Homemade Deer Blocks

[snowman69]

Looking for some help on how to keep deer feed blocks together like the commercial ones.

Mixture is made up of 1 part corn, 1 part sunflower, 1 part Oats, 1 part dried molasses, 1 part laying hen mixture. I have used buck jam, liquid molasses heated in the oven put in a 2 gallon bucket then hydraulic press for 24hrs buy to crumble apart.......deer will eat in less than 2 days, the commercial blocks last 2-3 weeks

Any thoughts?

 

[yoderjac]

Since there are no studies indicating mineral blocks benefit free ranging deer in any way and there are risks in congregating deer face to face I'd suggest abandoning them, as we have.

Free ranging deer have a widely varied in native foods. Each plant variety mines different minerals in differing amounts. Short of an individual deer having some disease or genetic condition, mineral deficiencies are pretty much unheard of in necropsy studies. All of the studies showing benefits are on penned deer that have an artificially restricted diet.

If you remove salt and sugar from a mineral block, deer won't touch it.

Save your time and money and apply them to other proven beneficial habitat management techniques.

Those are my thoughts...