When you plant a food plot in fall, what do you expect
to get from it? In most cases, the No. 1 reason folks plant fall food plots is
to attract and hold deer for hunting season. Whitetail Oats Plus does that — in
spades. When it comes to choosing a fall annual to plant, it ought to be
sufficient that Whitetail Oats Plus attracts deer as well or better than you
expect.
Even so, Whitetail Oats Plus can do
more — much more if you know how to take advantage of its versatility.
The
Expected: Attraction, Attraction, Attraction
The backbone of Whitetail Oats Plus
is an oat variety the Whitetail Institute first heard about years ago, when one
of its worldwide agriculture contacts told staffers about it. In Whitetail Institute
testing, this variety proved to be more attractive to deer than any other oat
the company had tested. The variety had initially been included with other oat
varieties in a university research project comparing how well various oats
performed as grain producers, but researchers had to “remove it from the tests
and shelve it because deer browsed it so heavily.” As you can imagine, the
Whitetail Institute was immediately interested in exploring the oat variety’s
potential as a deer forage. The company’s initial tests of the oat included
evaluating its attractiveness to deer, how well it grew in various climates and
other performance characteristics related to food plots. Those tests confirmed what
the Institute’s contact had said: The oat variety was high in sugar and
extremely attractive to whitetails. The tests also showed the variety is well
suited to a broad range of climates, and that it’s winter hardy — another
excellent characteristic for any food plot planting. Because of the oat variety’s
stellar performance during testing, the Whitetail Institute purchased the
rights to the variety and named it Whitetail Oats. It’s the most attractive oat
variety for deer the company has tested, and it’s only available in Whitetail
Institute products. As excellent as the oat variety is by itself, the Whitetail
Institute still wasn’t satisfied it had done everything to maximize food plot
performance. So during the next six years, it continued to test Whitetail Oats
by itself and blended with other forage varieties to design a Whitetail Oats based
food plot product that could max out performance. The result is the Plus in the
product’s name: small amounts of winter wheat and triticale the Whitetail
Institute included in Whitetail Oats Plus to enhance winter hardiness even more.
The
Unexpected
As mentioned, although Whitetail Oats
Plus is a tremendous food plot product by itself, it can also do much more. You
can also use it as a nurse crop when planting perennials in fall, which yields
several benefits. First, Whitetail Oats Plus germinates and grows quickly, and
because it’s so attractive, it attracts deer to the plot soon after planting.
Second, the fast growth and attractiveness characteristics of Whitetail Oats Plus
help it shoulder some of the browsing pressure on the plot as the perennial
sprouts and grows. Third, planting a nurse crop of Whitetail Oats Plus with
fall-planted perennials can be a great way to hedge your bets against a
late-summer or early-fall drought. This is especially true when the perennial
seeds planted are coated with the Whitetail Institute’s Rainbond seed coating. Rainbond
serves several important functions, but for our purposes, the most important is
it helps protect seeds from germinating until sufficient moisture is available
in the soil to sustain the seedling. If you plant a nurse crop of Whitetail Oats
Plus with fall-planted Whitetail Institute perennials but Mother Nature turns
off the water, you’ll likely still be in good shape even if the drought is hard
and long. In the worst-case scenario — if there isn’t even enough moisture in
the soil to penetrate Rainbond and germinate the perennial seeds — you can
still have a highly attractive plot of Whitetail Oats Plus to attract and hold
deer until rains return. Planting a nurse crop of Whitetail Oats Plus with a
perennial in fall is easy. When planting the perennial, broadcast a light layer
(30 to 45 pounds per acre) of Whitetail Oats Plus onto the disked or tilled
seedbed right after putting out your fertilizer. Then, smooth the plot to
lightly cover the fertilizer and oats. Finally, broadcast the perennial seed at
its full seeding rate on top of the smoothed seedbed. (Editor’s note: An
article on using Whitetail Oats Plus as a nurse crop appears in this issue on
Page 38). As with all Whitetail Institute forage products, the components and
their ratios in Whitetail Oats Plus have been exhaustively developed and tested
in real-world conditions across the United States and Canada to ensure that Whitetail
Oats Plus is the best the company could make. Whitetail Oats Plus is high in
sugar and exceptionally attractive to deer. It’s also winterhardy, easy to
plant, establishes quickly and begins attracting deer right away. Its
cold-tolerance allows it to continue to attract deer longer into winter. Whitetail
Oats Plus is designed to thrive in a wide range of soil types, from slightly
sandy to heavy bottomland. Loamy to heavy soils are best. One 45-pound bag of
Whitetail Oats Plus will plant up to a half acre. For information about
Whitetail Oats Plus or to order, visit whitetailinstitute.com, or call (800)
688-3030.
