Just my humble opinion, but I only mow when broad leaf weeds have overpowered my food plots. I do use herbicides (well, now just glyphosate, with a weed wiper), to control grasses and weeds and it suits my purpose.
Put up an exclusion cage and let that be your guide. A deer eats 7 pounds of food a day, of a mixed variety. Let's pretend that you have 10 deer that appear in your 1 acre clover plot daily, and each eat 2 lbs of clover. 2 x 10 x 7 = 140 lbs of food/week come off that plot and if they are in your plots, for 6 months of the year (they are in mine almost all year), that's 3360 lbs of food that they have taken off your plot. That's pretty close to what a good stand of Durana can yield in a season.
To get a real healthy stand of clover, it too must go through it's life cycle. This cycle of budding, blossoming, setting seed, tillering and allowing it to develop mature seeds adds to the longevity of the plant and to the plot. I have 10 year old Durana plots. Why mow repeatedly, when all you are doing is preventing that plant from adding free seed onto the soil surface?
You can have a pretty clover plot with mowing and you can get deer to come to the plot, like they do when you till fresh soil, but I am just offering a different opinion on what I do. Also, some clover do not do well with multiple mowings, like Mammoth red, but most of use use medium red.
What's left of my Crimson, Ladino and medium red clover plots, from last year. We've had lots of rains, so I had to get the weed wiper out last weekend and chase them. The deer find the tender new growth that one of their own ate last week.
) and why "Frost Seeding" was developed, for some northern cattle pasture farmers. Cattle would never let the clover go to seed, and it's longevity was reduced, hence, frost seeding became one solution, for pasture improvement.
