We’ve spent several years on our lease in Southwest Arkansas trying to find the right combination that would unlock the door to great food plots. Every year we would try some of the same habitual mixes of clover and oats, and so through the expense of preparing the seedbed year after year. We have always held more than our fair share of deer on our property through the utilization of these plots, but the time to make a change was sneaking up on us. We wanted to find a better “mousetrap” that would not only keep deer on our lease but also add some good nutritional value as well.
Last summer we began to look at some of the major players in the production of seed and see what they had to offer that might fit our situation. One of the problems we have is control of pH levels – more specifically, getting lime trucks to our remote plots. When we tested our plots a couple years ago, the pH was about 5.7, and it would be very expensive and labor intensive to buy bagged lime to apply to those plots. This is what sparked my interest in one of the Whitetail Institute’s newer seed blends, Imperial Whitetail Extreme. With this new blend coming from a “tried-and-true” company, I knew that it had to be something that was rigorously tested and patiently re-tested over a substantial period of time. When the Institute’s Chris Eubanks addressed all my concerns and answered all my questions, we placed our order.
Per Chris’ advice, and following the detailed instructions provided, we put our seed in the ground in late September. I decided at that point to give another new product a try, Plot Saver. I wanted to baby one acre that was separate from the other plots. So I thought I would give this product a test as well. Just a few days after our seed was in the ground, we were blessed with just the right amount of rain, followed by a few mild days of sunshine. In what seemed like overnight, small little green plants began to break the ground, and so our first venture with a perennial had begun.
Mid-October arrived quickly, more rain fell, and the young plants began to thrive. We noticed very early that the deer were beginning to use the large plot, nibbling the plants at a pretty good rate. They were plants that our deer herd had never tasted before, but they seemed to really enjoy them – much more than the old mixes of clover and oats. The smaller one-acre plot was not utilized at all, meaning the Plot Saver was doing its job as well, and the plants were really coming up beautifully. Thirty days later this plot was given to the deer, and they had no mercy on it at all!
There is one important factor that must be mentioned here. We had an unbelievable white oak acorn crop on our lease this past season, and never before have the deer hit our food plots that early in the season with that kind of mast. I would never have dreamed that deer would walk by white oak acorns to feed in a food plot, but this herd was doing it on a regular basis.
My dad was sitting on his stand on opening morning of Arkansas’ firearms season, overlooking the larger plot of Extreme. A doe came into the plot and started feeding at approximately 7:15. Not much surprise there with the number of deer tracks in the plot, but the surprise was the buck that followed her out, not to chase, but to munch on the nice-tasting plants that were growing there. The best buck my dad has ever seen, while on stand, was taken that morning at 7:30. The 140-class 12-pointer is a basic 8-point with several stickers, giving it character that will add to the conversation as the deer hangs on my dad’s living room wall.
Our confidence in these new Extreme food plots is growing at about the same rate as the plants themselves, and with a little TLC, we should be looking for more good things to come out of them. The best part about them, at this point, is not having to go through another planting for the next few years. When we put the numbers to it, we discovered that the initial investment in the Extreme will be balanced out over the next few years as compared to replanting oats and clover every year, while having a much more nutritional mix of plants. We believe we made the right choice by going with this blend from the Whitetail Institute, and many thanks to them for their research and development in a seed blend that met our needs.
