My first experience with a Whitetail Institute product was in 1989 when I planted six acres of Imperial Whitetail clover. It was a beautiful stand of clover, and we enjoyed seeing lots of deer using it throughout the summer. That fall after just one season of growing the clover, my son, David Stine, harvested a really nice nine-pointer. Since that early exposure to the Whitetail Institute and its product in ’89, it has been my pleasure to be a yearly field tester for the Institute.
Over the past seventeen years we have tested a variety of products. As a field tester and hunter, I have become a strong advocate of the Whitetail Institute and the products it offers to landowners/hunter. I appreciate the fact that the Whitetail Institute is a strong believer in doing its homework when it comes to creating quality products that will be beneficial to the wildlife and in turn, produce results for hunters. It has been my experience that the Institute takes the testing process extremely seriously, refusing to put a less-than-satisfactory product out on the market. I know this because some of the products I’ve tested for the Whitetail Institute were not successful enough to make it to the marketplace.
I have been very fortunate to have a family of interested hunters living in a close proximity to both me and the land upon which we hunt. It has been a joy for us to hunt and share our experiences together. While in most cases it’s the father who teaches the son about hunting deer, in my case, it was really Dave who taught me. He introduced me to bow hunting in 1989, and from him I learned more about hunting whitetails in two years than I had in my previous twenty-five years of firearm hunting. My grandson, Ryan Matzke, started bow hunting with us seven years ago and works really hard at learning all he can from his Uncle Dave and me, as well as from his own hunting experiences. Although I consider Dave to be the real deer hunter in the family, and one of the better ones in our area, Ryan has become a skilled and avid hunter, and with a little more experience, he will be a close second to his uncle. All three of us have become strictly bow hunters.
I have enclosed a picture of my most recent buck, (1), as well as Dave’s most recent buck, which was a wide ten-pointer (2). I have also included a photo of the 210 lb. ten-pointer that Ryan shot this year (3). We’d seen these bucks, as well as numerous other large bucks occasionally while scouting during the summer and early fall. As evidenced by the number of mature bucks our fellow landowner/bow hunters and we have harvested or seen in the last several years, we all feel that the deer management program we started several years ago is a sound one. We are committed to annually harvesting more does than bucks and to shooting only mature bucks. By combining these practices with the year-round use of the Whitetail Institute food plots products, I am confident that the outlook of our deer hunting will only get better. Thank you for your quality products, and I look forward to my continuing relationship with the Whitetail Institute.
