Jason Broom
Well-Known Member
Food plots are like a hot fudge sundae, at the end of a satisfying meal. If you clear out one or two small (<1/2 acre) strip plots in that 7 acre field, they would be the desert, but the remaining overgrown area is the actual meal.
The very best thing you can do with that 7 acres is to learn the following things before changing it:
1) How are deer currently using that land? Are they browsing on different plants throughout the year? Are they bedding in there, at times?
2) What all is growing in there? Do some research and try to identify what is good native browse and what is invasive.
3) Research the term "early successional growth" and realize that an ugly, over-grown pasture just might be deer nirvana.
What you have there is, quite likely, an excellent area of growth that can be managed to provide for a multitude of wildlife needs, not just a delicious desert. In addition to being a lot less work and expense, you can create substantially better habitat with the selective use of a saw, hatchet and spray bottle of glyphosate (look up hack-n-squirt) and a good bushhog. Man has this tendency to want to wipe away everything nature grew until he has a blank canvas, then paint a picture that he finds appealing. That is not at all how nature works and it rarely benefits deer, or other wildlife, nearly as much as having a proliferation of diverse plant life growing in balance.
You can bring in a dozer and turn it all into a 7-acre field of man-food, or you can selectively micro-manage what God has already started. It may cost you a lot less time and money, although it will require you to expand your knowledge of what constitutes wildlife habitat, while also learning how to hunt that kind of ground, versus hunting a food plot. Think long and hard before you undo what many of us who have been doing this for years are just now learning to emulate.
The very best thing you can do with that 7 acres is to learn the following things before changing it:
1) How are deer currently using that land? Are they browsing on different plants throughout the year? Are they bedding in there, at times?
2) What all is growing in there? Do some research and try to identify what is good native browse and what is invasive.
3) Research the term "early successional growth" and realize that an ugly, over-grown pasture just might be deer nirvana.
What you have there is, quite likely, an excellent area of growth that can be managed to provide for a multitude of wildlife needs, not just a delicious desert. In addition to being a lot less work and expense, you can create substantially better habitat with the selective use of a saw, hatchet and spray bottle of glyphosate (look up hack-n-squirt) and a good bushhog. Man has this tendency to want to wipe away everything nature grew until he has a blank canvas, then paint a picture that he finds appealing. That is not at all how nature works and it rarely benefits deer, or other wildlife, nearly as much as having a proliferation of diverse plant life growing in balance.
You can bring in a dozer and turn it all into a 7-acre field of man-food, or you can selectively micro-manage what God has already started. It may cost you a lot less time and money, although it will require you to expand your knowledge of what constitutes wildlife habitat, while also learning how to hunt that kind of ground, versus hunting a food plot. Think long and hard before you undo what many of us who have been doing this for years are just now learning to emulate.
