A Lil’ Tractor Time

That’s relaxing. Spent a few hours myself yesterday. Looking good on your property.

Thanks!.......I ran a turkey hen out of my bigger field. I mowed everything but that one strip down the center and had gone back to the house for no more than about 10 minutes.....When I came riding back up she shot out of that strip like she sprouted up out of the ground. I looked and looked and never could find a nest. That area was pretty thick in seeded out cereal rye and crimson clover


I think I may try planting it like this later this fall with the strips that are currently mowed being my fall blend areas......maybe widen them out a touch more.....I'm hoping the strips left standing will give some white clover semi-shade like you see beginning to happen in the first picture

Ouch!......That sucks. I was just looking in the wrong spot. I knew that hen had a nest somewhere in there. On the positive side though, if hens are nesting in the middle of your food plot then you must be doing something right. She was nesting in one of the thickest areas of cereal rye, clover, and new DF growth. My middle finger is pointing directly at where she was actually sitting about a foot in front of my hand... right in the middle of the semi circle shaped group of green cut DF stems. I think she got right up in amongst that little cluster for shelter. Maybe next year I'll wait a few more weeks and do this mowing in mid June.......or is this hen still nesting kind of an extreme outlier?

Here’s a closer look at the area the hen was choosing to nest in…….



If you think in terms of managing a pond for “structure” then you can see the same concept playing out here….and why the hen nested where she did in the cover of one of the DF clumps.....very same concept as your NWSG's that grow in clumps. The more I think about it the more I feel certain that I’ll wait until mid to late June next year to mow, if I mow at all. The purpose of the mowing was to thin out and set back the dog fennel some so that it would 1) allow more room for diversity to come in……and 2) make it more manageable and easier to plant into come fall….instead of being 7ft+ tall like the screens and perimeter......On a side note....Notice the amount of biomass I'm putting down and recycling via "hay"

Same spot a few weeks ago......There's a good bit of clover in that hay.....

How much and do you own CNC

I own 25 and hunt another 250,000 that surrounds it.

Cool man

Let me add one more thing to why I think the hen nested there……..Along with the good cover, I think she recognized the abundance of food in the field that would have provided her chicks a place to feed once they hatched without having to go anywhere.

GOOD STUFF!

Got at least 3 hawks and 2 buzzards swarming my field now.......The mowing definitely stirred the critters up and drew them in.

Sunlight, Water, Good Soil Practices……….Massive forage and biomass production……..massive carbon recycling…….Just need a “herd” of buffalo to recycle it for me……done let her get a lil’ thick. This is the top end of a watershed finger

Here’s a really important concept to understand……..If you back up a couple posts and look at the pic sequence that I said was “the top end of a watershed finger” and had gotten a lil’ thick…….the pics below are that same exact spots several years ago. For reference, the tree you see in the center of the first pic above to the right of the powerline is the same tree that's to Otis's left in the first pic of this sequence below. All of this water was flowing off of the neighboring farmer’s field…..The water was rushing right through my property though and not being utilized…….I thinned out the overstory and started recycling the understory vegetation……This changed the topsoil structure to be more porous as well as providing mass amounts of vegetation to slow the water down and hold the soil together……I basically created a backstop to catch this water runoff and absorb it into the ground. The result is that you no longer see this massive water flow running through this bottom now and the water that falls on this section of the watershed is being utilized to grow understory vegetation instead of just running on down the watershed. Being able to catch that silt and topsoil sorta recreated an alluvial flood plain scenario too and probably why that very top end of the finger is like a jungle now several years later. Part of managing land and a very important part of it.....revolves around managing water.

Water Management Continued…………

Here is the next watershed finger over and an example in my opinion of poor watershed management and indicative of what you see all over the area. The overstory and midstory have been allowed to dominate and COMPLETELY shade out the understory……When this happens it not only eliminates the understory vegetation….but it also effects the water cycle. Massive amounts of water and silt flow straight through this bottom during flash flood events. This entire bottom will flood for a few hours a couple times a year. It'll take the leaves and all with it and leave nothing but a floor of sand/silt across the bottom.



That process could be changed though through eliminating the privet midstory and thinning out some of the trash from the overstory…..which would allow a vibrant plant community to reestablish. You can see this beginning to happen on the left where I have done some H&S on the privet. The problem is that we’re not actually managing our “Stream Management Zones”………We’re mostly just cutting them out of the “management” areas and not doing anything to them.

I think your self diagnosing the other day was very correct.

Yeah, I feel quite certain about it......I'd say there's like a 95% confidence interval.

I just realized there are more weeds in the ditch by the roadside than their are in your plot CNC.

You gotta be pissed about that.

Here again is the watershed finger that I’ve gotten mostly restored barring a few more H&S tweaks……This is about 300 yards “downstream” from the first set of pics……The fairly straight line of trees in the back is where it starts forming the first parts of a gulley or ditch…..You can see the major difference in understory vegetation growth that comes from managing this watershed finger in a different manner. What’s not so easy to see is the impact it has on ground water retention……

Another thing that probably goes unnoticed is how the massive amounts of silt that have moved through these two watershed fingers over the years has silted in the beaver swamp that it flows into and now beavers no longer inhabit that area like they did when I first moved here…….which has also virtually eliminated the wood ducks that use to fly in……..”See” all the variables………the forest and the trees as they say.

The good thing about weeds is you don't have to do anything and they are free.

Pretty awesome thing. Thanks Baby Jesus.

There’s a lot of ragweed coming in now which suits me fine……… I’ve done a lot of edge feathering and understory work that provides chit tons of diverse food. This is what is encroaching into my plot more and more now.

The idea that you "don't have to do anything" is not true anymore........You still have to manage the land correctly to produce a vibrant native understory like in my pics........

So now here is the end result of the watershed management discussion……Something that I should have added earlier is that the water flow in the other watershed finger that is still in poor condition is coming off of a good sized cow pasture "upstream" that is overgrazed and constantly full of cow patties….Along with the massive amounts of silt flowing through the watershed is likely high loads of N washing out of the pasture……..

As a result of the years of erosion and silting in...this is what is now left of what used to be a massive beaver pond when I first moved here. There was actually two different ponds. An upper one you see here and a lower one down to the right…..It had a beaver hut as big as my living room dang near it. I used to sit in the evenings and see skads of wood ducks flying over going to this hole……Saw a snapping turtle one time that lived in it that had feet the size of my fists……That’s all gone now and no one will understand why when they ask “Where did all the wood ducks go??”……”Why don’t we have this or that??”……..”I sure like the way that eroded dirt smells in the morning though!!!!”……

Shew buddy…….

Let me add this......Some of this is right along the property line with my neighbors......so there's only so much impact that I can have on the situation and much of it is too little too late at this point I believe anyways. I'm just trying to use it as an example to show that our management practices do have consequences even if we can't "see" them sometimes.....We as a society of outdoorsman and folks who are supposed to be caretakers of the land are mostly blind to soil management issues.

These watershed fingers are supposed to serve as water filtration systems using the lush understory to slow down and infiltrate the water into the ground……The beaver swamps are supposed to serve as small natural “dam and lake” systems along the watersheds as well…..We have completely changed the way many of these natural watersheds function……We’ve eliminated the understories and filled the watersheds with silt and nutrient runoff due to our land management practices both with agricultural practices and pasture management practices…….Where are the animals????...........Well, where is the habitat??.......Bye-bye watershed understory…….Bye-bye water source…….bye-bye riparian ecosystem………You know “WATER” is a big component to life.

I disced today after years due to the amount of thatch layer I had. I think I’m gonna change up my approach but if you aren’t moving forward you are falling behind.

If you're having an issue with residue buildup then it's likely that you need more N in the system.......or your microbial community is not very active......Another important thing is to canopy over the "hay" in the summer time with vegetation so that it creates a greenhouse effect underneath......This rapidly speeds up decomposition. Once you get the field in the proper condition then biomass will disappear efficiently.....C/N balance is a big part of that,,,,,,If you have to run a disk over the top of the field to help the process then there's nothing at all wrong with that.....It's just about the understanding of why

I’ve said this dozens of times in the past but I’ll say it again……Many of you would be far better off to spend your money this summer on periodic applications of nitrogen and lime instead of trying to grow cowpeas and sunflowers, etc……You will be farther along 5 years from now instead of still trying to get started.

The problem for many folks is gonna be “scale” and its hard to get around that issue when you’re dealing with a 1 acre plot and even a medium deer density……In order for these concepts to work then certain things need to happen no matter what plants you choose to use…..You have to be able to canopy over the surface biomass you just put down and you have to be able to grow enough biomass with the current “crop” you’re growing to feed the animals and feed the soil…..When you go out and kill off all of the native vegetation and try to grow ice cream crops in their place on small plots…….then it typically just gets wiped out and these critical processes cant take place……There is no vegetation to canopy over the biomass you just put down so it just sits there for the summer and goes stagnant……and there is very little new vegetative growth above ground and below happening with the current cycle. You have to grow plants capable of getting the job done and the smaller the scale you work on, the more limited you’ll be with your options…..Now step things up in scale and we can talk about a whole different game plan of rotating lots of acres of ice cream crops and you’re talking about some real high end management that’s very possible……but you have to keep perspective on why that’s possible……It’s a matter of scale. You have to design your plan according to scale or you will be beating your head against the wall trying to accomplish things you see others doing that isnt possible for you....

More on the canopy effect…..

