If you are just managing for deer - wheat and clover will do it - provided there is no late summer drought - like we usually have. My clover rarely makes it through the summer. Thus, I plant eagle seed soybeans that provide a food source from May to February. Also shoot doves off them in Dec and Jan. And now that we are speaking of doves, I also plant ten acres of sunflowers and two acres of millet to hold them until the sunflowers are ready. And now that we are on millet, I plant 15 acres of millet for the ducks.
Pearl millet, an excellent soil builder, bird food and deer cover planting! As for clover, you are further south than us, so your problem is that your clover doesn't survive the summer, further north our problem is that clover doesn't feed our deer over the winter. Since this is a soybean thread I just wanted to give soybeans a bit of a shout out here. Our clover is frozen to nothing by mid-December, but with an average sized deer herd, our three acres of ag beans should keep the deer fed most of this winter. In my world the perfect "one field single source" food plot is a six acre field with three acres of Lick Creek style plantings and three acres of beans. This year we have wheat, rye, oats, corn, turnips, radishes, chicory, rape, and a half a dozen other things planted in some other fields, but it's our soybeans in the other half of the LC field that impressed me the most, they are simply unbelievable for deer food. Clover is the backbone of our program, but soybeans run a close second, with the deer hitting them hard all summer, a gap in the fall when the leaves turn yellow, and then feeding on the pods in midwinter when the only other food plot species surviving the snow in zone 6B is corn, turnips and rye, none of which provides much deer food value in midsummer like beans do. Here's an idea of what our major source of planted plots are that we have for our deer by month in a perfect world weather-wise: January& February; soybean pods, March& April; wheat, rye, May& June; clover, July& August; soybean forage, September& October; clover& acorns, November& December; clover, brassica. There's overlaps of course, plus other assorted plantings, fruit and nuts, and natural browse in the woods that are important parts of a whitetails diet as well. But according to our cameras, sightings, and tracks in the snow, our deer do the majority of their feeding in our fields, and soybeans fill those two important midsummer and midwinter slots better than anything else that I've found thus far. The amazing thing with the RR ag beans that we plant is that the deer eat the top leaves bare, leaving only understory leaves in midsummer, until there's nothing but stems sticking up on top, but the plants still produce a bumper crop of beans. Here's a pic of our beans today, the deer are hitting them hard every night. The back third of the field is stripped to nothing by now.
