Summer Food Plot Goals

What (if anything) will you plant this summer? How much $$$ will you spend?....On how many acres?

What are your goals for this planting??.....or in other words....What do you hope this planting will accomplish?

Some type of mix with peas or lab lab as the back bone. I only have a 1 1/2-1 3/4 at the house and will spend around $100-120. My goal is to keep more deer frequenting my fields and giving them a little more protein.

Considering corn and/or beans. Probably spend $300. Around 2 ac. My sole goal is to let it stand for fall to keep deer around. I won't be planting enough to affect deer herd health or antler size.

Undecided. Need something fairly inexpensive and the goal would be to keep the deer around the fields. Any suggestions are welcome.

Sunflowers-dove/deer
Soybeans-deer
Corn-deer/turkeys
Sunn hemp-deer
Milo-deer/dove/turkeys

Considering some iron clay Peas....this will be first summer plot....will be between 1.5-2 acres and will spend approximately $160-180 if I calculated correctly....goal is to keep deee frequenting the plot and feel safer by eating there regularly

Our club usually does IC peas in all the food plots. We usually plant 8-10 acres of corn in 3 different spots.

There is a really good thread in QDMA about planting. Even if you don't adhere to the QDMA philosophy, the information is a good read.

http://www.qdma.com/forums/showthread.php?t=67322

These articles were written by a guy with a screen name of Lick Creek. He is now deceased and the people there condensed his information into one sticky. He did a lot of experimenting with different seeds, planted in different ways.
He uses a lot of mixes and Its a lot of information, but some of it is not for my growing zone. But you can adjust it to meet your needs.

I have 4 plantable acres on 120 total. I know we are the only ones planting summer crops for at least 500acre, if not more. I'm still trying to figure out what I need to do for a balance of health/attraction. Right now I've got clover established in 3 acres, but I don't know if I'd be better with something else mixed in.

Iron & clay peas
Sesame
Corn
Maybe Milo

Millet and sunflowers for doves.

IC peas for deer. We won't improve heard health with the little bit we plant but it won't hurt. Hoping to draw a few new deer in and keep them here for early bow season.

Will plant about 10 acres total.

Sun hemp and IC peas in 4 fields about 12 acres. We had good luck with the hemp last year and it stays ahead of the browse.

One acre of RR soybeans in my winter plot.

That will fit nicely with the 4 acres of Alfalfa that is 200 yards from it, in the same field.

I limed the winter plot and the alfalfa again this fall.

For those that want to try alfalfa, go for it. The RR varieties make it easy to grow. Be advised though, if you don't plan on liming early and often, no need to try it. I put one ton of lime per acre this fall. I planted it in the spring of 2013. I have now put 5 tons of lime per acre on the plot starting in the fall of 2012.

Fur, what causes the demand for that quantity of lime? What is your PH? I'm interested in trying my hand at growing some.

Piss poor soil. The soil had a pH of 5 when I started. I'm trying to keep it between 6.5 and 7.0

I didn't test before the last application, I just put some on the alfalfa patch because we were liming the rest of the field. I don't think it's possible to over lime anything on Sand Mountain.

I think I’m going to keep it pretty simple this summer. My main goal is to have the deer just continue to frequent my field during the off-season and have that pattern of use be a routine part of their life. To take that a step farther, a more specific goal is to recruit young bucks to my plot and bedding areas and allow them to grow up with my plot being a central part of their core area and daily life. I’ve learned over the last few years that in order to make happen I can’t let every doe in the neighborhood take up residence on my plot and in my sanctuaries or there will be no vacancies for the dispersing little bucks to stop and make their core area here.

Right now I have what looks like an excellent crop of crimson, yuchi arrowleaf, and durana clover. I’m going to let it grow through the end of May and then I think I may just broadcast some buckwheat and some turnips/radishes into the field….mow it…then let it go the rest of the summer like that. I think if I can provide it with a little shade the durana clover will persist through June and July. I had it grow all summer last year in moist areas. I may try to double crop the buckwheat later in the summer.

My end product will hopefully be a well balanced mix of grass, broadleaf, and legume that will continue to build fertile productive soil as well as keep the deer using the field. The grass will come in later with some encroaching summer crabgrass. I’m not going to be planting full rates of buckwheat so one 50lb bag with be thrown out over my 2 acre field for a rate of 25 lbs/ac along with around 2 lbs/ac of brassica mixed in. Total cost should be around $30-$35 per acre for seed plus however much it costs me to mow two acres. I may end up mixing in 25 lbs/ac of cowpeas as well. If so that will take my seed cost to $50-$60 per acre.

if you have many deer, you better fence the peas or you will be wasting time and money. The only thing I can grow in less than a 3 1/2-4 acre plot is grain sorghum and in some places Sunn hemp

We had a club member a few years ago ask if it was ok to come in and do some summer plantings on his own. He spent hours and hours spraying, disking, cultipacking, and then finally bringing in a drill to drill in around 10-12 acres of plots with all kinds of chit. Planted our biggest 3 acre field in nearly pure soybeans I believe it was. I bet he had more invested in that summer planting than in his membership. It sprouted and looked great after a couple weeks…..a couple weeks after that though it was like……

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJxCdh1Ps48

You might as well have just thrown a stack of $100 dollar bills out the truck window and saved the wear and tear on the tractor. It was all gone within 4-6 weeks after planting and our fields were left with bare eroded soil. The trip a couple weeks after planting was the highest of highs….the trip two weeks after that was a bunch of drooping heads. You live and learn though.

