Designed for planting in
the fall, the Whitetail Institute’s new annual, Imperial Whitetail Destination,
combines five highly attractive Whitetail Institute forage components to deliver
an incredibly lush, palatable food source with phenomenal attractiveness to
deer from fall through winter. All five components are proprietary to the
Whitetail Institute and are only available in Whitetail Institute products.
Simply stated, Destination
is one of the most attractive fall annual food plot products the Whitetail
Institute has ever offered. Destination is designed, first and foremost, to be
extremely attractive to deer. Further, Destination is formulated to establish
quickly, exhibit early seedling vigor, grow rapidly and provide high
nutritional content. Again, while the Whitetail Institute considers all these
characteristics important, the most important of all is attractiveness to
deer. Destination meets the Whitetail
Institute’s superior-performance requirements through its components —five
proprietary Whitetail Institute seeds that have all proven themselves through
our research efforts and over time to be extremely attractive to deer. As
such, Destination is an excellent example of the Whitetail Institute’s
practice of developing blends of complementary forages in order to sustain maximum
attractiveness of the stand over the long term. To explain, you may have noticed that most
Whitetail Institute food plot products are blends of different plant varieties.
That’s because one type of forage plant can rarely maximize performance in all
the categories for which the Whitetail Institute tests. That’s why when
developing Destination the Whitetail Institute thoroughly researched and
selected multiple complementary plant varieties to boost attraction for the
early hunting season as well as the late hunting season, and then combined them
in the optimum ratios as shown by Whitetail Institute testing. The exhaustive
research and testing to develop food plot products that perform up to the
Institute’s relentless expectations is one reason Whitetail Institute food plot
products continue to dominate the market. This is accomplished by combining
various components in different proportions and then testing them on wild,
free-ranging deer until the Institute identifies the optimum seed varieties
and ratios to maximize attraction over the longest period of time. Each of the
forage components in Destination were selected and then combined with the other
components so that no matter what time of fall or winter it is, deer will have
multiple extremely attractive forages available to them.
Early Fall Through Late
Fall. Three
forage components of Destination are primarily responsible for its
early-season performance: Whitetail Oats, WINA 214 Pea and Alex Berseem clover.
The exceptional attractiveness of
Whitetail Oats will come as no surprise to anyone who’s familiar with another
Whitetail Institute annual food plot product, Whitetail Oats PLUS. When it
comes to attracting deer, all oat varieties definitely are NOT the same. In a
nutshell, Whitetail Oats, the backbone component in Whitetail Oats PLUS, is
the most attractive oat variety the Whitetail Institute has ever tested. (You
can find out more about Whitetail Oats PLUS in the article on page 10 of this
issue of Whitetail
News.)
Winter Peas varieties also vary quite a bit in their attractiveness to deer.
WINA 204 Pea is a high-sugar pea that has consistently proven itself in
side-by-side cafeteria tests across North America to be vastly more attractive
than any other pea variety the Whitetail Institute tested. WINA 204 Pea is also
high in protein and cold tolerant. Alex Berseem is an annual clover that has
long performed double duty in other Whitetail Institute products —as a
complementary early attractant in many Whitetail Institute annuals, and as a
fast green-up component in many Whitetail Institute perennials. In both cases,
its primary benefit is to attract deer to a food plot as soon after planting as
possible.
Fall Through Winter. Destination’s two other
forage components, WINA 210 Kale and WINA 412 Radish, complement the early fall
components by increasing tonnage and boosting attraction even further by
adding variety to the planting. Once frosts arrive, enzymes in the kale and
radishes convert starches in the foliage to sugars, making them even more
attractive to deer and providing deer with high carbohydrates through winter.
The thick, deeply rooted tubers produced by WINA 412 Radish also continue to
act as a much-needed food source for deer through the coldest winter months. Destination is available in 9-pound bags that
plant 1/4 acre. Sites with moderately light to medium-heavy soils are optimum.
Avoid wet bottom areas. Destination requires a minimum of 3-4 hours of filtered
or indirect sunlight a day. For additional information about Destination, go
to whitetailinstitute.com or call the Whitetail Institute at (800) 688-3030.
