You have all the equipment you need. I’ve tried a few different techniques in different parts of my farm, and they’ve all been successful. My first attempts involved significantly more plantings, primarily shrubs from MDC nursery and some forb/pollinator type seed blends (mostly from RoundStone seed). At my place, deer do seem to love bedding amongst my plum thickets that I planted. Planting is a blast, but it’s also time consuming and incurs an obvious cost.
I had to move away from my farm for work a couple years ago, and time became my limiting factor. My last few field conversions have been much simpler, cheaper, and honestly the results are just as favorable.
I converted two fields that were primarily tall fescue a few years ago. I’ll use them as my example. First, I had them cut and baled in late summer (a neighbor did it for me, he was happy for the free hay). That helped remove a significant bulk of material and prevented the thatch layer you’d get from just mowing. I waited until the fescue rebounded and was about 6-9 inches tall. I sprayed it all with 2qt/acre of glyphosate. That killed about 80% of the fescue. By the third week in September I was seeing the fescue try to come back, maybe 30-40% coverage. So I sprayed it again. That knocked it back to less than 5% coverage. I then just let nature and the seed bank take its course.
By the next spring I had a nice stand of native annuals with a few unwanted invasives. I went through the fields after turkey season and spot sprayed what I didn’t like from my UTV; it only took a couple hours. Later that summer I did another spot spraying, but there were significantly less unwanted plants that time around. Deer not only bedded in the waist high growth that fall, but they had an amazing summer plot with a lot of pokeweed and ragweed to feed on. My dad claims it was our best summer food plot to date.
The following year I had significantly more perennials showing up, and I started getting some early successional woody stems (like blackberry) showing up. The deer again fed in there all summer, and we noticed even more bedding activity that fall.
Year 3 it started to get more sumac species and some small trees like sassafras and some young oaks. The summer food was still abundant, and we saw an increase in buck utilization that fall.
We are going to burn 1/2 of each of those fields in a few weeks of weather conditions allow. The following year we’ll burn the other half. Then we’ll repeat the process again.
I’m no expert, but a lot of guys on here are. I’ve learned a ton reading their stories and advice. I would advocate trying something similar to what I described. If you’re not getting the structure or plant composition that you like, you can always go in and plant some native shrubs like plum, arrowwood vibernum, dogwoods, etc. But you may not need to.
