■ Three years ago, my friend Kolton Atchley and I began traveling to Easton, Illinois, to hunt with our buddy Gavin Urish. The first two years, we used a week of vacation to hunt. But at the end of the 2019 deer season, we decided it was time to put some work into the farm. Naturally, the first item was to determine how we could plant food plots and provide deer with more groceries. Gavin had all the equipment we would need for planting. We just had to get there in August to complete our work.
When we got the 120 acres of land almost 18 years ago, it had not produced a trophy class whitetail (130 plus) in over 15 years. I knew this was my chance to do my own program. After a lot of research, I decided to go with the Whitetail Institute’s products. We planted our two largest fields in Imperial Whitetail Clover the first year. We put out cameras and realized we not only had a horrible age structure, but our few older bucks weren’t what you would hope they’d be. We had a bulldozer come in and help us widen existing plots and strategically create some new ones.
After spending time and effort preparing a food plot during the off-season, I was very grateful to see it pay off!