You know how during the summer we have some days where the air temp is high and the humidity is just maxed out and it feels like you’re walking around in a bowl of soup???......That’s how the air needs to be just above the soil surface in your field for as many days this summer as possible in order to efficiently decompose a big crop of cereal grain biomass in a timely manner. The way that you create these conditions on a constant basis is through proper C:N balance and by getting a thick roof of vegetation covering over that hay biomass. This shields it from the sun and keeps it in a nice, moist state for long periods of time like if it were in a greenhouse. It allows those perfect conditions for decomposition to occur and allows the soil fungi and bacteria an opportunity to effectively do their job. If you don’t get it well covered over with vegetation then it just bakes in the sun.

You might say “Well, I’m gonna add some milorgranite and keep the deer off my peas for a while”……but if a few weeks go by and the deer come back and wipe out all of the vegetation anyways and expose your hay to the sun again then you’re not much better off in the long run……you’ve just hit the shutdown button on your soil factory that does the processing work of decomposition….… Once that biomass is canopied over then you don’t want to see the surface again until you’re ready to transition to your fall crop....... at which time it should be decomposed and gone and ready to put down the summer biomass you just grew……rotation after rotation after rotation…….recycling biomass crop after biomass crop after biomass crop……..summer, fall, spring……..summer, fall, spring.

If scale wont allow you to accomplish these critical tasks then you will not be moving forward and progressing.

Here in the southeast, especially in areas like central and south Alabama…..we have a climate very similar to a tropical rain forest…..We should be able to grow and recycle a virtual jungle of vegetation back to the soil…..and each time we do so in an effective manner…….a more vibrant flush of growth emerges as the soil fertility increases. I have been doing it via tractor implements but doing so with a herd of “grazers” I believe would take it to another level. If you look where Lu-lu is standing you can see the canopy effect happening naturally covering the winter ryegrass that came back in when I opened this area up.



The deer seem to like it………..

So we just got hit with about a 45 minute torrential downpour……heavy rain……As soon as it was over I ran out and snapped a few pics to illustrate the watershed concept again showing the difference that the dense understory makes now…….Here is the water rushing onto my place….Look at the underground cable marker and you can see that there’s a lot of water passing through here……..



This is just on the other side of that culvert where its running to………



And this is the "water filter" that I’ve been showing pics of in many of the previous posts that extends for several hundred yards down the watershed…..This pic is literally 100 yards from where the heavy water flow pics were taken above and you can already see how the understory veg is slowing down and sucking up the water…..Does it get it all??......No, but its not supposed to……It’s supposed to slow the water down, allow as much to infiltrate as possible, and hold the topsoil intact in the process.....which is probably the most important thing long term…….How much extra water I’m I absorbing into the soil on my property as the water passes through by managing the understory this way versus if there were zero understory present??? I'm guessing its pretty significant…….It's important to understand concepts. All of this is over with and done in just a short period of time.....These are the type events that most folks dont get to see happen after they leave their hunting property

So what are the results in terms of bucks killed? I mean that’s why we do the things we do. What has the changes you made resulted in?

Nothing. No-thing

I have to give it to CNC. I’ve never known anyone so passionate about growing weeds that most everyone else is trying to get rid of. It takes all kind to make this world go around.

I appreciate that Marsh……..but saying that everyone else is trying to get rid of them is not true. There are days in the spring when the sky is so thick with smoke around here that you cant see the sun for it. People aren’t just doing that because they like the smell of smoke……They are burning to promote the growth of native understory vegetation. Why? Because it’s the foundation block for supporting wildlife populations. The highest deer density properties I go to are nothing but a sea of understory vegetation….thousands of contiguous acres of plants y’all like to call “weeds”.

I see a way that I believe would allow you to produce a much more prolific understory than what is even being done now by using different management practices that focus on rotationally recycling the carbon back to the soil. The soil is, after all, the foundation block for the vegetation we're trying to produce. So it makes sense if we first and foremost try to manage it as productively as possible. Many folks are already using these methods to manage land around the world in this manner. What only a handful have done so far, that I’m aware of, is to use these methods to manage a hunting operation. I believe there is the potential for some of these hunting “plantations” as well as other landowners to manage their operations more profitably and productively by using cattle or other grazers as their tool for setting back succession of the understory……Maximizing the return that the land is capable of producing. Right now people don’t combine the uses like the potential exists for. Not only would you be adding the income produced from the cattle and/or other grazers, but I also firmly believe that you would increase the productivity of the wildlife if managed correctly. I've got a small test area built here that I'm now ready to rotate a few cows or sheep around on if I want to. I'd like to see it done on a much larger scale though. I think the results would be pretty awesome to see.

Fungi…….. Very important in the decomposition process and the recycling of biomass….. Do you notice what type plant is helping to promote their populations?? It's the very woody stuff.....

I go to a lot of properties that are managed with fire and I can see with my own eyes the differences in productivity and diversity of the understory plants in comparison to what I'm doing and I’m not even getting the fertilization boost that would come from the manure and urine of a grazing herd. I also feel quite certain that I see where folks are even hurting their situation by using fire too frequently and with too much intensity……They are degrading the topsoil over time and in turn degrading the microbial and plant communities that are able to be produced from it. It results in a less diverse and a less productive understory long term. I think fire should still be kept in the tool box and used but we might want to reexamine some of the impacts we have using it…..All situations are not the same and soil management impacts should be a consideration...especially when talking about the impacts on soil carbon levels

On that note, in addition to better soil building practices long term in comparison to using fire…..here is another way in which managing the understory with grazers would have a more beneficial impact on the deer and other wildlife in my opinion……When folks typically burn in the spring it’s a one time affair that sets back succession and produces one new flush of growth in the spring. In comparison though, a holistic grazing approach to setting back succession moves the grazing herd from new paddock to new paddock once or twice a week. The result of this is that all summer long you have paddocks that are producing new flushes of growth in a bunch of various stages……This then allows the wildlife to come in behind the grazing herd and “pick and choose” and feed off of the best parts of the new flushes of fertilized growing plants ……and if the animals are able to feed off a continual supply of new flushes of growth and very high energy growing tips……then you produce a better end product with the animal….both cattle and deer.

Marsh…….the much bigger picture of things with these holistic grazing ideas (or whatever name you want to give it) is that if someone were to take and implement these grazing practices on a big piece of recreational hunting property for the purposes of being used a tool for managing succession…..Then it could change our overall perception of what “raising cows” has to look like……And if that were to start happening then there’s a WHOLE LOT of cow pasture that could be turned back into productive wildlife habitat over the course of the next few decades….or at least start a trend in that direction…..which would have far reaching impacts. I believe there is very real potential for this to happen.

So now circling back around to question on producing bucks…….Recent research has shown that the nutrient quality of any individual plant is the same whether we test that plant in Iowa or South Carolina. The type soil it is being grown in has no impact on it’s nutrient content and therefore no impact on antler development or other herd characteristics….In other words, a ragweed plant in Alabama or South Carolina is the same ragweed plant in Iowa regardless of the soil……The difference though and the reason for these areas producing more “big bucks”……is their soil’s ability to grow high quality forage in much more abundance…….So therefore, that research also translates into meaning that if we can manage our own land here in Alabama to produce a higher abundance of high quality forage……then we also have the potential to grow better deer…..and the manner in which we manage the soil has major impacts on the abundance as well as the type of forage (which species) that are available. .....

So we went from tractor time to this???

Now if you’re still following along with that then imagine that were not only providing the wildlife with an abundance of high quality forage…..but by managing in a way to produce constant new flushes of growth…….you’re providing the wildlife with a steady supply of the most high energy part of these plants as well as various stages that they themselves can pick and choose from.

……AND….……..if you want to talk about managing for truly top end type chit…….then you can still incorporate large scale “Ag” into the mix…… I know of several properties that would be prime for doing just this type thing…….one which is within the black belt soil region and has a couple hundred acres of ag land within a couple thousand acre recreational hunting property. I believe properties like this have the potential to be something sho nuff special above what they are now. I think they could produce 170”-200” deer with consistency. I see what is being produced now because I track these places.

The thing that makes that ag land so special is crops. Not weeds

I’m still trying to wrap my head around why anyone would want to do away with a place that held wood ducks? That obviously meant there was food and water there for ducks...and deer?

It wasnt on purpose......It was the unintended consequences of the management practices that were happening "upstream" in the watershed that caused the beaver pond to silt in over time

🤦🏿🤦🏿🤦🏿🤦🏿🤦🏿

Privet hedge actually played a large role in this process……The watershed area we’re talking about here is shaped like the letter “F” with two hollers feeding into a main bottom where the beaver pond used to be. All of the fingers have been taken over by privet hedge in the past which is pretty common around here now. When that happens though the privet eventually forms a monoculture in the midstory and it, along with some other trash trees completely shades out the understory vegetation…….There’s no vegetation then on the soil surface to slow down the flow of water and hold the topsoil together. Water rushes down the bottoms in a flash flooding type manner with the force of the water carrying loads of silt with it that eventually fall out of suspension once it hits the beaver pond and slows down. Look back in my original pics toward the bottom of page 1 posted on 6/1 at the chocolate color of the water and you’ll see the sediment in suspension. There’s more than just one factor that caused the end result of the silting in process.

Again, this is just being shown as an example of the things we are all doing to the land…..I’m not mad at anyone or pointing fingers……….We all as a society could do a better job of being the “caretakers of the land”…..

But to compound this flash flood process that’s taking place in the watershed……At the top end of the first finger you had a farmer repeatedly turning the soil over on a large field annually......and at the top end of the other finger you have an old black man running way too many cows on too few acres without ever having any rest……..Both of these situations result in poor water infiltration and excess runoff across a good little swath of land that is feeding these water sheds during rain events…..A lot of that water that is flashing flooding the bottoms should be getting absorbed by the land but instead it runs off and makes the situation worse….Several factors lead to compounding the issue.

