The Whitetail
Institute’s Winter-Greens brassica blend has been on the market for two years.
Has it been a success? Without question, the answer is a resounding, “Yes!” In
fact, Winter-Greens is well on the way to dominating the brassica food-plot
market. Let’s look at why.
Actually, the reason is very simple. It’s because Winter-Greens is
an incredibly superior forage product for deer. The brassicas in Winter-Greens
are not standard brassica varieties. Instead, they are lettuce-type brassicas,
which have a vegetable genetic base. These lettuce brassicas are vastly more
tender, palatable and attractive to deer. In fact, tests of Winter-Greens
alongside other brassica blends continue to show that deer prefer Winter-Greens
4 to 1. You may ask yourself, “How can that be? How can one all-brassica blend
outperform other all-brassica products by 400%? Since they’re all brassicas,
how can that be possible? “If you’ve asked that question, you are assuming that
all brassicas are the same. Let me assure you — they aren’t! Remember the old
commercial on TV where the old guy says, “Motor oil is motor oil” just before
his car’s engine blows up? I may be showing my age here, but I remember it. The
point of the commercial was that all motor oils are not the same — that some
outperform others. The very same thing is true of brassicas — all brassicas are
not the same, and the lettuce-types brassicas in Winter-Greens are truly
preferred by deer. Anyone familiar with the history of the Whitetail Institute
knows that the Institute is the leader of the food-plot industry.
The thing that got it there, and that keeps it there, is the
fundamental principle that governs all the Institute’s research,
development and testing of potential new products: the Whitetail Institute will
never release a new product until it is absolutely certain that is the very
best that they can make it. And be sure you understand this critical point: the
Whitetail Institute doesn’t stop development and testing of a new product once
it will outperform the competition. New products have to go farther — much
farther. Every new product has to satisfy the Whitetail Institute that it is
the best that the Institute can make, and that is a much higher standard! In
fact, their commitment to testing new products against their own abilities
rather than just against the competition is the single biggest reason for
Winter-Greens’ superiority over competing products. Let’s look at why. The
Whitetail Institute has been testing and marketing brassicas since the early
1990s. In fact, the Institute’s Imperial No-Plow blend was the first nationally
branded product to include brassicas. When the Whitetail Institute started
testing brassica varieties during the initial research-and-development stages
of Winter-Greens, it started with a goal. That goal was to produce a forage
blend that would be highly attractive to deer and provide forage even in the cold
winter months. Protein is a critical nutrient for deer, but it is at its most
important during spring and summer when bucks are re-growing antlers, does are
in the later stages of pregnancy and, even later, producing milk for their fawns.
In the fall and winter, though, protein is not nearly as important a
nutritional element as it is during the spring and summer. That’s not to say
Winter-Greens is not highly nutritious — it certainly is! In fact, the protein content
of Winter-Greens is as high as 30% or higher. However, because Winter-Greens is
designed for fall and winter when natural food sources are scarce and most
food-plot plantings may be exhausted, the Institute’s main goals when
developing Winter-Greens was to create a blend that would provide abundant, highly
attractive forage for deer during the coldest winter months and be the most
attractive brassica product available. Once the Institute identified its main
goals for the new product, the research and development team moved on to the
next stage of product development: selecting candidate brassica varieties to
test all across North America.
These
candidates included brassica varieties that were already well know and others
that were not. This is the same approach the Institute has followed all the way
back to the very first clover varieties its first Director of Forage Research,
Dr. Wiley Johnson, selected for breeding Imperial Whitetail Clover. for
breeding stock Dr. Johnson selected candidate clovers from the U.S. commodities
market, Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere. This is the same approach the
Institute took when selecting potential candidates for a new, all-brassica blend
that would carry the Imperial name. They didn’t just start with well-known
varieties for breeding-stock candidates. They looked at everything — varieties
that were well-known, and others that weren’t. Choosing candidate brassica
varieties that were well-known in the U.S. was pretty easy. Standard brassicas had
been included in food-plot blends for years. In fact, the Institute tested
these brassica varieties before they were even introduced to the food-plot market
in North America, but it elected not to release an all-brassica blend at that
time because the Institute’s early focus on research and development was to
create a food-plot planting that would provide deer with year-round forage that
was highly attractive and nutritious. The Institute’s early tests of standard brassicas
quickly showed that they were not the best candidates to meet those goals
because they were highly attractive to whitetails for only a brief period of the
year, following the first hard frost of fall. Although standard brassicas did
not meet the Whitetail Institute’s early research and development goals, the
Institute did find a great use for them. Because they do become sweeter after
the first frost of fall, standard brassicas have been used as a component in
some of the Institute’s forage products ever since 1993, specifically those
blends the Institute intentionally designed to provide deer with multiple plant
varieties, each of which performs best at a different time during the life of
the plot.
The
key to the overwhelming superiority of Winter- Greens, though, lies in the
other brassica varieties the Whitetail Institute gathered as test candidates —
those that were not already well-known in North America. These included unique
brassica types that, unlike standard brassicas, have a vegetable genetic base.
These “lettuce-type” brassicas are so attractive to whitetails that it’s almost
unfair to compare them to standard brassica blends on the market today. Like
all brassica varieties, the lettuce brassicas in Winter-Greens are also at
their sweetest after the first hard frost of fall. However, the Whitetail
Institute realized early on in the development and testing of the new Winter-Greens
blend that deer often utilized Winter-Greens even earlier, and Field Testers
all across North America continue to confirm that. Even here in Alabama, where
temperatures often don’t dip below the freezing mark until November or even
December, it has been found in many cases that deer heavily utilize Winter-Greens
plots as early as September. That’s why in all honesty, the overwhelming
success of Winter-Greens is not surprising. Like all forage blends that bear
the name “Imperial Whitetail,” you can be assured that it contains the very
best product the Whitetail Institute could make. That’s why the Whitetail Institute
remains the industry leader. More information on Winter-Greens is available
online at http://www.whitetailinstitute.com/products/wintergreens/.
