By Jon Cooner
As we begin our journey from raw land to incorporating a high-performance food plot system, you should keep our ultimate destination, or goal, in mind: We want to end up with a food plot system (which can even be just one or two plots) that will make the property we hunt as attractive to deer, nutritious for deer and huntable as possible. (More on each of these as we go along). If you want to achieve that goal, the following four steps will get you there with Mother Nature’s cooperation:
1. Decide how many food plots you’ll plant and where you’ll put them
2. Decide what forage to plant in each site
3. Correctly prepare the sites for planting
4. Plant correctly
Regardless of whether your property is large or small, the steps that will take you from no food plots to a high-performance food-plot system are pretty much the same, and you should follow them in the same specific order. One reason is that some steps depend on others having already been done. Another is that you can sometimes save money and time by performing more than one step each time you’re at the property.
Finally, as we go through the steps, keep in mind that what you’ll be creating is a starting point; most plans need a little adjustment based on how deer actually react after the plan is put in place.
STEP 1: DECIDING HOW MANY FOOD PLOTS TO PLANT AND WHERE TO PUT THEM
Whether your property is large or small, your bestcase scenario is to have enough acreage in plots to maximize attraction and nutrition, but without planting so much of the property that deer have no reason to move. With that in mind, here’s a formula that seems to be a good general rule of thumb.
First Formula: Most managers put about two to five percent of the total property into food plots if only “hunting plots” are being used. Managers who use both hunting plots and feeding plots may plant as much as 10 percent or more.
Most folks who plant food plots for deer, plant hunting plots. These can be anywhere from 1/10th of an acre up to two to three acres. Their main functions are to draw deer for harvest and provide nutrition.
Feeding plots, when used, are usually larger than hunting plots, and their main function is to serve as places where deer feel safe. When feeding plots are used, they should be hunted sparingly, maybe just during the rut, so that deer have a feeling of safety using them.
Again, this is a general rule of thumb, and it won’t be exact for all situations. Lots of factors will determine how much of your property you’ll ultimately decide to plant, such as landowner permission, equipment accessibility, time, money and lots of other factors. And if your property is small, don’t forget to consider what’s beyond your property line, because that may be a major source from which you’ll draw deer to your land.
For example, say you own or lease a long, narrow tract that borders with a vast wildlife area that’s not hunted much. In such a situation, you might not want to stick with the formula. Instead, you might want to plant as much of your property as possible to maximize its attraction and available nutrition because you will be feeding so many deer.
Where to put your food plots? It always pays to put some thought into where you put your plots. Before we get into that, though, consider that it can be equally critical to think about where not to put them. One place you don’t want to put them if at all possible, whether your property is large or small, is where they’ll be visible from a public road. When making that determination, be sure to consider that screening vegetation, which may be there when you check in the spring and summer, may be gone in the fall and winter. Also consider planting evergreens or other natural screening plants to help shield the plot from public view. For advice on trees and other screening plants, check with your County Agent, or call the Whitetail Institute’s consultants at (800) 688-3030. Generally speaking, feeding plots (when used) should be centrally located on the property. You want your deer to consider your feeding plots as safe zones so that they’ll purposefully head for them when they leave their bedding areas in the afternoon. That means that you shouldn’t hunt directly on feeding plots at all, or at least do so very rarely, for instance during the rut. This can help establish a more predictable travel pattern for your deer that you can use to your advantage as you hunt between the feeding plots and bedding areas.
When feeding plots are used, hunting plots should be located between feeding plots and bedding areas. Structured this way, the plot system can help you use the natural tendency of deer to feed as they travel and utilize undercover corridors around plot edges to your advantage during hunting season.How you design your hunting plots can also be very important. When designing your hunting plots, keep one critical thing in mind: the safer deer feel using it, the better chance they’ll do so during legal hunting hours. To help deer feel safe, a long, narrow plot is usually better than one that is wide and square. Also, try to place your plots where their edges border cover such as a thicket, standing rows of corn, or anything else deer interpret as something they could quickly jump into if threatened. A corner of an overgrown field that meets thick woods on two sides is an excellent example.
Also, take wind into account. No matter where you hunt, chances are that the wind comes from one direction more than any other during hunting season in your area. Try to structure your plots so your main stand sites can be placed downwind from the most common wind direction. If possible, structure each plot so that it can also be fully covered by a secondary stand when the wind is coming from a different direction.
Try to structure things so that deer feel that they’re only a few hops away from cover while they feed. Proven design shapes are the “V” or “L” and the “hourglass.” These designs are often useful in deep cover and with the stand site located at the junction of the “V” or “L”, or at the neck between the two lobes of the hourglass.
Again, these are just ideas that work in many cases. In the end, each situation is different,
so when you’re deciding how many plots to plant and where to put them, be sure to take into account any factors that will make your property as attractive to deer, nutritious for deer and as huntable as possible.
STEP 2: DECIDING WHAT FORAGE TO PLANT IN EACH SITE
Once you decide where your plots will be, it will be time to decide what forage you’re going to plant in each one. We’ll cover more about forage selection in Part 2 of these articles which will appear in the next issue of Whitetail News. Until then, keep a few things in mind.
First, the fact that selecting a forage is your next step is an example of why it’s important to do things in a specific order. In the next part of this article, we’ll discuss one of the most important steps in ensuring a successful planting: performing a soil test. As we’ll discuss, when you prepare your soil sample to send to the lab, if at all possible, you should make sure you let the lab know what you’ll be planting in the site. That’s because different forages have different fertilizer requirements. If you don’t let the lab know what you’ll be planting in the site, most soil-testing labs will give you general recommendations for grains.
If you forget to let the lab know what you’ll be planting, the Whitetail Institute’s consultants can quickly help you adjust the lab’s findings for the forage you’ll be planting, but it will save you time if you let the lab know up front. Also remember this: You should choose a forage product that is specifically designed for that specific plot. To make sure you choose the correct forage for each site, you have to take into account physical characteristics of the site such as soil type, slope and equipment accessibility. You’ll also need to take into account whether you want the forage in that site to be a year-round forage, or something that will provide maximum production for only part of the year, such as spring and summer for antler growth, or fall and winter for attraction and energy.
In preparation for Part 2 of this article, you might want to review “How to Select a Forage,” an article which ran in Whitetail News last year. If you no longer have that issue or if you’re new to Whitetail News, don’t worry — the article is also available online:
www.whitetailinstitute.com/HowtoSelecttheRightForage.pdf.