Thinking more about how the natural watershed systems were designed to function……I think one of the beaver’s role in nature is to help keep the midstory of these watersheds thinned out so that native understory species don’t get shaded out by woody growth. That’s pretty much what they spend their life doing is “thinning” up and down the watershed. I picture our watersheds looking much different before we really started tampering with it and they functioned in a much different manner. Can you imagine how many beaver lakes/ponds there likely were along all of the watershed fingers back when we first discovered America? I would guess that it encompassed most ALL of the watershed fingers and formed a gigantic interconnected system of small ponds and damns…..Think about how much that would change the water runoff across the landscape compared to what we have now when heavy rains occur…. We’ve drastically altered the functioning in comparison. Most of the upper ends of our watersheds are full of privet now with little to no native understory species.....I think if we could restore as many of them back to what they once looked like it would have a pretty significant impact on wildlife in those areas…..Most of our small scale watershed fingers are just sitting there now not being managed at all anyways…….yet labeled as “Stream Management Zones”…….

Looks like I may have just a smidge of volunteer crimson sprouting........


The whole field is covered in it actually.....it'll be interesting to see how long it makes it.

It won’t make it past a good hot spell. My place is covered in it too.

Yep, I was afraid that would be the case.........

All kinds of critters hanging around my field .....First one of these I've seen in a while......I believe my lab could sniff out a mole turd.......

So take this with a little perspective and not as if its ALL or NOTHING……..But when I look at nature and the way our overall ecosystem is designed to function here in our part of the world……the beaver is a key specie to making all of that function the way it was designed. I don’t see why we are forming such a negative association with them…..It looks like we would mold our way of doing things around them a little more instead of trying to eradicate them so we can force our way upon the land. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone needs to let beavers take over their place……we can still bring in the same concepts and designs…….like thinning the trash out of the watersheds using H&S …or building small duck ponds along the watersheds.....…although if it were my place and it was a recreational hunting property…….I’d want beavers to inhabit as much of my watershed as they wanted to. It’s preforming a number of functions that makes the whole ecosystem around it thrive better. I think I could find a way to incorporate low water crossings or other solutions than to exterminate the beavers……I tromp across a lot of miles of habitat during hunting season looking for deer and without fail beaver swamps are THE most infested areas for buck sign.

We get too narrowly focused sometimes on trying to manage for just one specie (deer) that we forget that they exist within a much bigger design…..There’s a lot more links in the chain to building a complete “home” or ecosystem to which the deer lives within. If we want things to truly thrive then we have to manage for the whole picture and then pull out that one specie from it that we may want to micromanage a little more intensely. You still need to “paint the rest of the picture” around it though. THAT is where I believe you have the potential of producing the best results.

At the end of the day we are first and foremost soil and forage managers..........

When I say that beaver swamps serve numerous functions above just helping landscape scale water function…..here’s another example probably not thought of very often……They serve as key strategic defense locations for deer to escape from predators like dogs or coyotes……They’re deer and wildlife magnets on many levels. This is a completely different swamp where I tracked for some folks

Got a call to check out beaver activity on a tract where they have flooded a couple of low water crossings and had another hunting club with a flooded low water crossing that limited their access to a good portion of the leased property. Most of the issues I've dealt with involved a road crossing, either a culvert or low water crossing. A few instances where they inhabited someone's fish pond, which has it's own share of problems, but more often than not it's a problem with a road.

I agree with you that road issues are one of the bigger problems. I’m sure each situation would need to be looked at in its own way but I would think we could collectively come up with better ways of adapting to the situation than to eliminate from our properties one of the key species to the whole ecosystem we're trying to promote. The more we eliminate these things just because we want culverts, etc……the more we move away from the original design and how things like our watersheds are suppose to function. I would first look to see if I could re-engineer the road to cross at another point or maybe put a little more into a low water crossing and beef it up more……Something other than fighting to control an animals population that is trying to help me manage the water flow and understory vegetation in my watersheds and promote more wildlife.

On the idea of reclaiming SMZ's and dealing with privet..........You can skip to the 8:30 mark for the "After" once you see what the before looks like....This area is basically just like one of our SMZ's with a small creek branch down the center.......The after may look kinda rough to many in this video but its the ensuing flush of new understory growth that would follow that would be the desirable outcome. It would also make it a whole lot easier to then come in with some H&S treatments if needed to thin out some of the bigger woody trash

It's kind of a slow video but a lot of good concepts talked about including the beavers.....as well as possible options for helping restore areas of land.......Pretty cool story also about the old timers hand fishing the creek on this place toward the end of the video

Here's the results..........This is how clover was meant to be grown.......

So its been a couple of weeks now since I mowed.......You can see all of the tender young poke weeds and other plants coming back in a new flush.....These are the same general concepts as in the videos and such above.....just implemented in a different way. Using animals like cattle, goats, and sheep to set back succession you would have whole paddocks coming back in a flush of new growth rather than strips like where I've mowed. Imagine if we scaled this up and were doing it in 10-20 acre strips where you moved in 3-4 day increments.......

A really important principle to understand with that last picture is what happens after a plant has been bushhogged or grazed in that manner. It responds by using stored energy reserves in its roots to put back out a new flush of foliage……However, a plant can’t continue to do this over and over again without a recovery period because it has to replenish those energy reserves through photosynthesis first…….And in order to do that it needs leaf area and time. This is why you don’t want to heavily mow or graze the same area continuously without rest. You’ll change the whole dynamics of the plant and soil community by doing so.

This area has been “mobbed” by the deer……It’s near a mineral lick and concentrates their activity. I’m actually not too far away from a natural balance of the deer setting back a lot of the succession just like goats would. It’s just that they don’t always concentrate where you want them for the duration of time you want them there. I still have to use other methods for some areas. Feeders are a good way of concentrating the deer in some of the same manners and using them to accomplish some of the same effects…..Just move them around to new areas periodically and allow the old areas to recover. I've seen this effect happen through just pouring out corn on the ground too......

If anyone in this world needs some Beavers it's you. Hope you get some of your furry little want-to-be friends to help you with your "habitat improvement" goals.

I don't know how you have enough sense to get out of the rain, if you even do have that much.

Nice weeds.

Me too..........

This is a little bit of a spin-off related to the same topic of “water”……But something that always has me scratching my head wondering why we don’t put two and two together more revolves around rainfall. If you watch over time you’ll see post after post after post where we talk about rain and weather and we say the same things over and over and over…….”Man, it sure came a frog strangler!”…….”We’ve had too much rain, I’m tired of it!!!!”……..”It’s dry as a BONE!!!!”……..”It ain’t rained in 3 weeks!!!!”…….

How many discussions do have in comparison though about the days when it rains “just right”???.........Rarely………About 1 out 10 weather related events are gonna be “just right”……..the rest are gonna be heavy downpours or heat and drought………..So why then do so many folks manage in a manner where they need everything to line up “just right” instead of manner that buffers against the extremes??......

One of the most important concepts the guy talked about in that last video is where he says that

"they may use fire annually to impact 1/3 of a unit but they will impact 100% with the cattle and how doing this doesn’t confine or put the mother’s and young chicks in a box……It creates a mosaic of different successional stages of plant communities across the landscape that the birds can then pick and choose from"…..

I think about what PCP said in raising young turkeys and how he thinks they need a certain height and type of grass for the first few weeks……Taking that into consideration and the fact that your quail and turkey chicks are probably gonna be hatching out across a matter of weeks and maybe even a couple months…….then having that constant mosaic of plant communities at multiple stages (plant heights) would in my mind offer the best possible habitat situation for optimal survival rates……In other words, you’ve got an optimal stage of plant community growth available to them at all times for whatever stage of growth they may be in from egg to adult . They have lots of options. That is the concept the guy is talking about in the video

I’ve watched a bunch of these videos now on how folks are managing the land for wildlife with cattle and there’s a number of different methods being used to promote the same concepts and ideas. Taking all of it into consideration, I think maybe the simplest manner for achieving the desired results for wildlife would be ……if let’s say we have 3,000 acres total……we divide that into 3 paddocks of 1,000 acres each and then rotate a low stocking density of cattle annually from one to the next just letting them roam the paddock as they choose. In other words you would have one 1,000 acre paddock that was “this year’s” to be actively managed by the herd and then you would move over to the next 1,000 acre paddock next year and so forth…….This would create that nice interspersed mosaic of successional habitat types that suites the needs of the deer, turkey, quail, etc… with the least amount of input and hassle. I still see a time and place for more intensive management where needed but all of that daily moving stuff seems like overkill if producing wildlife habitat is the main goal and you aren’t worried about maximizing cattle production so much.

Plus all of that blocked off mob grazing way of doing it is still putting your successional units each in a box so to speak just like the guy was talking about in the video with the small fire unit on his ranch…..For example, if you blocked off that 1000 acres into 10 units and rotated between them then it would create 10 different stages or heights of growth…..However, level 10 may be ½ mile from level 1 and so forth….An animal like a quail needs as many stages of them as possible within a 30-40 acre area..... and that is the more "natural form"....It would look more like abstract art than nice neat lines

If you just let a light stocking rate of cattle roam a 1,000 acre paddock then you would have a much more interspersed mosaic of all of those same stages of plant growth growing together versus everything being laid out in block fashion……This would give more opportunity for all of those stages to intermingle with one another in a small area creating better micro-environments. Just my ponderings on a rainy day anyways........

