Hunt Clubs and corn?

Do any of you guys in clubs have rules on corn? I think I have a strong support for corn only in feeders, and none on green fields in mine for next season.

We have a rule of no corn or bait within 100 yds of a green field

Just curious why you dont put out corn near a Greenfield?

Thats where i put mine

All my feeders are in plots. Deer utilize the plot more than the corn every time.

I've never understood why people go to the trouble of planting food plots only to put a feeder in the middle of them and have the deer beat everything around it down to the dirt.......

That's why.

There's a worn circle around the feeder, but the green fields they're in are an acre to acre and a half, so
it's no big deal

Same at our place. If corn is on a feild long enough for the hog to find it they will root up everything. Once the food plot is growing the hogs normally leave them alone.

But why not just cut a lane or something off to the side of the plot?.......Most folks are limited on the amount of acreage they have for growing plots……Like you say, many are only an acre or so, maybe less…..AND most folks spend $100-$200 or more to plant that acre…….Why just mess it up when other options are so easy to set up? …….

We have a rule of no feed on or around fields. Our reasoning is we don’t want to attract hogs to the fields.

You gotta put out more corn than the neighbor club or they will get all the deer.

I wouldn't consider where i hunt a true hunting club just a group of guys who share a lease. But. All of our greenfields have trough style feeders. This is to hopefully prevent hogs from tearing up the fields. we have 2 spreader feeders also but they are located in the woods.

We don’t have hogs but most the corn gets put out in the wood bc they try to hide so no one knows where it’s at… they can’t hide it from the hounds that run the coons

We just do no corn on the fields, but people put feeders up within 75 yards of some of some greenfields. I talked to a guy last year that said they made a rule of no spin cast feeders and only gravity, tube, or ground feeding was allowed. He said their buck sightings tripled when they got rid of the spin cast feeders.

No corn will be out til Dec 4th. Unless you can sneak it in Got to hunt old school.

Now I remember why I HATE hunting clubs.🤦‍♂️

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Club I just joined is corn has to be on a greenfield. Only reason I could understand would be so corn wouldn’t be scattered all over the woods spreading the deer out

We do CLUB feeders only during season, and don't do corn on fields or anywhere close, for 2 reasons, 1.) it lessens the pressure on certain fields, and 2.) opens up other hunting spots away from the fields. It has worked pretty good last couple of years. We are always open to suggestions.

We don't have a field larger than half an acre. What I have observed on the one field that had a corn person supplying it is the deer would come out, eat corn for 5 minutes or so, and then eat greens. No way around the fact deer need green plant material in the winter to offset the hard mast.

I brought a wildlife biologist out this year, and her suggestion was to severely limit human traffic on green fields. If you put corn out on the ground, then you have to go in and add more at minimum weekly. That's additiona pressure on top of hunting pressure, and usually the person puts a camera up as well.

What I have found on spin feeders is it takes a couple years for the bigger bucks to hit them. I just hate feeding coons.

I have a friend who leased a plot a few years ago. They put feeders along their roads and they hang treestands 75-100 yards away from the road on the biggest trails leading to the feeders. They can fill feeders from a truck and they kill big bucks. They stopped doing food plots and just went with these feeders

I actually have a spot I thought about doing that, but the problem is getting to it with the normal prevailing wind.

This ^^^^........This is the best way to hunt a piece of property period in my opinion........Not necessarily just the corn idea but setting all of your hunting spots and feeding spots, etc along the road system and never entering the "woods" for more than retrieving the ones you shoot.....Make as many stands as possible be a simple drop out from the truck right at the foot of the ladder.


I'd still have to do food plots though

Maybe I can do this when they thin some area's next spring. Either that or I need my member with a skid steer and a forestry head to cut some new roads for me!! LOL!!

Put corn on a road on my club and the 3 retired people and 2 self employed people’s would be sitting on it all day. I’ve got my feeders so far back in the woods I need a helicopter to keep them filled but it’s the only place I can put them where other people can’t find them.

I used to hunt with a bunch of old men when I was younger who never got off of the roads and hunted the same old stands, etc……Of course I always had to go as deep as you could and it was the catalyst of one of those little bits of drama that you get in every club……Looking back on it I probably was screwing things up but that’s just how it goes in a hunting club with 25 folks.

I’m glad they legalized baiting but it’s put a whole new wrinkle in hunting for people with >40 hour work weeks. Working folks are just feeding with the hope they can catch a buck roaming. The retired and self employed can feed, run cameras, and then hunt at the exact time they need to be there to kill the deer. They can put a plan together and execute it pretty easily now.

