Jeff H
Well-Known Member
I'm trying to recover the post I made when I made my discovery. No luck yet. It may have been on the old forum but I don't think it was that long ago. Stay tuned.
Homemade minerals
- Thread starter Buckeye
- Start date
Drycreek
Well-Known Member
Before I started using blocks, I had some bagged minerals from WINA that came for free when I ordered some seed from them. Small bags, but enough to establish some mineral sites. The deer really used those sites, in fact, they used them for two years. The hogs finally made wallows out of a couple in the creek bottom. Must have been some potent stuff.
swat1018
Well-Known Member
Yes, grape Koolaid powder definitely seems to draw them in. It's considered baiting where I am now. My wife liked to try things like that, but haven't done it in MO since it's considered bait.
Mennoniteman
Well-Known Member
50 lb trace mineral block from tractor supply $6.99
weekender21
Well-Known Member
That’s definitely the cheapest way to do it. And, there is zero conclusive evidence that the minerals we give them help deer health or antler growth at all anyway. The 99% salt “trace mineral” blocks attract deer for sure.
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MarkDarvin
Well-Known Member
True. It's one of those things that's so cheap, it doesn't pay to try to disprove it.
However, even though I use a redmond block on my place, I push total fertility on my limited plot acres (can I get an amen Catscratch!). It's not easy at first, but if you have the right tools and the right soil test, you can plop a small postage stamp in the landscape that delivers better tasting, more nutritious forage than the rest of the neighborhood.
Properly selected lime can unlock all your nutrients. Proper potassium levels can unlock previously unavailable manganese. Gypsum can put sulfate into your plants. I buy borax at the grocery store for $5/box and put a few on. I get copper sulfate powder from Amazon. I could never put on borax and copper without my Extreme Blower attached to an electric leaf blower. It's very hard to spread 10lbs of powder over an acre without a blower.
Grand scheme, it's not cheap up front, but once you have your soil data and leaf blower, it's $40/acre per year to put your leachable nutrients on (at least for what my soil needs, yours could be different).
The Famous Grouse
Member
I absolutely believe mineral feeding has made a difference on my property. We used to have spindly, crooked, short racks. I started feeding the salt/TMS/di cal mix 5 years ago and the difference is dramatic. The biggest and most obvious change I've seen is in the 1.5 to 2.5 year olds. Instead of being small forks at 1.5 and then maybe growing to larger forks or small 4 pointers at 2.5, we now get 6 pointers regularly at 2.5. That almost never happened before.
IMO here's the key to the whole thing. It ONLY makes a difference if your property is in an area that is mineral deficient in the first place.
Look at all the natural big buck areas in the US. They all have one thing in common--natural calcium and other mineral rich soils and water. A buck in SW Wisconsin, for example, is drinking out of a limestone creek and eating food grown in calcium-rich soil with no acidity. He is getting all the calcium he can possibly use already. Naturally, anyone feeding mineral in these areas will see few if any benefits.
Up in east central MN, my soil is very acidic and has 0 calcium. The water is also acidic with no calcium. Trace minerals are almost non-existent naturally.
It's in these circumstances that I believe feeding mineral, specifically high calcium and trace minerals, does make a difference to rack size and shape. You are providing your deer with hundreds of times more Ca than they could ever have found naturally.
Grouse
IMO here's the key to the whole thing. It ONLY makes a difference if your property is in an area that is mineral deficient in the first place.
Look at all the natural big buck areas in the US. They all have one thing in common--natural calcium and other mineral rich soils and water. A buck in SW Wisconsin, for example, is drinking out of a limestone creek and eating food grown in calcium-rich soil with no acidity. He is getting all the calcium he can possibly use already. Naturally, anyone feeding mineral in these areas will see few if any benefits.
Up in east central MN, my soil is very acidic and has 0 calcium. The water is also acidic with no calcium. Trace minerals are almost non-existent naturally.
It's in these circumstances that I believe feeding mineral, specifically high calcium and trace minerals, does make a difference to rack size and shape. You are providing your deer with hundreds of times more Ca than they could ever have found naturally.