A story that ties in with all of these same land management ideas…..

I tracked the same buck twice last year for a guy in south Montgomery Co…..When I get there he tells me that he’s pretty sure the buck ran onto the neighboring property but he knew the folks who owned it so all was good…..Well, we start tracking this buck through the guys place and it was a pretty hunting property with some nice pines and bottoms on it…and you could tell that he had a few deer there for sure…...But sure enough though, the buck crossed the line off of his property and onto his neighbors like he thought.

So as we’re crossing onto this other place he starts telling me about this farm we’re going onto and the folks that own it, etc……just chit chatting more than anything……He tells me that it’s about 120 acre farm that the folks ran cows on up until just a few years ago and he reckon they must have just sold them or something because the place had been sitting there with nothing happening for maybe 3 years or so.

Let me tell you what…..it didnt take long to figure out where ALL of the local deer lived around there…..That “grown up” cattle farm was infested with bedded deer. He shot this buck with a bow twice and we tracked it 800 yards the first time and 1,000 the second time and both tracks led to the center of the neighbor’s farm right in behind the pond dam……..That “grown up” cattle farm is no different than what would be the third year rotation of what I described in the last post…..same principles and concepts. That place was a good example of what the results would look like and it was pretty awesome. That 120 acre block was likely holding most of the local deer herd for that little area I was in.

Tell you what, you buy me a couple of Comstock or Koro live traps and I'll bring you a few beavers. Just pay the gas over there and I keep the traps.

I appreciate that but I've got a guy that is supposed to be bringing me some of those Bankhead beavers with the northern generics already..........I'm gonna turn them lose in my sanctuary.

I'm starting to get some actual clover coming back now....Volunteer crimson clover in July???

I don’t think that the late May mowing really thinned the dog fennel any but I do think it set it back to where its allowing much more diversity to come in. This is the same spot where the turkey was nested.

Here’s a couple of “before and after” pics showing the new flush of growth where I mowed some of the other areas back in May compared to the older growth. The idea now is that I go out there probably after this rain moves through and set some more of the tall stuff (not the already mowed sections) back and hit the reset button on it so another new flush comes up in a couple weeks when it starts recovering. This area has really increased in the amount of goldenrod this year for whatever reason. The deer browse it moderately. There's still a good bit of dewberry present in it too which the deer browse across many. many months including during the winter.

Goldenrod:
https://www.honeybeesuite.com/goldenrod-a-late-summer-feast-for-the-bees/

Patches of teaweed are beginning to sprout up as well.......These are excellent late summer food sources with protein content nearly equivalent to soybeans.........Both the taller patch in the back and the small sprouts in the foreground are teaweed. You can see the browsing pressure already on the taller stuff......

I need to get some tea weed seed and spread in my long leaf next year after I burn.

You need to get you some Johnson grass. They will bed in it and they will eat it. It’s high in protein.

A jug of 24D would have that place looking real nice again in no time

Dig some up, transplant it when things are moist, and stick an exclusion cage around it so it can fully mature

Theys everything but a tractor in this thread.

😂

Obviously there’s no tractor nor Bush hog on the premises.

What do you feel would have been a more appropriate title........"A Lil' Weed Time"????

Coming soon!!!!!!............."A Lil' Goat Time".....????

Tractor……….



And oh my lord what is that?????

You too high to notice you runnin trough a forest with that lil disk

I beg to differ sir……..I know exactly what I’m running through and why.

So whether we’re talking about pokeweed or goldenrod or dog fennel or dew berry, etc……..by having mowed some areas back in late May, right now I have two different stages of growth of the same plant species/communities……Some fresh sprouts and some much more mature….……when I go mow tomorrow and knock back more strips of mature growth, I will create a third stage….and another few weeks I may mow some more remaining mature areas one more time and create a 4th………If you count the buffer strips of dog fennel and sich that haven’t been mowed at all then it would be 5…….This begins to make the understory a lot more dynamic and provide fresh flushes of growth and cover throughout the summer a lot more than if everything were just in one single stage….like if say you had burned in the spring and that was it. It’s very possible to do this with a tractor and bushhog/disk and likely gonna be one of the best options for many people……maybe you do it in thinning rows or something like that…….

If you get the idea now of how this process makes the understory more dynamic from the standpoint of food and cover…..then imagine if we had say 15+ stages interwoven with each very randomly all in a continual daily rotation as the cattle herd roamed around and grazed at their discretion. In a nutshell I think that is what you could accomplish by running a light stocking density of cattle through a place every other year or maybe every third year. It would create very fertile, dynamic understory habitat. Other "tools" would still need to be used but they would be a very valuable edition to the habitat management toolbox. I know a lot of this is just being repeated but it took some people 10 years to listen to the other ideas soooooooooo........

Goldenrod is said to have an allelopathic effect on some plants around it……….. "To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven"






Notice the color difference…….We'll see how it plays out.......…To be continued……….

This is probably actually a joint effort at play between plants, soil microbes, and insect life as fungi moves in and nature changes the dynamics of the plant community away from the original pioneers that grew in the bacterially dominated soil. The tables have turned now and set things in favor of other plant species. While there may be a few stray sicklepods survive in this area I disturbed last year…..I believe the other plants will out compete most of it. Notice in the one pic above that none of the other plants have insect damage……I think they are targeting the weak……The sicklepod is probably sending out some kind of chemical signal that it is stressed while the other plants are healthy and vibrant. I’m guessing that as sicklepod plants weaken then they will be eaten and taken out of the plant community or just get outcompeted for resources (sun, water, nutrients).

Started my latest round of setting back old growth.......already found 3 nuttal oaks and a county champion beautyberry bush........ .........The majority of it was blackberry which had grown too large to really be useful so I turned it into mulch. Now a new flush of young growth will come up after it recovers........

Next spot.............

Even though what I am doing is small scale experiments……that is how almost any experimenting is done……These ideas and concepts can easily be scaled up.



This is the only spot that has been mowed twice……I did it to see what effect it would have on the species composition.

Diverse biomass..........

More like biohazard

Looks like you started to bushhog and your tractor broke down........ Twice

Blackberry makes for some of the richest soil of anything I've seen.

Getting some of my fall plots "carved out" in the process of managing summer veg....... Got to leave some of it for structure......The great thing too is that I'm in no hurry about it. The best thing I could do would be a little today.......a little more in a few days to a week, and so on.....

I’ve never seen a good crop made in a blackberry patch. 🤦🏿

I guess that just depends on what you consider a "crop".......I'm not a farmer and constrained by what I can consider to be a "crop".......Blackberry, beautyberry, and pokeweed are my summer cover "crop" in this little field and they're accomplishing their role outstandingly.

Nice sweetgums.

Quick Question though -

When you say "scale up".... do you mean like this:

Yeah, that'll work.......

Here you go Goatkilluh……..Name that tree on the left (any of the smaller trees)



If you're allergic to poison oak you might not even want to look at this pic........

Other side of the field......

Got several of these guys flying around.....

So earlier in the thread I mentioned about putting a canopy of vegetation over surface biomass…..and it being one of the major factors in efficient decomposition……Choose whatever plant community you want to use but the concept is the same. My #1 goal is to have the best fall/winter plots around……Everything being done now is just “prepping” for them. These plants are starting to “prep” my soil surface for seed in about 3 months by turning the straw into a nice soft fluff for my seed to land in. Again, use and plant what you want to but don’t lose sight of the concepts.

I would think that a baby quail or turkey would like this type of structure…….

That's not happening.

Just about every track I go to starts in a food plot so I see a large sample size of what is occurring……..The beautiful lush pics of food plots represent a small fraction of the total……

G-Killa..........Those last two pics were two totally different soil types but both are lacking the same thing.....Soil Organic Matter

They lacked weeds too.

Weeds make me think about how many evil ways I can kill em. Momma taught me to never hate, so I STRONGLY dislike weeds.

Spots like these are probably lucky to have much of anything growing in them throughout the year.......They become biological deserts......

Here's a good example of the things that were talked about in the last few posts.......Last year just before hunting season I ran my tractor through the thick undergrowth of dog fennel to make a trail to my stand.....In doing so I let my front end loader down a little too low and when I hit a low spot it scalped the organic matter off the top of the soil in this spot......This shows just how much impact taking away the OM can have.....It's not like we're in a drought or something either..... This same principle applies to more than just this one spot in my field.....It's like the laws of physics........The same thing applies in a big stand of thinned pines or an oak savannah or in your food plot.......Soil organic matter % impacts plant density and species composition.......And "taking it away" or reducing it is the same no matter if its through a front end loader, a plow, fire, or whatever the means......It has the same impacts if it's not taken into consideration......

Goatkiller.........When I say that you can "scale up" with these ideas and concepts, what I'm really trying to imply is that you can look at that last picture and it could just as well represent your property and your neighbors property if your management techniques are decreasing soil organic matter while his are building it.....That could represent the understory production of a bigger sized piece of land just the same as this small scale model. It's not always gonna be an all or nothing extreme either......It's a sliding scale as OM increases or decreases.

Lack of OM is not what causes the soil to crack open. 2:1 clay structure is what causes the surface cracking when the soils dry out. Even with 4-6” of high OM surface, when the subsoil dries out it’s going to open up.

So you think it would still look like that even if there was continual living roots being kept on that site instead of taking it to bare ground???.....BTW this wasnt really an unusually dry period, it was last Oct.

Oct is typically our driest month. Late winter/early spring is when those soils typically seal up. Look at the houses in the general area, if they’re not on a “floating” slab or have some type of extended footing deep in the parent material, you’ll see cracked brick veneer, sagging rooflines and chimneys falling away from the structure.

