein can actually make it into your deer.

PowerPlant contains three forage plant varieties and two structural plant varieties. The key to PowerPlant’s incredible performance is the Institute’s detail-oriented, goal-driven research, development and testing. The soybean and structural components in PowerPlant are prime examples.

Forage Soybean Component. As a deer forage, the soybean in PowerPlant outperforms standard, agricultural soybean varieties by a wide margin. One reason is that unlike standard, agricultural soybeans, which were developed for commercial bean production (to maximize production of beans for harvest and market), the soybean in PowerPlant is a true forage variety, specifically designed to produce massive amounts of high-protein foliage.

Another advantage is that the forage soybean in PowerPlant grows on tender, supple vines. This helps PowerPlant stay palatable to deer throughout the growing season, unlike ag beans, which grow upward on rigid stems that are not as palatable to deer. Yet another advantage of the forage soybean in PowerPlant is that once it establishes, it can continually regenerate as deer forage on it. This allows PowerPlant to withstand grazing much better than ag-type beans.

Structural Components. In addition to the three forage plant varieties, PowerPlant includes sunflowers and a specifically selected wildlife sorghum as structural components. While deer will forage these structural plants, they are included in the blend for another reason: to act as a lattice for the vining legumes in the blend. This allows the vines to grow up instead of along the ground, and produce maximum tonnage. Put simply, no spring/summer annual food plot product we’ve tested produces more highly palatable, high-protein tonnage for deer than PowerPlant, and there’s a reason: the Institute spared no effort in researching candidate components, developing the best possible combination of components, and then testing different blends to ensure maximum performance.

If you want your deer to have access to the abundant, high-protein forage PowerPlant provides, though, you need order now and plant at the right time.

ORDER POWERPLANT AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE

Spring/summer legume seeds, including the forage-plant seeds in PowerPlant, have relatively short life spans. Generally, they will last only about a year in storage unless they are deep frozen. Accordingly, the Institute must estimate how much PowerPlant will be sold each year and then start preparing to meet those estimates many months in advance. In some years, the Institute has been pretty accurate in estimating how much PowerPlant to grow for the next year. In others (especially the last few years), supplies have run out early as, despite the Institute’s increases in annual production, increasing demand has outpaced supply.

Accordingly, if you want to ensure that you’ll have PowerPlant on hand to plant when temperatures warm up, you’d be wise to order now. Wait to plant PowerPlant until soil reaches a constant (day and night) temperature of 65°f or higher. A map showing planting-date windows for Imperial PowerPlant is on the back of the product bags and also posted on-line at http://www.whitetailinstitute.com/. The planting map for PowerPlant has only three sets of dates for the continental U.S.: one for the northern U.S., one for the middle U.S., and one for the south.

Once the published planting window for your area arrives, then wait until soil temperatures reach a constant (day and night) temperature of 65°F or higher before planting PowerPlant. I mentioned above that spring/summer legume seeds don’t store well for more than a year. The reason is that these types of seeds are very fragile. In fact, if you plant them in cool, moist soil they can rot in as little as a few days. Unfortunately, that’s just the nature of spring/summer legume seeds generally. It’s therefore very important that PowerPlant not be planted until the soil has reached a constant (day and night) temperature of at least 65°F.

If you’re not sure how to tell when your soil temperatures reach a constant 65°F or higher, it can be a great idea to contact a local farm supply store in your area to find out when farmers in the area are planting ag soybeans. Although the soybean in PowerPlant is a forage variety, temperature requirements for planting are the same as those for ag beans. Also, in some cases deep tillage can help dry out wet soil and warm the soil up more quickly. Try to disk early and, again, disk deep.

If you have any questions about PowerPlant, how and when to plant it, or any other questions about deer nutrition or deer management, give the Institute’s in-house consultants a call at (800) 688-3030. They’ll also be happy to take your PowerPlant order — as long as supplies last!