As dry as it is in Marengo Co, I may skip spraying this year. Herbicides don’t work well when plants are not activity growing. Did my first cutting last week before fawns start dropping, and the plots are brown. May just mix a hundred gallons and spot spray where needed.

Yes, I basically just cut the plot out of it and leave the perimeter.

NICE CNC

I HAD a field i was doing that for the past wo seasons and alway seen deer. Killed a decent buck off it last year, but they took that part of land away from us... Still pisses me off..

I assumed the bucks would just stand out of sight and wind the hot does

Yep. Been promoting edges of native cover for years. It’s a death trap for bucks and great escape cover for ground birds too.

Lockjaw- Been thinking the same thing. Been watching a lot of Dr. Grant Wood on Growing Deer TV and he does something similar to what you are talking about. As he explains the details, it begins to make sense. I think the hardest part is getting started and allowing the system to work.

Yes I have emailed with him a little. Really nice guy. He has the benefit of a drill and a crimper. I think if I just had a crimper, it would help alot.

I will say this. The first time I really did what he talked about, he was still doing the Eagle soybeans. But I went in and subsoiled a plot, disked it, and planted it in buckwheat, clay peas and soybeans. I put about 2000 pounds of pellet lime on it and then a couple bags of 0-20-20. It was pretty thick towards the end of August, and I was thinking, I have to be nuts to broadcast this seed and fertilzer in it, but I did it. That field was just amazing.

I think what I need to adjust next time is to get in there and plant the beans/peas earlier. Normally I waited until after turkey season, but I think that is to late, especially when they keep pushing it into May.

The biggest obstacle for me, especially no till and doing clover, is trying to kill the weeds. If it rains enough in the summer where you can mow it, then that helps. But when it doesn't, then the plants go dormant, and that allows weeds to get a foothold. I don't like to cut mine or spray it when the plants are stressed. If it's just one summer, then it usually will bounce back, but 2 summers in a row, like we have had this and last summer, and you about have to start over.

If you just plant in the fall, its not a big deal, but when you want to have year round food, weeds are the battle. And on my lease, rocks. I prefer to mow with my flail mower, but.. rocks seem to grow like weeds too, and flail hammers aren't cheap.

As a former GrowingDeer intern who spent an entire summer at the “proving grounds”, I can tell you first hand that there is a lot more to that whole operation than meets the eye.

In theory, the crimper is a great idea, but in uneven food plots with a lot of variables, it’s not practical or effective. Despite what he showed on video, he was still spraying the vast majority of his plots with Glyphosate both to terminate and to control weeds. His blends were skewed heavily towards soil health and made his plots unusable to turkeys in the spring and much less attractive to deer in the winter. No till is definitely the way to go, just in a much different way. Growing Deer is food plot oriented when it should be habitat oriented. In a world of food plotters, be a habitat manager.

Relative to the amount of acres and capital input he has in that place, he’s not even scratching the potential of what a better wildlife manager/property designer could do with the same resources. Not even close.

What he has going for himself is production quality. He has a really good team working on his YouTube videos and it gives a good impression of what is otherwise mediocre. Don’t get caught up in the production quality and product pushing. People are not always the same in person as what they portray on video and he is perhaps the strongest example I’ve ever witnessed of that fact. Probably what I learned most there was how not to do some things. Essentially every person who has shared in that experience with me or one similar would whole heartedly agree.

I don’t want to sound arrogant or bitter, but this is the harsh reality.

As a former GrowingDeer intern who spent an entire summer at the “proving grounds”, I can tell you that there is a lot more to that whole operation than meets the eye.

In theory, the crimper is a great idea, but in uneven food plots with a lot of variables, it’s not practical or effective. Despite what he showed on video, he was still spraying the vast majority of his plots with Glyphosate both to terminate and to control weeds. His blends were skewed heavily towards soil health and made his plots unusable to turkeys in the spring and much less attractive to deer in the winter. No till is definitely the way to go, just in a much different way. Growing Deer is food plot oriented when it should be habitat oriented. In a world of food plotters, be a habitat manager.

Relative to the amount of acres and capital input he has in that place, he’s not even scratching the potential of what a better wildlife manager/property designer could do with the same resources. Not even close.

What he has going for himself is production quality. He has a really good team working on his YouTube videos and it gives a good impression of what is otherwise mediocre. Don’t get caught up in the production quality and product pushing. People are not always the same in person as what they portray on video and he is perhaps the strongest example I’ve ever witnessed of that fact. Probably what I learned most there was how not to do some things. Essentially every person who has shared in that experience or one similar would whole heartedly agree.

I don’t want to sound arrogant or bitter, but this is the harsh reality.

Thank you that is helpful information. My lease is timber co, so we are limited on plot size and placement, and what we can cut down. So my focus has been on having year round food, which is why I like the clover so much. But I have come to the conclusion that I can't plant it on every plot and expect it to thrive, so I will end up with a bean/pea/sunn hemp or buckwheat mix on some of the plots. Which is fine.