Some alluvial soils will develop surface cracks but they are generally shallow. The high shrink/swell clays will have deep fissures in them.

Yeah he’s right Harold the prairie mud shucks cracks easy even in a covered situation. I’ve dealt with it for 14 years now. It will dry out where you can’t drive a nail in the ground.

Interesting.........I need some of that stuff to play with for awhile instead of sand. Not disagreeing with y'all but I think someone could do a lot better than what is in that picture. Yes, Oct is typically a dry month but If I remember correctly, last fall was one of the best years we've had in a while for establishing food plots. It doesnt seem like that pic ought to be seen as just "standard operating procedure".....

Ride over to the neighborhood after it hasn’t rained in about a week or two and you can have all the fun you want.

I've got to finish up taking a burn class today........I'll argue, I mean debate, with y'all goobers more about it tonight.

Woop, woop!.........I’m recertified to burn!

So back to the prairie dirt…….So take this more as me just me thinking out loud…….But I just cant see how you can look at that picture and say that its “just the norm”……I feel like if you took that same plot and changed techniques then you would get a much different outcome…..For example lets say that during the summer months we either planted or allowed a diverse summer cover crop to grow. That would put down a diverse root system of several root types and depths from very fine fibrous shallow roots to bigger and deeper running tap roots……all of which help to give “structure” to the soil around it…….And if we don’t disrupt that structure and allow it to build year after year then we also develop “tilth”……..where the rotting of these roots puts OM deep into the soil profile where on a molecular level it gets in between the clay molecules like your disks between your vertebrae……..Maintaining this soil ecosystem intact is far different than a situation of a house foundation

Prairie soil is going to crack when it dries out regardless of what's planted in it whether it gets tilled or not. The volume of the soil changes with the moisture content. It is what it is. I've dealt with it off and on for about 60 years. It's a pain when it's wet,
It's a pain when it's dry and a pain when it's in between. It's fertile, the ph is good if it's not too high and it will grow crops and deer, you just have to learn how to deal with it and to stay off it when it's too wet or you'll be taking a long walk, 4wd or not. It can be like driving on grease

It’s no offense meant to anyone and I’m truly not just trying to be argumentative or anything but y’all know me by now…….Until I’ve had a chance to try it a different way then I cant just take that picture as being acceptable……Just due to how my own ideas of food plotting have evolved over the years, I can’t just take “the way it’s always been done” as the gospel…..I do hear you in that prairie mud has different challenges than I’m used to but I feel certain that there’s a way to effectively manage it……and it’s likely gonna be a blueprint that nature has already drawn up. I feel like a lot of times we fight and fight against the grain trying to force our will instead of trying to adapt our methods to “go with the flow”.

You don’t have to manage prairie mud. You can throw a 50lb sack of wheat and 100lbs of 13/13/13 to the acre and make yourself look like the best farmer in Alabama. There were plenty of years we didn’t even fertilize until we hit it with urea sometime mid December. And there were summers where the Johnson grass was 8ft tall but I was scared to lose a small child if they fell into one of the hundreds of cracks.

As Ron said, it will grow plants and deer. And lots of both.

When grassland prairies experience surface cracking, there’s not much your plot magic can do to fix it.

But like RonfromRamer said above, it’s too sticky and slick to work when wet and too hard to work when dry. There’s a very narrow window of soil moisture when the soil can be worked. Even rolling and crimping may not be as effective due to the soil properties.

Y'all sure are a stubborn bunch.......

I hunt a place in the MS delta outside yazoo city. When it dries up there will be cracks in the soil a inch or two wide and 6 inches deep. Its crazy looking.

When wet... Notice the tracks are not visible on loader.

Damn, y'all sure got a knack for getting things stuck around here!!

Is this a thread about growing weeds or mowing weeds or something? I look at the photos for the last few pages and it just looked like weeds growing, and being mowed.

Am I missing something?

To start with I think you should take a look at the definition of a "weed"..........


"A weed is a plant considered undesirable in a particular situation, "a plant in the wrong place."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weed


None of these plants are "weeds"....... They're not unwanted nor are they in the wrong place. They're native plants doing exactly what they were designed to do. The thread is revolving around that idea and the idea of using them to work for us as a means of improving the soil as well as ways of manipulating their succession. Mowing is a tool and there are numerous ways of using it to effect plant succession and composition depending on your frequency and timing.

Here’s another thing that I’m showing and some of what we’ve been talking about in the last page or so……. I’ve got naturally sandy soil that is just about as chitty as you can get…….Here it is years ago. It would damn near pour through an hourglass probably…..



What I’m showing is why my fall plots look and produce a lot different now than many that are grown in the same soil that are sparse and struggling to even germinate and grow……... It all revolves around increasing soil organic matter. What you are calling "weeds"......I call my summer cover crop.

When we talk about organic matter and biomass, etc…….Most people are likely picturing dead wheat straw (hay) but probably not much more past that point. The true end goal though is the end product of humus produced from that biomass....like in the picture below of highly organic soil where the soil microbes have formed the humus into “soil aggregates”…..Soil aggregates are what give soil structure and allows things like proper water infiltration and soil aeration to take place….This is from my property with the same crappy soil……It just formed from a different source of decomposing organic matter over time……Same concepts though and something that should even turn on a lightbulb as to why you need to include some woodier types of biomass in your food plot rotation over time. Sunn hemp for example…..dog fennel…..blackberry…..milo……It’s a different type of carbon source than a fine grass provides.


https://www.ndsu.edu/soilhealth/soil-health/soil-property-1/aggregation/

Aggregation – Arrangement of primary soil particles (sand, silt, clay) around soil organic matter and through particle associations. Aggregate stability is a good indicator of soil health.

Ok. You didnt have to get all fancy. You could have just said " Yes. I am growing weeds, but I LIKE weeds."

See, where we plant we hate weeds and try to kill them believe it or not. Crazy , I know. I guess we just aren't right.

But I will follow along and take notes so if I ever want to get a great stand of weeds established and growing well I can get some tips.

Great job though by the way. Those are definitely some of the NICEST weeds I have ever seen!

You haven't missed anything.

So let me get this straight so I understand y’alls way of thinking…..Y’all are saying that everything in this pic is just worthless weeds that need to be gotten rid of?? Correct??

No, what I am saying is that whole area would be bush hogged, limed , fertilized , planted and growing Durana clover if it was on my land . And 10 to 20 deer an evening would be in there eating high protein forage.

I try to grow great high protein forage on every available acre to attract and hold deer on my properties. I try to create destination plots, where deer travel to get and spend a lot of time in feeding. I try to maintain Durana clover fields year round for destination fields so deer and turkey go there all year long, not just during the hunting seasons. So to me weeds are meant to be killed.

I am sure there are some palatable weeds there but they certainly are not going to pull in deer and hold them in the area like highly desirable, palatable and protein rich forage does.

I guess my strategy is different. But then again as stated, I hate weeds.

I see atleast 7 or 8 different things right there i have seen deer eat before. Its just not pretty. Dont fit most peoples idea of what deer feed should be. I have seen deer walk all the way across a beautiful green field to eat blackberry leaves, greenbriar, or privet. Deer can be pretty offensive. Its almost like they have absolutely no appreciation for a mans hard work. I guess most deer would make it just fine without us there to feed them. Theyd just eat the stuff in your pictures. Youve got to admit though, per square foot, theres more nutrition in most nice looking food plots. Should be anyhow, just because theres not all that clutter that the deer just dont eat.

I hate dog fennel as much as I hate fireants and yellow jackets, it has absolutely no redeeming qualities as far as I'm concerned

If I could air lift a mature crop of corn, peas, sunflowers, etc into my fields then that’s kinda the picture I get that you’re basing your statement off of…..or even a lush stand of clover……However, the problem is that I can’t air lift it into place….it has to be grown…..And the combination of high deer density and low productivity sandy soil wont allow that to happen without scaling up the operation to fields that are 10-20 acres or more and adding high amounts of inputs……So in reality, no…. a field of those kinds of plants would not produce "more" in this situation…..As a matter of fact it would cause the productivity of the area to go backwards when the deer quickly wipe it out and no biomass was produced to recycle back to the soil.....or I was trying to grow all clover (N) with no carbon. These concepts play out in all soils but your more fragile ones are the ones that really show the effects the most. Take organic matter out of sand and it takes a nose dive in productivity…….Look at the scraggly Egytian Wheat screen in my old pic…….The last pic I just showed is one the most fertile and diverse spots I have with probably 25-30+ different species of plants growing very productively in that one area……It’s got a high organic matter content to the soil….However, start taking away the SOM and it’ll revert back to sand and crabgrass and that diversity will disappear……How you manage the plant communities makes a difference as soil organic matter does not stay static over time....Keep in mind that my main goal is to grow very productive fall plots of cereals and clovers…..So my main summer objective is to protect and improve the sandy soil……..

Dog fennel is one of my favorite plants.......It makes the best screening of anything I've seen. As a matter of fact, my screens and buffers from last year are still standing now while the new ones are growing....A nice mix of dog fennel in a summer stand allows you the ability to go in and "carve out" a plot of whatever shape you want it to be with whatever types of visual screens and dividers you might want to include into it......Let's say you want to take a larger plot and divide in half or quarters or you wanted to leave a perimeter buffer all the way around it. For example, in the pic above my bigger field is actually on the backside of that dog fennel screen......The strip I'm showing in the pic is the lane where the buck makes his mistake when the does disappear into the field........

Kinda like so……….Perspective fellas.....perspective....