Below is a picture of one of the plots just after planting. Can you see the soil erosion occurring? Any fertility the plot might have is also washing away with that soil when this occurs. In situations like this you will be far better off during the summer to forget about expensive, elaborate plantings of just “deer food” and keep your main focus on improving the soil conditions for your fall plantings. These plantings that just get completely wiped out in short order aren’t accomplishing any substantial goals and are actually setting you back long term from a soil health perspective.

I'm going to try and either fence mine or use some deer stopper on my fields to give them time to produce.

3000 AC - we plan to spend a little over $1000 which is a drop in the bucket compared to what I'd like to do. We currently have about 4-5 acres in Yuchi and Durana clover. We'll keep that sprayed with herbicides and fertilized with triple phosphate and potash. We'll plant about 10 AC in sunn hemp. My last objective is to strip disk thoroughly across 900 AC that recently had a thinning completed in the planted pines. My goals have nothing to do with plot utilization, it's simply to provide the deer with as much available forage as possible.

I would plant something like peas, corn, soybeans or sunflower. Although if you have a good deer population, the crop maybe eaten down before it matures. Something is always better than nothing.

What about "weeds"?.....Is this a viable option for a summer plot??

I have just over 3 acres of plots on my farm. I will have some milo/sunflowers/ew planted for dove. I will also have some buckwheat/sunn hemp/peas planted for the deer. I also have a perrenial white clover plot that i maintain.I have about 3 acres at our club that will be planted with sunn hemp/buckwheat mix. I haven't figured the cost, it is what it is. I'll be liming my club this spring and my farm, this fall.

So surely someone here wants to call me a fool and tell me how this is not an acceptable summer food plot?? Would this not still accomplish the goal of continuous attraction while being much more browse tolerant than stuff like sunflowers or peas?……257 ???……2dogs????

It depends on what those "weeds" are. I hope to promote weed growth across our property that was recently thinned. Some of this ground hasn't seen daylight in 8-10 years. With a little light risking, I hope to see a smorgasbord of weeds. (I am trying to keep them out of my clover plots though).

I will plant about 20 acres of eagle beans and rr corn. We plant to keep the deer on our property throught out the entire year. We try to give them everything they need so they don't have to travel to neighboring properties to get anything. I have noticed a large increase in the numbers of deer we have since we started planting summer food

Did he inoculate the soybeans? That looks like a field we had that we forgot to do a few years ago.

The innoculant shouldn't effect the growth of the beans.

Yep, I'd think there are plenty of good "weeds" out there.

These are not “clover plots” per se. Its a diverse mix of many plant species that include grasses, broadleafs, and legumes. What’s wrong with growing clover and weeds together? If those young tender broadleaf plants in the previous pics with the clover had been radishes or turnips instead of pokeweed then it would have probably been seen as perfectly acceptable. We grow clover alongside of cereal rye as a companion grass specie….Is not alright to grow it along side another type grass specie in the summer in order to give it some shade from the summer heat?

Even though many would see the previous pic as a failed clover plot full of “weeds”….the deer were mowing down the young pokeweed along with ragweed, a little blackberry, and numerous other species that didn’t cost me a dime….. and are much more browse tolerant than things like sunflowers or cowpeas which many just can’t grow. The clover was not planted at full rates in order to form a monoculture of clover. It’s just another browse tolerant plant in the mix that will withstand the browsing pressure of the local deer herd without being completely decimated.

Here is a diverse winter mix of grass, broadleaf and legume that most would be ok with. Is this really that much different than the diverse summer mix in the other pic?

There was about 2 acres out of the 12 that made it through the initial slaughter of the seedlings. I think maybe these plots just didn't have as many deer concentrated close to them as the other fields. They looked awesome for a moment in time.



A couple weeks later though it looked like this and all the fields remained bare the rest of the summer. Seems like these pics may have been in mid to late June.

CNC I feel your pain. Our first year we missed some of the innoculant and had poor results.

The next year cash was tight and we only did a 2.5 acre plot and it was destroyed as soon as beans got about 3 inches tall. If you have a good to high deer density and do a small plot you either have to install an electric fence or use forage beans. The forage beans will continue to put on growth after being nibbled on. A standard soybean will die after getting the top eaten off.