My problem, which we just put a stop to, is putting corn on green fields. Then they put a camera on it, and have to go walk into the greenfield all the time to check the camera and put more corn out. I think next year we are going to require feeders.

That was the first thing the wildlife biologist said we needed to do, minimize traffic on and around them green fields, and move shooting houses and any stands further off them.

I am not burning $11 a bag to feed corn to coons. My feeder should be here tomorrow and I will set it up and see how it does. It has the "shocker" thing around the slinger, so I bet it will be interesting to see how the coons react to that!

Lockjaw -- What kind of feeder did you order? Do you have a site that shows it?

If I were gonna both bait with corn and plant food plots in the same exact spot……I’d still want to separate the two if you’re feeding at any decent clip…….In essence what you are creating on your soil is a mob grazing effect of hooves. Now this may be exactly what someone might want to do of they had a lot of thatch built up on the surface but what I see more often than not is areas around the feeders just beat down to mud and dirt……..Like an area where cows have been fed or something…….

This is just me but here’s an idea for what its worth…….If you’re gonna feed corn around your greenfields then instead of using the concentrated hoofing action to destroy your food plot…….instead, set it just off to the side of the food plot and periodically move it around the perimeter so that you use the concentrated deer hoofing and browsing as a means of resetting succession and creating a buffer of new understory growth around the food plot……In other words, let them beat down and hoof up this little circle for a while and then move it 50-100 yards before it ever gets to that muddy, dirt stage....and let them work on another spot for a while....and so forth…..again around the perimeter of the plot.....

It's a Moultrie Deer Feeder Unlimited. I could only find 1 youtube on it, but it showed a coon getting on it and getting off in a hurry. It's about $189. Then I got the moultrie battery and solar charger, even though the battery is supposed to last a while, I don't want the shocker to not have full juice!! LOL!!

I figure I can add their cage too if this doesn't work.

I like that idea, but it requires overcoming the inherent laziness of your average hunter. They don't get if you want to see deer on green fields, you can't shoot everyone that walks out on it.

I had a cousin that went all out feeding corn when they legalized it and was dumping it out by the damn truck load every weekend or two at least. He had feeders going but then he was also pouring out 200-300 lbs at a time on the ground too around the edges of food plots……I got to noticing that the deer were just wearing out the vegetation around where he was doing that and convinced him to slide over a little each time instead of dumping back on the same spot……You would be amazed at just how much of an area the deer would clean up like goats as the weeks rolled by……Of course when the following spring rolls around then the perimeter of your food plot comes back in some fresh understory growth........

Again, you could use corn and this concentrated hoofing action to your advantage as well on the food plot itself if you have a lot of surface residue or hay on top……In this case some added hoofing action would help …..up until you reached a certain threshold ……This is where understanding concepts really comes in handy.…..Adapt on the fly……What would also work well would be to mix a little clover seed and corn together and broadcast that out over a thatch covered plot……maybe even add a little cereal rye into mix eacg time…….No thatch then move your corn to the perimeter.

What I noticed last season on one field in particular is the deer would come out and eat the corn for about 5 minutes or so, and then eat the green plants in the food plot for a lot longer. The thing you can't get away from in the winter is the deer have to have "greens" of some sort since most all that dies off except for green briar and privit hedge and some honey suckle. They are eating acorns and then the corn, plus woody mast, and they can't digest it without greens. I never ever saw a deer sit on a corn pile and eat for longer than about 5 or 6 minutes. You can make them stay longer if you really scatter it around, where they have to work for it to find it, but then you still end up with Coons on it all night long.

I had a really hot spot last year and I went in and trapped coons off it, and that just added extra traffic, plus me in there killing them. So I think this year I will set some traps in places I don't want to hunt and see if I can catch some. Especially when I had one of my kiddo's with me, because they want to go and either kill it, or watch. Not sure if that spot will be good this year or not, I just put a camera on it over the weekend, along with some persimmon crush. Going to get some rice bran and scatter it around too.

But that would be a good way to get some extra seed in the ground. I have really worked hard this season to get perennial stuff on nearly all the plots. The ones I have camera's on that I established last year have been pounded this year. If those had been pea fields, they would have been bare 3 months ago.