So dog fennel has zero redeeming qualities and I should just mow it all down this afternoon???........Mow down the whole mouse trap???......Why?

I don't care what you do with your dog fennel or your beloved weeds, you can cultivate and fertilize it, makes no difference to me. It's ugly, nothing eats it and it spreads. You can have mine if you want it. If I see dog fennel and I'm mowing, it's going down. I like pretty fields and pastures, I just can't help it

Back to why “protecting the soil” should be an important objective……This is a spot where I believe my bushhog tire didn’t swivel or something and it scraped the thatch off the top of a small area……It’s on a slight slope with the downhill side being the bottom left of the pic…….



You can literally see the lighter particles of humus (or decomposed organic matter) being separated from the sand and taken downhill by the rain…..Now this is where that “ocean effect” comes into play……This is a small area thas has been effected surrounded by acres of well protected soil…..So it becomes like a scratch on your arm that recovers fairly quickly……However, what if the whole field were currently doing this and ALL of my organic matter was washing away downhill?? Then it would be like a hemorrhaging artery bleeding out……..This is one of the ways in which OM is lost and fields end up being nothing but sand. This should be heavily taken into consideration with how you decide to manage and its one of the big reasons why I do what I do during the summer months….One other thing to note, if you look close I’m pretty sure a few of those larger “rocks” in the top right are pieces of lime I added a number of years ago now.

Here is an even closer look at the sand and organic matter being separated……If you look closely you’ll see how organic matter acts like “dark matter” for those of you into space stuff……It gets in between the sand and silt particles so that sand particles aren't just piled on sand particles……Look at the tiniest of white specs toward the right of the pic.....There starts becoming a structure to it……Of course keep in mind that we are looking at the tearing apart or separation of that process. Without the OM though the sand will form a surface like concrete. This isn’t food plot magic…..It’s science.

So now taking it a step farther…….Let’s say our management efforts ARE lowering the soil organic matter %……What impact does that have?



As soil OM is lost and the growing conditions decline then it creates an environment where only certain pioneer plants are able to thrive. You have impacted variables like soil moisture, soil tilth, soil structure, aeration, nutrient holding capacity, etc, etc….This is how specie composition is affected and changed……This is the same field years ago dominated completely with crabgrass due to the soil conditions you see above.



Compare that to the specie composition now…..same field, really close to the same exact spot. There’s actually a lot more diversity across the field than just what you see in this one pic too with probably 20+ species present now …..The big picture concept to recognize is that soil organic matter influences species composition……..That same concept plays out just the same whether you call it a food plot, timber stand understory, or a quail block…….Changes in soil OM = changes in specie composition due to changes in growing conditions. I think that could be a “natural law”.



One plant that has really jumped out at me as the soil has changed is pokeweed. It seems to only establish and grow in my richest spots which suggests that it may be heavily reliant on more improved conditions…….

Somebody is gonna read this and hopefully connect the dots ……Take what I just showed and consider what I said about the pokeweed in that it seems to need the richest spots to establish and grow……Also consider that pokeweed seems to be one of the more preferred natural browse species……I’d rank it in the top ten anyways from what I’ve seen so there's most likely a reason the deer prefer it so much……Now think about the study that just came out not too long ago that said that a pokeweed had the same nutrient content within it whether it was grown in Alabama or Iowa…..the difference in the amount of high quality bucks being killed was due the AMOUNT of high quality forage available....


To me, when I take all of those things and put them together I come up with the idea that if I can make the land produce more of an abundance of the higher quality plants then I should be able to produce better higher quality bucks……and what is it that is effecting species composition and determining which of those plants I’m able to grow like pokeweed???.....and effecting the abundance in which I'm able to grow it??? It’s the richness of the soil......and soil organic matter plays a big role in that….. and the chittier the soil the more it impact it has.

Let me get this straight, are you saying that mowing a field, letting the cuttings lay and decay then cutting that into the soil reduces organic matter in the soil? No comprende, please explain, having a hard time grasping that concept

To start with we need to look at the fact that we live in the southeast where decomposition already happens very rapidly in our environment…..The main reason I point this out is so that you get the idea established that organic matter is in a constant state of decay and the soil and other environmental conditions dictate the rate of that decay.

Now like I’ve been showing in the last few pics……our actual end goal is the refined product of humus (the black dirt particles)…..We want to not only protect what we have already produced…..but we want to keep increasing the % of it or the richness of it in the soil……Just think about when you see someone’s garden that you think of as being “really rich”….That’s what were after……that’s created from decomposed OM…….In order to build that humus up over time though then you have to basically turn your soil surface into a layered mulch pile. In order to slow down the decomposition process you need the soil to be covered over not only in dead vegetation on the top but also you need to have the different layers and stages of decomposition of that hay or organic matter……This creates a buffer zone across the surface that regulates gas exchanges……

Think of it like a fire and oxygen……If we want a fire to burn slow and low for a long time and not burn up all of our fuel rapidly then what do we do to it??….. We smother it, right…..limit the oxygen to it…….This is a very similar effect to what is happening with your soil OM……If you go out there and completely cut in all the OM you’ve grown then you’ll get a very rapid decay and burn of that OM but there will be little growth in humus % overtime……You wont be growing it but rather just making rapid annual burns of it. That is why when you look at my old pics you see nothing but sand……I wasn’t “building” soil organic matter……I was just burning up any annual growth that I had and perpetuating the condition of being just sand…….This pic is from a few years ago but same field as I’ve been showing…..You can see how the OM is building as compared to the old pics of white sand.

So to add one more thing to the response now to tie that back to what I was showing with the humus and sand being separated by the rain….

There’s more than just one variable at play here…….It’s chemical and physical……Looking at the last pic I just posted…….If I went in there and tried to "cut in" my next crop of OM into the soil……not only would I rapidly increase the rate of decay but I would expose all of that refined humus to the elements and the pounding of the rain drops……Just like you saw in my previous pics I could take that whole layer of black dirt you see and have the rain separate it out and wash it away if I managed that way. ........Here it is again.

This is something that often isnt taken into consideration with these discussions. Most folks are running in very low OM conditions with their plantings but they don’t see the impacts to the same degree or they may see different types of issues…..The picture below is the reason why. All of our fields fall somewhere on that chart and it makes a HUUUGE difference where……The field I’m showing is way down there in the far bottom right somewhere I do believe. It's considered to be a "fine silt" on the soil map. ALL of these soil types are designed to function hand in hand with decomposing organic matter though…..it’s like a two part recipe…..Some of them are just far more impacted by its absence.

When you rub a small sample between two fingers, does it feel gritty or like cake flour ? Does it fill the voids in your fingerprints ?

I'd say more like flour......it's very fine. If I remember right its labeled as a Conecuh Fine Silt but dont hold me to that

Conecuh

Here ya go...

RFR……I was just poking at y’all in fun a little bit with the comment on perspective but that really does get overlooked. Think about this and just use your eyes and common sense……How much better do you suppose my field of fall cereal grains and crimson clover grow now with that layer of rich topsoil present as opposed to when it was just sand?? …Let’s suppose that the neighbor has the same chitty silt/sand to deal with……..which they very likely do since this is a common soil type around here….. But let’s say they don’t understand these concepts and have zero OM in their fields.........Hmmmmm…………

People lose perspective on the things that should be at the top of the list for being important. ……Just like if I went out here right now, plowed everything under, planted it full of IC peas, and then sat back and watched them get decimated about the time you could tell it’s a pea……..It would serve no purpose and many folks would never even bat an eye at the degradation that would be caused to the fragile silt soil system in the process. They wouldn’t see the rain separating the humus from the sand/silt and they wouldn’t recognize how much they just shot themselves in the foot for the fall as soil OM was lost……They would look at my summer field the way it is now and see nothing positive happening……They wouldn’t see the rich soil being protected from the heavy rains and held in place by the diverse root systems…..or the new round of biomass being produced to keep growing the richness of the humus……and how that will effect the quality of my fall plots and the deer that use it then.......when it matters the most........Folks just tend to see an old field of “weeds” ………Where’s the perspective in that?

Back to the soil triangle for a minute so that this part is understood…..The field I’m showing and many places in southern Alabama are likely gonna fall out below that red line I drew.…..That means your soils are less than 10% clay and made up mostly of sand and silt……




https://ucanr.edu/sites/mgslo/newsletters/Soil_-_The_Basis_for_a_Healthy_Garden28260.htm

Sandy soils, like those found here in Nipomo, generally accept water quickly and have good aeration, but can’t hold water well. So, both water and nutrients are too easily lost, and plants may not thrive.

Clay soils retain more water and nutrients than sand, but there is little percolation of the water and less oxygen for the plant due to smaller pore sizes than those of coarser textures.

****Finally, loam, what gardeners dream about as the vernal equinox draws near, is the ideal soil, holding water, nutrients, and oxygen in a balance of sand, clay and organic matter.****



This is why we are not all built on the same foundation and why organic matter plays such a big role in these sand/silt soils. It’s where just about all of your nutrient and water holding capacity is coming from in these soils. We need to have perspective with each situation……

https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdf/SS/SS66100.pdf

Heavy rains here just about daily ……Notice again the “chocolate and vanilla” swirly basically painting a picture of the water flow for you…..…….This is where the humus is settling out. What is the most important thing that’s occurring here long term?? I'd say topsoil loss....



The humus versus the sand/silt



If you’re a really deep thinker then you can look at those pics and then look at the one below and see that its not just “food plots” we’re talking about where organic matter is lacking in the topsoil and there’s more than one way to lose it or mismanage it………What does that do then to the overall amount of “quality forage production”???? There were huge swaths of poor sand with no topsoil across this entire tract and its not uncommon to see such.