Grouse
catscratch
Well-Known Member
AMMEN DarkMarvin! .
Fertile soil with a complete mineral content and living bacterial/fungal colonies is beneficial to everything... including deer. I know it isn't a popular belief, but I feel this includes soil and plant communities away from the plots as well as in our plots.
Mennoniteman
Well-Known Member
One sweet attractant that definitely doesn't work is "Stump Likker", I bought some years ago and poured it on a stump beside my feeder on a regular basis, we had a camera on it for a year and never saw one deer lick it.
MarkDarvin
Well-Known Member
You know I’ve always been fascinated with knowing why something works. For those of you that took the initiative to order that Green Cover soil book, you already know this.
For the rest of you slackers, here’s the best explanation I’ve ever read that explains the function and importance of AMF in your soil. Note the paragraph circled in the right hand column.
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catscratch
Well-Known Member
You know I’ve always been fascinated with knowing why something works. For those of you that took the initiative to order that Green Cover soil book, you already know this.
For the rest of you slackers, here’s the best explanation I’ve ever read that explains the function and importance of AMF in your soil. Note the paragraph circled in the right hand column.
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I'm surprised that this hasn't turned into a discussion. With all the drive to go minimal tillage and to create/build better soils... the whole reason for doing it doesn't get talked about much. Not that I really care if it gets talked about much, I just figured it would be a hotter topic in general.
MarkDarvin
Well-Known Member
Me too. This is the process that explains the nutritional conduit from soil to deer. I was blown away when I found that article. Next logical question should be, how do we support this with the tools and goals we already have?
Mennoniteman
Well-Known Member
According to my farmer friends the push to go no-till by the farmers is driven by fuel savings, fertilizer savings, and erosion prevention. Bigger yields and soil health, while touted by the biologists, have not been the driving force for farmers because they could achieve the same yields or better by tilling and dumping on fertilizer. Commercial farming is driven by dollars, just like any other business, farmers want 200 bushel corn the cheapest way possible, and don't care about fungi if it doesn't impact their bottom line, which is why my biologist friends are a bit frustrated by farmers not paying much attention to soil health in the way they see it. Having more fungi and minerals in the soil is a bigger deal to us deer habitat guys than it has been to farmers, because we can't just add cheap supplements to our feed like farmers can. Perhaps that is the reason why we don't talk about it more, because we are kind of locked in and following whatever soil narratives farmers are currently pursuing. But we can't continue to ignore it because better plots do grow bigger deer.
catscratch
Well-Known Member
I completely agree that our farmer counterparts are great at making a product and making money at it. They crunch numbers and have it fine tuned for ever cent. I know a couple of guys who tried cover cropping and no-till only to go back to standard practices due to weed issues, increased spray/chemical inputs, and a reduction in yields. To me (as a habitat guy) it's completely different than what the farmers are after. Mineral and nutritional levels in plants are the number 1 objective in increasing habitat and food for healthier deer herds. I see a lot of threads on how to grow crops that deer like... stuff that will draw them in. But I see few posts on how to grow nutritious crops that will make healthier deer. Maybe you are right that we are too tied in with farmers to see it another way. Maybe we don't see it as something that will have outcomes that are higher than what we are all ready doing. Or maybe we just do what is comfortable.
MarkDarvin
Well-Known Member
Those that choose not to try this will eventually fall behind the guys that figure out biologicals. We've hit the wall in what we can do with conventional fertilizer. All the flash and flare is in biological processes and products now. A farmer has to figure out how to drive up bushels, or drive down costs. To stay inbetween is to be a sitting duck.
FarmerD
Active Member
Well, maybe we are doing better than we think, assuming the deer might only eat 25% of their diet, from a food plot? I know, this varies by location, but we do plant some nutritious crops, too. Amending the soil, using nutrient scavengers and doing the best we can to improve the organic matter, helps?
http://www.northamericanwhitetail.com/editorial/deermanagement_wt_202foodplots/264184#
That's interesting! I use the same mix - loose stock salt, di-cal pho, & trace minerals. Deer use it moderately here & we have a relatively high deer density level.
