Ah,
the crystal ball. The stuff I could have accomplished if I’d only had one, and
the things I could still anticipate if one rested on my shelf. On second
thought, scratch the shelf. If I had an instrument that foretold the future, I’d
lock it up somewhere, only producing it at critical times.
I don’t waste a lot of time longing for
such a device, but I should have secured one before I pitched a story idea to
the editors of this magazine. “How about a piece on the future of food
plotting?” I asked innocently. When they assigned the story — this one — I
think it was more out of pure amusement. As in, “OK, let’s see how Bestul can
trip himself up on this one.” Of course, I’m not qualified to foretell food
plotting’s future. But I quickly recovered when I realized I could do what I
always do in such situations; defer to people a lot smarter than I am. With
that in mind, here are some speculations from three men whose combined
experience amounts to nearly 100 years of experience in the food plot business.
Steve Scott
Vice-President of the Whitetail
Institute, Scott has been in the business for almost 30 years. The savvy businessman
maintains a bullish attitude for the future. “I see us doing nothing but
growing in the years ahead,” he said. “More and more hunters are getting into
food plotting, primarily because they know food plots work. The proof is there,
both in photos like you see in our magazine but also the record books. Hunters
have a far better chance at killing a record-book whitetail now than they ever
did before we started providing products and information for deer management in
’88. Certainly, we can’t take all the credit for that, but we’re certainly going
to take some.” Another reason for Scott’s optimism is the increasing number of hunters
purchasing or leasing land they can manage. “There’s simply a greater
investment in time and dollars in deer hunting than at any time before,” he said.
“Hunters start by just buying land to manage the deer they shoot or don’t
shoot. Then they’re planting food plots, managing their timber and working on
other habitat projects. Food plots play a huge role in deer management, and
that’s great news for us.” When Imperial Whitetail Clover was introduced in
1988, it was the first clover specifically developed for whitetail deer. Will
there be other ground-breaking introductions from the Alabama-based company? “Well,
we recently introduced Ambush, which featured lupine, a seed I’d guess 99
percent of hunters had never heard of,” Scott said. “We continue to work on new
varieties of everything in our current lineup, and even some off-the-wall stuff
that may never see the light of day. But we’ve also introduced a new variety
into Imperial Whitetail Clover that will make a great product even better. We
just keep pushing the envelope, and I see some good things coming down the road.”
Scott feels particularly gratified to see Whitetail Institute customers becoming
more educated about not only Whitetail Institute products but food plotting and
management in general. “We’ve got a long way to go and a lot more people to
reach, but when it comes to planting food plots, we just see more and more
people concerned about dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s,” he said. “Our
soil testing service has grown every year, and every year we get tens of
thousands of phone calls and emails with questions, which we love. And not to
brag too hard, but more and more people are getting their hands on, and
reading, Whitetail News. I think the serious deer hunter who doesn’t
read Whitetail News is probably a little behind the curve. That’s how
proud we are of the information that’s in it.”
Mark Trudeau
As the director of certified research
for the Whitetail Institute, Mark Trudeau knows the world of food plotting
well. Perhaps more important, Trudeau is a devout and successful land manager
who recognizes the importance of food plots and habitat work on his own farm
and hunting property in rural Tennessee. “Lots of people know the importance of
food plots for successful deer hunting,” Trudeau said. “But in my opinion, that
number continues to grow. Food is everything to deer, and we’re seeing more and
more hunters recognize that at the end of the day, the most cost-effective investment
they can make is to establish and maintain quality food plots.” Trudeau said
even veteran food plotters have more frontiers to explore. “Plot design is
becoming a hot topic,” he said. “Having a proper design — like an S-shape or a
dog-leg that requires a buck to enter and work the entire plot to see all the
does — is something still not on a lot of hunters’ radar. Also, knowing how to
hunt food plots effectively — which means getting to and from your stands with
as little disturbance as possible and sometimes backing off the plot with stand
locations are ideas many hunters are just catching on to. We plan to do an even
better job of getting even more hunters up to speed on things like this.”
Matt Harper
One of the country’s top experts on
food plots, Harper is also a fulltime employee in the ag industry. Given that
the food plot industry sometimes follows the lead of agriculture, Harper is
situated perfectly to serve as a forecaster for the future of food plotting. “It’s
interesting to speculate on things like this,” Harper said. “It’s tempting to
think, ‘Well, we’ve done about all we can do, and there’s nothing new in the world,’ and there’s a degree of truth to
that. But it’s also not entirely accurate.” For starters, Harper said,
Whitetail Institute will keep looking for and developing new and better
varieties of proven seeds as well as seeds most hunters have never heard of. Harper
sees more room for opportunity. “Maybe there are seeds that we’ve never tried
in a blend before, or a specific variety of seed that we’ve never offered to
whitetail hunters, and deer just hammer it,” he said. “We might come up with
even more food plot seeds that are perfectly suited for the whitetail
nutritional profile. This is something that cattle guys do all the time; grow a
certain variety of corn, for example, with the specific carbohydrate levels they
need. Or, guys who grow high-quality hay go to great lengths to create the maximum
tonnage that meets specific requirements.” There’s also a lot of unexplored
frontier when it comes to soil prep and plot maintenance, Harper said. “There
are areas with very thin soils — I’m talking basically rock — and I’ve read
some really interesting stuff on using composting to build organic matter and
aid in water retention in spots like this,” he said. “You’re actually building
soil where there is almost none. I expect we’ll see more of this kind of
experimentation coming from areas where growing good deer food is a real
challenge.” Harper isn’t afraid to explore out-there concepts or even
potentially controversial ones as he contemplates the future. “One of the big
things in ag now is getting increasingly specific on the fertilizer needs, for example,
on big agricultural fields,” he said. “Farmers now soil sample across a field,
and then use GPS to target areas that need more or less lime or fertilizer.
This saves them money since they’re not just applying the same amounts across
an entire field. Something like this would obviously only work on a larger
plot, but it’s an example of another farming technique that in time, could
cross over to food plotting. Harper concluded by placing the food plotting
world into perspective as we move toward the future. “I think it’s important
how we position food plots in the conversations we have with others — hunters,
non-hunters and anti-hunters — about what we do,” he said. “If we speak about
food plots as just another tool that helps us kill deer, it’s one thing. If we
recognize them as one important piece of habitat improvement, that’s entirely
something else. Veteran food plotters know that when they plant, for example, a
one-acre clover plot, they’re feeding a whole lot more animals than just the
deer that feed there. So if we talk about the rabbits, the turkeys, the
insects, the songbirds (and others) that feed on that clover, non-hunters and
even anti-hunters will have a whole lot better chance of accepting the fact
that we might kill a whitetail or two there every year.”