Also the forage beans seem to put out a lot more leaves (which also have the protein) in them than regular beans. But if you plant a large enough plot of regular that they don't get destroyed and they make beans they might still be around in the fall during deer season.

If you understood weed seed banks and what pre-emerge herbicides do and how they work it would help you greatly. I don't tolerate weeds in my fields. You shouldn't either. One day you might decide to grow something different then you're starting behind the 8 ball.

I’ve actually been trying to move away from the use of herbicides. I haven’t used any in over a year on my test plot and plantings have gone well. Instead of herbicide I’m trying to use certain cover crops as “smother crops” while ceasing tillage and not disturbing the seed bank any further.

The picture of the weeds and clover is a different area though. Right now I’m good with accomplishing the goal of just stabilizing the soil in that area and beginning to reverse the damage that I caused through tilling. That’s what has put me farther behind the 8 ball than anything else I’ve done. While this is a severe case, its not really that much different than what is likely occurring in many other people’s tilled fields to a lesser degree. It’s the same thing that occurred in the other field I posted a pic of that had been tilled, cultipacked, and drilled. There was just no one there at the time of the rain event to snap a pic of all the water running off the field. Either field would have been better off to have grown grass, weeds, and clover rather than have them tilled up, eroded, and then left bare. That’s really where I’m at now with this powerline. I’m letting Mother Nature take care of getting me back on track in the first year or two rather than continuing the same process pictured below. Here is the area the last time I tilled it.

Seems like every picture you show of erosion is where you disc in a drainage or on a hill that has a lot of water running across it.

It doesn’t take much slope to make water run when it stops infiltrating the ground. Steeper grades just exacerbate the problem. Even if it doesn't severely wash, heavy rain on bare soil can cause issues. If you’ll watch over time as folks post pics on here of their plots you’ll see soil erosion occurring to varying degrees in a lot of fields. The field below that I showed earlier is not on a major slope. Someone would actually look at this field and probably consider it as having no slope. Yet erosion is still occurring. Crusting of the soil surface is already in process. Look in the rills at the pure sand that is being separated from any clay. All of this diminishes growing conditions.

Here is another example. This isn’t on a major slope or drainage.

Before



After

Do you have any pics of the build up of eroded clay particles?

No I don’t have any further pictures of that field. The pic was actually not taken for the purpose of showing soil erosion….it was taken to show the progress of our fields that summer. The erosion is something I noticed later on.

There’s a test you can perform on your soil to see what % is clay, sand, and silt. Many folks may have done this before. You just put some of your dirt in a graduated cylinder….fill it up with water….and then shake everything up really good. Once that’s completed then you set it down and allow everything to fall out of suspension. What happens is that different particles separate. This is the same thing that’s occurring in these fields that’s causing the pure sand you see on top of the ground. The rain drops are hitting the bare soil surface and blasting tiny soil particles into suspension.

Some folks may find the ribbon test easier.

Really....

Soils do not naturally have the necessary bacteria to allow the soybean plants to absorb the nitrogen.

Click me for inoculate info...

I first discovered my error when telling a the father of a friend who farms about 1800 acres of soybeans every year, what my crappy crop looked like. He laughed at me and the first thing he asked was did I inoculate the seeds?

He also mentioned the inoculate should always be loose and never hard and brick like. If you buy some that is hard it will not work.

I understand what the innoculate does. Maybe it effects soys more than pea's. I plant pea's every year and nobody carries the innoculant, not even the co-op, so i have to plant without it and i have pea's waist high every year. Both are legumes, so i figure they take the same innoculant.

Ok Maybe it is my soil type. My report from ACES shows "Clays of the Blackbelt" Most of my fields have a PH of 6.2-7.8. Lots of limestone in soil. The local seed stores here stock inoculate. That is my only guess...

After re-reading my post I was not trying to be argumentative. I was just offering something I learned the hard way. It really sucks to spend what I spent and have such bad results.

I was hoping my information would save someone else frustration.

If I had the beach sand you got I might be scratching my head too. Idk if you realize it but up here in the Tn valley our soil has structure. It doesn't "erode" after every rain. I'm glad you believe in what you do but folks need to realize it's not a one size fits all method. You let red ground mellow by working it up. This can go 10 pages like always just don't mislead folks. And our ground has WHC also which your sand doesn't that's why it can be an alternative I guess. No tills still just ugly to me.

How am I misleading folks???

I'm sorry for the delayed reply I been deep plowing some ground today. No I said misleading folks because most folks won't have patience nor the realistic goals too many folks just need instant glorification these days

That is Marshall Ryegrass is still one of the top game plots planted.

We use to plant that for years.

I think I’m going to let my tractor remain idle for a little while longer. This warm weather has the clover really poppin. The cereal rye is also starting to take off. Once it gets warm enough it'll take off and bolt. That will likely be my next tractor time on the food plot. Probably knock it back with a mowing when that happens.

I need to mow my cereal rye, but the plots are so wet, that i don't want to compact the soil, so i'll wait a while.