Looking at the last pic and keeping in mind what’s been said about the total amount of quality forage being produced…….Another question to be asking for the deep thinking crowd is……. “How is this impacting the generational nutrition of the deer herd?”…….

I think this is what causes a lot of the differences you see in the deer herd across the landscape that people often attribute to being good genetics or like the discussion now in the serious forum about Gastonberg just being “ a good area” for big bucks……While there’s a few places in the state where genetics ARE playing a role……I think the vast majority of the noticeable differences people are seeing in isolated areas that "just seem to grow ‘em bigger" than other places comes from improved nutrition over a 10-20+ year time period. That is influenced by soil and understory management as well as soil type. For example, places like Sedgefield probably have doe herds that have been feeding on good quality understory forage for decades worth of generations......mamas and great-great-great-great-great- grandmamas that have all fed on good quality understory forage and those doe herds are kicking out quality buck fawns for the area. I think the pic above looks like the reverse of that.

Something I believe would REALLY help these soil building processes cycle and build more rapidly would be if someone had the ability to add chicken litter to their fields…..I know there is some debate on its use and turkeys….It can be slow and tough though to build “fertility” in low fertility sands without some help and chicken litter would bring in nutrients and tons of decomposing OM full of highly active microbial life all in one application…… I think you could turn around fields and make them highly productive in a short time period if you had easy access to litter and spreaders. This is also where the idea of moving cattle through an area to help improve the soil comes from……It’s another form of bringing in manure and applying it to help the natural processes along. That’s kinda where I’m at right now with things when I look at what is happening with the soil in my field……It’s like making a pot of soup and giving it a taste test……It’s pretty good but it’s still needing juuuuust a little something else to make it really good. I think manure would be that ingredient. It would assist in both growth and decomposition

If you think manure would be beneficial, and wanted to stay away from chicken, then a horse farm or dairy may be your better option. Most horse barns have a excess supply of manure.

Gin trash ?

I think there's a few routes you could go depending on the scale of situation......Someone with 1/4-1/2 acre plots could probably shovel out the horse stables and spread it on their fields by hand.......folks dealing with bigger fields and more acreage might have to go with something that can be mechanically spread......The dang thing about it for me is that my FIL actually cleans chicken houses out and spreads litter as a side business but its up in Marshall Co....

Mechanically spread isn’t a problem with the other options either. It’s not hard to find an old spreader for cheap. The bigger horse barns are set up to use equipment to clean them out as well. I assume the dairy’s are too.

There are old wagon type spreaders sitting around everywhere. Alot of people would probably give you one to get it out of their yard.

A little more on the idea of “perspective” ……..

I know most times folks are just giving me a hard time and it's in good fun, etc……but a lot of what I say often gets taken out of context and made out to be as if I think everyone should be growing weeds or this and that……However, what you see me doing is far more about adapting to the situation in front of me and working within the parameters of what I’m given in order to achieve the best outcomes. Everyone has different variables and constraints that have to be taken into consideration with the things they can and cant do……I may want to plant a field of soybeans and it look real pretty like in the magazines but the situation may not allow it ….There’s no need in going out and trying to repeatedly force a square peg through a round hole………..Adapt, improvise, and have perspective on the things that you CAN accomplish. Don’t just keep going out there doing the same things expecting different results......"Oh wow look, they ate it up again as soon as it sprouted!" (sarcasm )....... And for sure don’t go out and do things to make your situation worse. A great deal of this is psychological…….You’ve almost got to recalibrate your eyes as to what “you see”…….If you look at the pics of my field that I post and all you see is a field of weeds …….. then keep dialing it in a few more clicks.

I’ll be dam if I’m letting my place grow up in weeds tho

I’ll gather up a bag of sand spurs, sickle pod and Johnson grass if you can arrange an air drop on CNC’s place

Don't you have armyworms you need to be figuring out how to kill??

I know how to kill them now. Waiting on more poison to get here now

Dawn dish soap???

Hardly.

This article is a little old now but I found it interesting......At the end of the day this product revolves around all of the same concepts.....


https://alfafarmers.org/mulch-ado-about-cotton-father-son-team-turn-gin-trash-into-hydromulch/

Boring.

I have weeds in my parking lot.

Aesthetics..........

Perspective……….Let’s say we have a scenario of a big hunting club of 4,000-5,00 acres with 40-50 acres of food plots……Everyone decides that this summer they’re gonna budget in $150 per acre on “summer food plots”……How do you think most folks are gonna spend that money and what will be the return they’ll get out of it??

Likely the first thing folks are gonna do is start debating over what to plant or what to add into their seed blend……It may be lab lab and sunflowers or someone may say to plant it ALL in soybeans!!! They’ll figure in 2-3 weekends of tractor work to get it done and maybe figure in fuel for the tractor man…..Then they’ll spend what is leftover on a bag or two of 13-13-13 that they’ll apply at planting…….. Been there, done that, got several t-shirts……….Most of these type operations end up doing more harm than good in the end and just waste $150 per acre with nothing tangible to show for it…….It’s usually justified because some deer came in and wiped out a few acres of peas or something as if that made the slightest real impact to anything.

What would benefit situations like this more is to take the same $150 and spend it on something like summer applications of litter and lime and just let the field grow what it grows…. or maybe look to a product like the one made from the gin trash and apply it……or maybe invest the money on periodic applications of nitrogen every few weeks throughout the summer to boost organic matter production……..I’m gonna do something that results in tangible long term improvements to the growing conditions so that I have the best winter “kill plots” I can produce……..

That’s all most of these food plots will ever be…..”Kill plots”……There’s nothing wrong with that though……but you should have some perspective on the fact that if you have 50 acres of food plots across 5,000 acres then it’s the 4950 other acres that are influencing herd health and you manage your kill plots accordingly…….People start getting hung up on ideas that they are using these plots to “feed” deer in June and July and lose sight of the things they could be doing to have a real impact on the quality of their plots in November or January. For example, if you suggest that someone grows millet on their one acre plot in order to help their soil then most people will first and foremost be worried about how much the deer like the millet instead of how much it will improve the growing conditions for the fall. Not picking on jwalker but what was it you noticed about the pic I posted? It was how much “deer food” was there right? That’s just how we’ve trained our brains to see the situation.

Once you get your brain wrapped around the idea that most of these small food plots we all hunt will ever be is a fall/winter kill plot then you start looking at it from the perspective of…… “Everything I do in my one acre plot is prepping for that fall/winter stand"……. and your June/July decisions revolve around what is best for that goal.

So keep in mind that most of these things I’m showing and talking about are revolving around small scale food plot management but at the same time I’m also talking about how the same concepts can effect larger land management practices…... I really think we’ve lost a major connection to the most important “driver” of our ecosystem……We want to just manage deer or turkey or quail and have disconnected our thinking away from still managing the whole food chain and what is the most important factor in that.

If you pull back the straw from the surface of my field right now little critters scatter every which way…….Its loaded with these little snails by the thousands and millipedes and tiny grasshoppers, and rollie pollies and chit I dont even know what is.....…… What is the foundation block that supports this food chain?? The answer is carbon......


Invertebrate predators of land snails include beetles and their larvae, millipedes, flies, mites, nematodes, and other snails. Vertebrate predators of snails and slugs include shrews, mice, squirrels, and other small mammals; salamanders, toads and turtles, including the uncommon Blandings Turtle Emydoidea blandingii; and birds, especially ground-foragers such as thrushes, grouse, blackbirds, and wild turkey.

Pretty Cool. I am learning a lot. Keep them coming.

I like the bugs for turkey. I never thought of that.

Do you post here daily?

Thanks!.......

I have decided this is the last year I am going to mess with peas and beans in the spring. I am going to plant clover/fusion plots, and maybe add some alfalfa, and then spring planting turns into spring cutting, fertilizing and spraying. I am not disking twice a year and letting top soil blow away in the wind, or wash away in the rain. Then in the fall I can come in and broadcast whatever I want into the clover, and cut it. Boom done.

The clover is always there to feed them. Already did the lime. And I should get to where I don't have to add fertilizer. That should reduce the need to add lime again for a while. And I can easily maintain it with pellet lime too.

It is a waste of my time and $ to come in and spend $$600 a spring to plant peas only to have them wiped out in 2 weeks.

I like you're idea.......Everyone has a different opinion on this subject and to each his own but me personally I wouldnt get into worrying about "maintaining" a clover plot.....Just amend the soil and broadcast a little more clover at fall planting each year.....Maybe mow the fields once around June and let it ride from there.....

Think of it much in the same respect as feeding the food chain in a pond……The little tee tiny stuff feeds the small stuff and the small stuff feeds the bigger stuff and that feeds the really big stuff and so on and so forth……A food chain …..When you’re talking about “feeding” the soil food chain and these bug and insect populations then it starts with feeding carbon to the bacteria and fungi……It snowballs from there to the nematodes, arthropods, protozoa, etc and on down the line to the things that turkeys and quail eat……..Carbon is the main fuel for making the whole cycle function though …..From a management perspective you shouldn’t really focus on “producing snails for turkeys”……….No, you’re focusing on driving the big picture process from a base level…….which is producing, growing, storing, recycling humus from carbon based plant sources ……As the “manager” your focus should be to drive the vegetation recycling process that produces rich, vibrantly alive soil for this food chain to thrive in……..Hence, the reason I randomly show pictures of the diversity that is being produced from the process……People may look and say……”What the heck have dragonflies and butterflies and snails and snapping turtles and hog nosed snakes, etc have to do with turkey or quail management??”……It’s because they’re signs that the bigger cycle is flourishing.

