I must have missed a few responses. I didn’t notice this one or Blum’s…

The point of that was not about sweetgum and pine feeding deer…..it was to illustrate how nature would get rid of the sicklepod permanently without you doing anything at all. Yet our “solution” of spraying only eliminates it temporarily and then we have to deal with it or another pioneer specie again. It’s something in the natural progression of the soil conditions that eliminates the sicklepod. You can still grow beneficial plants for the deer but the soil conditions need to progress out of the pioneer stage or nature will just continue to put out those types of plants…..Its natures attempt to repair the soil.

Blum……I think there are unintended consequences of spraying chemicals that we don’t have a full understanding of yet. The soil food web is a big chain with all the links tied together. You start eliminating some of the links and other links fall as well. There’s a very good chapter in the One Straw Revolution that describes a series of events just like this. We may not be aware of what its effecting but I would just about guarantee that chemicals impact some form of microbes, etc…