Simple Food Plot Mix
Filed under: Ask Grant, Food Plots
Can you provide a recipe for the simplest (fewest crops possible) way to provide year round food for deer on my property? I’m in the south and I’m not sure if brassicas would be attractive to deer. My current recipe is corn, soybeans, grains (wheat, rye and oats) and clover.
This is my first year planting corn and it has come up great. I have 20 acres of corn that will be left up for deer until the spring. It appears to be an attractant for deer and other wildlife. My concern with the corn is that it only provides cover after a few months of growth. Until that stage all you have is bare dirt with no cover. That takes up a lot of room on 100 acres. Do deer migrate from surrounding areas to the corn when it provides sufficient cover (i.e. am I maximizing “holding” deer on my property if there is not always a large amount of cover provided in some way)?
Also, this is a touchy subject with most hunters, but it’s common in NC. Would a good alternative be to supplemental feed corn as an attractant (many hunters around me do)? I think corn on the stalk is probably more of an attractant and cheaper. But it takes up valuable space and I’m not sure deer won’t leave when cover is missing on 20 acres while the corn is growing.
Eric
Eric,
I like your current recipe. You will notice that I primarily plant a corn and soybean rotation at The Proving Grounds. Soybeans provide extremely good quality forage for deer and other wildlife during the growing season. Roundup Ready forage soybeans can provide more high quality forage than almost any other crop. Weed control is as easy as it gets when using Round Up Ready varieties. The same is true with Roundup Ready corn. I enjoy growing corn. It is relatively drought resistant and there are gads of varieties for almost every location throughout the whitetail’s range. Clearly a corn/soybean rotation in the Ag belt produces some of the healthiest whitetails anywhere!
I do like to commit a relatively small percentage of my food plot acres to clover. Clover can provide quality forage during two critical time periods. The first is during the early spring before the temperature is warm enough to plant soybeans. The second is after the soybeans have stopped growing in the fall. Most varieties of clover are a bit more cold tolerant than soybeans. When clover is growing during these two periods, it will usually produce a lot of forage. Hence it doesn’t take many acres to provide adequate forage. Wheat is my favorite small grain crop for providing forage during the late season, especially in your area.
Deer and other species of wildlife will readily use standing corn as cover. You are correct that it is not providing forage for many months of the growing season, but it is providing cover. Since corn usually produces at least twice as much grain as soybeans, I usually have at least twice as many acres of soybeans planted as I do corn on properties I manage. I use a soybean-soybean-corn rotation so that a single field is not always corn or soybeans, yet they are both available somewhere on the property. In addition, the ratio of acres planted to each crop should reflect what the deer prefer and the amount of each they consume at your location.
Growing Deer together,
Grant