I have a 300 yard 30 foot wide shooting lane between 6 year old planted pines stretching between two food plots which is the best stand on my place..I use my Utv spreader to throw corn on the middle 100 yards.It works really well.When I got the stand set up properly and started doing it 12 deer in one sit was the most I had ever seen in years of hunting my place and I generally averaged seeing 3-4 deer a sit.The last couple of years it has become fairly routine to see that many, my average sighting have over doubled and on good days it gets a lot of fun.only difference is the corn, I had no clue what a difference it made .I screwed up on the biggest buck I have ever seen because I had watched so many does for several hours I got complacent and did not get my rifle on her when she came out because she did not look stressed.She got about 1/2 way across plot, looked behind her ducked down and hauled arse.I just got my rifle up when he comes out, takes about 2 steps, slams on the brakes and wheels around back to woods. I think he realized he was in the open because there is no way he knew I was there.I swear he had an ‘oh crap what have I done’ look on his face.he did not get that size stepping into open fields very often.I learned my lesson and shot my personal best last year from same stand because I had my cross hairs on where two does crossed over 10 minutes after they were gone.this has always been a good stand but the corn makes it something else because it brings the does and they bring him.
I have also noted that while there is a 1.5 ac plot and 3/4 ac plot at this stand not one of the 6 mature bucks killed off it in the last few years were in the plots.They were all either running or crossing the two shooting lanes looking for the does that were eating the corn.

We done the same thing this year. No corn in the woods. only on green fields in feeders. Just trying to cut down on pressure

Like I said earlier all our feeders are on plots. We don’t shoot does on food plots so the deer are really never harassed while at the feeder or the plot. Every year we kill a couple good bucks on or near those same plots. It’s pretty foolproof honestly. But it’s just me and a buddy on a total of 900 acres (2 different leases).

I think the 3 of us on the board could go there if we had a couple of conditions. First, don't set the thing to dispense for very long, maybe 3 or 4 seconds twice a day, and second, we need to approve the field(s) they go on. We thought it would be to much of a push to require feeders only without giving everyone advance notice, which we did.

What we wanted to avoid was all the traffic on the green fields. We have several hunters with kids who haven't shot a deer yet, so the goal is to aid them in being able to do that with their kids. If you want to find a spot out in the woods and put corn on it, and go in there all the time, that is on you. But for one hunter to basically put corn out on 1 field, it tends to become pressure no one else can control. I had a couple spots in the woods last year I was doing that on, and they held deer all year long, but I didn't hunt them very much. I really think that works better if you go in there periodically and drop 5 pounds of corn on the ground and then don't put any out for a week or two. That forces the deer to keep checking for it.

And we had people who would come out later in the afternoon to bait fields and check camera's, which we also put a stop to as well. We basically said absolutely no baiting after dusk and the only time acceptable, unless you were packing it into your stand site was from 10am to 2pm. It is sad that we have to make a rule that strict, but we had a couple guys who were doing this consistently, and they drive as close to the field as they can get, which just bumps deer when there are very active.

BradB, the timber co is supposed to cut a large section of our lease next year, and they have already agreed to give us 2 fields that are about half an acre each. Since they sold acreage that had our largest field on it, they agreed to let us expand a field down along a creek, and we didn't go as big as they said we could, so I am hoping to go the route you did and have a couple of long fields so we can set up for just about any wind direction. And ask for a little bigger than half an acre.

I had a biologist out this spring, and based upon her feedback, we are making some changes, and I hope our guys see the benefits.

Bad idea in my opinion. Those mature does can be just as wary as mature bucks. Last year I moved a feeder on a plot and the deer quit using it regularly. Moved it back (50 yards or so) and they went back to using it daily. I’m ok with losing a 10, diameter circle in a plot. We typically sit ours on the edge or back of the fields anyway so I’m not losing much room at all.

I will start by saying I'm not in a "club" really, just 5 of us that lease some land together and we don't have any written rules. A few years ago when corn was first legal (out of sight, 100 yards away) we set up feeders in the woods just off of plots and had pretty good success in some areas. Once it became legal to put them anywhere we slide them into the plots with less success (probably due to more corn being in the woods everywhere). The problem was that we ended up with a lot of feeders, which meant a lot of corn. This added a lot of additional costs, plus it would take a half a tank of gas and nearly a whole day every couple weeks to fill them up.

This year we decided no "club" feeders. If a person wants to set up a feeder and fill it on their own that's fine, but they can't then "claim" that field for themselves. We do each have a spot or two in the woods that are "claimed", I feel sure those will still have corn.

I think we are trying to find the balance of letting people use bait, and its impact on the club for other members. From what I have seen and heard from other guys who put corn out last year, if you put it on the ground, or even use a bag feeder, you are feeding coons and everything else, and you go through it quickly. If you sent up a feeder with a timer, and set it to go off a few seconds twice a day, then it lasts a lot longer.

