Brett,

I’ve been very pleased with the crops produced on my rocky, very low fertility sites after I applied humified compost.  I get mine from Antler Dirt.  I’ve been pleased with their product and service.  If it will produce 6’ tall forage beans at my place, it would probably turn a desert green!  Humified compost addresses many more characteristics of the soil than just the ph and N, P, and K levels.  It usually cost about the same as adding lime and the appropriate amount of commercial fertilizer, depending on shipping costs.

I encourage you to have patience with the progress of your deer management program.  There are multiple research projects that show bucks produced by malnourished does never express their full potential, ever after five years of growth.  This same trend is true with humans that are malnourished as infants.  So, if you had supper quality food plots the first year of your project, the fawns born that year probably wouldn’t express their potential even as five year old bucks (the mature bucks you may currently be hunting).

For deer to express their full antler growth and body size potential, their parent’s parents would need to have been consuming all the quality forage they desired.  So, if a short deer generation is three years, then two generations are six years.  Then the offspring of that second generation is allowed to mature to five years of age (actually 6 years – 0.5, 1.5, 2.5, 3.5 4.5, and 5.5 years old). It would require 12 years for a property with low quality habitat to produce deer that express their maximum potential.  This is a long-term project!  I’ve spent eight years working on The Proving Grounds.  Each year I have been able to monitor progress in both habitat and deer herd quality.  I’ve enjoyed the process and am really looking forward to seeing what quality of deer will be produced in a few more years!

By the way, the total time to show improvement of deer herd quality when beginning in better quality habitat is much less.

Growing Deer together,

Grant