We didn't want to discourage people from baiting, but what we did want to discourage is a ton of traffic on a green field because someone wants to bait it all the time.

All my corn I put out last year was in the woods, usually if I took any out and put it on a green field, it was a gallon size freezer bag of it. This will be my first year using a feeder with a timer, so I will be interested to see how it does. I want to train the deer so when they hear it go off, they know its not broadcasting a lot of it, so they need to come get it quick.

Well my feeder showed up today. Put it together, got the battery in it, the solar charger mounted and all the wiring cleanly run and secured with T-REX tape. It comes with enough leg sections to get it about 9 feet off the ground too.... And it says "shock hazard" all over it! Man I need to put a video camera on it and see what happens. LOL!!

Snuffy I think u like our club lol

😁

NWA love them guys 😂😂

I'd work backwards math to find the $ number you are comfortable with as a club adding to the bottom line and see how many Boss Buck 55 gal drum built timed 12v feeders with solar panels + 350lb corn per fill each and how much lb/day you want to feed to last all year (or just deer hunting season, etc). Also Who will fill? Remember more corn lb/day fed equals more fills more $, more labor = More $ per year. (To wit I think I paid 15c /lb for corn in bulk a month a go when I filled up last.)


So thats what the club can provide. From there I would let members do as they pleased with additional corn wherever they pleased with the understanding there are no private spots, its first come first serve, and thats the deal, any rumored crying or bellyaching will be immediately addressed and pends a their removal as an example to others this is meant to be a fun bellyache free environment and weak links will be removed. Now is everyone is happy and you arent dragging yourself into more micromanagement fun police BS as leaseholder/president.. Remember every rule is one more you have to enforce..
Go have fun!

I won't know the $ we take in until the lease is handed over to me. And if I am honest, I would rather bank a little $ so we don't ever struggle to make a lease payment. Then I would upgrade some of the hunting stands and soil test regularly and keep the fields limed and fertilized. Ag lime is cheap, but its not easy to spread, and I don't have any more room in my garage to add a lime drop spreader. Which means pellet lime. Even when I can find it on sale, its still over $3 for 40 pounds. The upside is we did ag lime already, so I could probably do a ton of pellet lime a year and keep everything in the proper PH range.

Last fall, I established 4 perennial plots, in whitetail clover, fusion and Alfa rack. This fall, nearly all 24 will have some sort of perennial crop on them, mainly whitetail clover, fusion and alfra rack, but I did try extreme and edge in a couple spots, and I have one big field where I have Plot spike clover, whitetail clover and durana in sections, so I want to see how they compare and which the deer tend to prefer. Fusion is probably my preferred planting. All 4 of the established plots have heavy use, especially right now while we are waiting on the cereal grains and brassica's to grow. Then fall plantings will be more like come out, fill up the 3pt spreader and run around and broadcast some cereail grains and brassica's and add fertilizer and lime as needed ahead of rain. Shouldn't need to disk anymore.

We are supposed to get a couple more fields next year when they cut timber. They will be half an acre, but I am going to ask for a little bigger. Or else I want to try to get the loggers to cut a north south running road we can plant. That will take a bunch of lime, since all our soil tests came back with PH's in the high 4's to low 5's.

The biologist wants zero human traffic on the green fields, which will take some training. Hopefully we can move towards people letting doe's go on the green fields so we can begin to see bucks on them. As we get these fields going, our carrying capacity should increase and I expect we will see more body mass.

We basically require members to get a bait permit. But I think not allowing corn to be put on a green field creates a safety factor if you don't have one and didn't know someone spread corn out on the green field. But I could see us putting a feeder on a field and making it the "first deer kill honey hole" if you know what I mean. Nothing worse than trying to get a kid into hunting and then go and never see a deer.

Same as above. All of my feeders are located in food plots, broadcast corn daily at 7am and 4pm and we refill feeders every 60 days during season. We do not kill does on plots so the deer aren't pressured near the feeders and every year we kill mature bucks on the plots/feeders. I'm not in a club, but manage/hunt a smaller place and have to be conscious of pressure. Therefore, I do not want the added nonhunting pressure of feeding in the woods.

Don’t get your bag corn at Calera’s Walmart in those $9.48 50 lb bags. They are full of mold. Pouring it into a feeder spits out a greenish cloud of spores.

You gotta put out more corn than the adjoining club or they will kill all your deer. Its a baiting competition or so it seems nowadays. But you gonna attrract hogs.