Im definitely going to try it before turkey season next year. I figure I will mow as soon as deer season ends, and have a good bed of that dead weeds. Than by April Ill have a ton of bugs in there for the turkeys. I could see them loving that for scratching and bugging!

I dont think that would be baiting I hope. Id hate to get a ticket.

Just rinse and repeat and that’s how the soil builds up to become a flourishing food chain…….”Feed me Seymour!!!” …..It takes time and cycling veg over and over before the critters really start showing up though.....It's sorta like that saying build it and they will come....…For the deep thinking crowd ask yourself…..”How can I manage the soil in this manner on the “other” 4950 acres (the previous scenario) instead of just in the 50 that are food plots???”……That's where I believe someone could have the potential of seeing significant impacts .....I think the most effective tool for a landowner would be to mix in cattle for vegetation recycling along with a modified fire regime………Same concept as you getting on the tractor mowing the vegetation but instead you’re sending in the cow herd to trample it and poop everywhere in the process…. …..Imagine adding in cow patties to the soil bug mix.

This is a few years ago but it shows the constant cycle that has been occurring of feeding carbon to the soil........Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat………

I have noticed a ton of bugs in my fusion/clover plots. Grasshoopers especially.

I think much of the time turkeys spend in food plots is to hunt bugs and insects........

I tend to see them hit fields when I cut them too.

Now if we could just get 257 to genetically modify us some cereal grains to mature about a month earlier we’ll be set………

More of the past cycles......Feed mulch crop after mulch crop and that's what builds the soil food chain over time.

Another big link in the insect chain is "flowers"...... which goes hand in hand with plant and insect diversity…………

So while it may just seem like to some we’re talking about growing weeds…..there’s much deeper concepts and principles at the heart of it.



Another aspect of this mulching and recycling process that can be manipulated is the “timing” that you choose to use when resetting the vegetation. You can have an impact on several variables just by your timing…… I purposely chose to knock back and reset some areas a few weeks ago knowing that most things will be maturing and going to seed come August………





So now I have fresh new growth emerging as July ends…The main species are blackberry, dewberry, pokeweed, prickly lettuce, vervain, and goldenrod…….Focus on the concept here and picture if this were on a bigger scale of 100 acres instead of 0.1…….I’m just keeping my resident does happy with these little spots …..However, ramp up the scale of this idea and you’re gonna start having a much bigger impact……How many people have lush new growth coming up in August when most of the natural browse is maturing and hardening off???



Other ways you can have an impact is by resetting succession and/or stimulating the seed bank during the dormant season …..”Frequency” of resetting can also have an impact on the balance of grasses to broadleafs/forbs…..Frequent mowing during the growing season will start favoring grasses over broadleafs……Dormant season mowing/resetting seems to favor the broadleafs unless fire is used……Dormant season fire seems to favor the grasses while growing season burns seem to favor broadleafs…..Take that with a grain of salt as its still something I’m tinkering with to figure out better…..All of these things can be used as tools though to manipulate the habitat to produce a well-balanced system of grasses, forbs, legumes and the subsequent food chains that follow……But you need to know “Why” you’re doing them in order to apply them correctly or you’ll just be randomly mowing and throwing down matches in Feb because that’s what so and so down the road did instead of applying specifically what you’re situation is needing at the time. I actually think we need to take a hard look at our reasons for burning and apply our prescriptions for fire more effectively than everyone just lighting a match the day after hunting season ends and that being the extent of the “why”…….

I would love to do some burning, but the timber co would never go for it.

I love the flail mower I got. It makes it so simple. Go out into a field and broadcast seed, then cut it with the flail mower. If you need to spray it, then spray it and walk away.

I have 2 fields I am thinking I am going to flail mow and then spray, then disk and spray again to be ready for fall, and I am gonna plant some sort of clover blend on top of cereal grains and brassica's so next spring, all I will need to do is run out and mow everything. Then I can come back and fertilize and spray as needed to control the weed growth.

Here’s one of the conundrums that occurs and its where I think litter and/or cattle could really help the cycling process…..This is the same area I just showed where the thick stand of blackberry was mowed....I'm on the other end looking back..... So now I have a really thick layer of blackberry mulch down across the soil surface…..The problem is that there is so much of it that it will temporarily prevent new seedling plant growth from coming back in those areas until it decomposes. I’ll get regrowth coming back from the old established plants but ideally I want to maximize the plant density a little more with new growth…..

This is where you have to really have some perspective on what you do….If this were in an area that had a better natural soil type then I could probably get away with using a disk instead of a mower to just slightly process this biomass into the very top layer of soil as things are reset……In my situation though with such fragile sand in this area….tearing that top layer of dark soil apart in any way makes things degrade and go backwards. I've been there and done that already with it... That dark top soil is best left alone to cover over the sand and the biomass just fed from the top down or you really just work against yourself in these soils……What would have been ideal is if right after I mowed it if I had come across the top with a litter/manure application. That would speed up the decomposition of the biomass and boost plant growth at the same time. Cattle hooves and manure would also help to process the biomass and give everything a boost. That’s really the “natural” component that’s missing to this process…..Back long ago this would have been reset by something like a buffalo or elk herd instead of a bushhog and you would have gotten that hoofing action and manure application that its needing.

Here's another idea just to throw out there.........Something else that could have helped this situation is if I had a mower that would chop up the biomass really fine instead of the coarse way a bushhog does it......I think that would be more ideal for some applications such as this growing season mowing I just did. If you understand the concepts and principles then you can make your own "method".

When I was teenager I used to sit around and read every deer hunting magazine that was on the shelf…..It actually got to the point that by the time I was in my mid twenties I pretty much just stopped because every article I read seemed like some repeat or regurgitation of something I read 5 years earlier……(I guess my hypocrisy here knows no bounds)

Back then I took it all as the gospel and there was indeed a lot of quality information in all of it that I gained a lot of knowledge from……As I’ve gotten older though I’ve learned to take it all with a grain of salt. It’s funny looking back because I can remember when a lot of my perceptions of things began to change years ago. I had just gotten to know some of my Macon Co “neighbors” and they asked me if I wanted to take some pics for a magazine article ….be the hunter in the pic……I said “Heck yeah!!!”…..Getting to be in the deer hunting mags that I had read for so many years was really cool. However, during the process as we laid the buck down in the best looking row of corn stalks turned just right to the setting sun I realized……”Hey, wait a minute…….All of these pictures are just staged!!!!!”… ……It actually felt like a real “well duh” moment when I thought more about it……

But the bigger idea that I came to realize through all my experiences with the people I’ve met and things I've learned is that much of everything is just personal opinion even amongst the pros and how this person or that person "presents the picture". Doing things this way or that way or what we think we currently know is an ever evolving idea and many of the opinions we pass around are just regurgitating what someone heard repeated at deer camp or read in a magazine, etc. Sometimes though I think you need to allow yourself to forget everything you’ve been “taught” and just open your eyes and mind to what you see before you. Use the common sense God gave you to form your own opinions that are free of so much bias from outside opinions.

Case in point……I cant tell you how many times I’ve read it and heard it repeated that beautyberry is a great deer browse species…..……Now I’ve seen the deer browse a chitload of different plants and yet I cant ever recall seeing beautyberry being browsed at any stage. I’m sure someone has seen it but to me its just about running neck in neck with dog fennel for the least browsed. Are people actually seeing it being browsed or just repeating the tag line??? On the flip side of that though……how many times have you ever read or heard someone talking about Florida pusley being a highly preferred or top 5 browse specie??? Yet from what I see with my eyes it gets hammered this time of year……You cant find a patch that hasn’t been heavily browsed…..Sometimes you gotta open up your mind to what you see instead of what folks tell you to see…… …….Think fer yourself and have some perspective….. Hell, I might not be worth a damn at hunting and that might not even be my deer in the pic……

The #1 secret to killing big deer. Hunt where there are big deer.

Yeah, it sure improves the odds dont it.

That is why I bought a flail mower. I have a JD 1026R and a 48 in commecial flail mower, and let me tell you, it will flat cut some crap down. I cut some sunn hemp with it saturday, and I recall someone saying something about it being difficult to cut, but I didn't have any trouble with it. And it mulches it up really nice.

It is not a fan of really wet material though. So its better to wait until the dew is off stuff to get a better mulch distribution. I showed my landscaper at work a video of me cutting down green 5 + foot tall cereal grain fields this spring with it.

I have heard deer eat hickory nuts, but dang, if it takes a squirrel some serious effort to get into one.

This old hen says she aint leaving no matter what……She’s been chased by the dogs and damn near run over by the tractor and she’s still coming back for more……She’s been dusting in the same mowed area I was showing. I have found that some animals will do this when there are bountiful resources available in an area…....I’ve watched this with deer especially........There’s also a loaded pear tree right beside me that has lots of bugs around it and that's probably part of the draw to her as well…..…..I think there’s some kind of natural risk/reward assessment going on there and some of them choose to tolerate the risk due to the reward. I had a doe one year have her fawn in a patch of brush right beside my driveway about 50 yards from my house. She stayed there for a couple weeks at least tolerating our coming and going. I think that was a similar risk/reward situation for her.

Looks like a knee high weed patch with a rotten pear thrown in it.

That's pretty awesome I don't think I've ever seen that before... we typically mow around our pear trees.

Wow Is that you and that your Buck CNC?

Dang it is a nice one. I hope to someday shoot a good one for the wall! Hopefully using your tips and tactics will pay off for me. Thanks again and keep them coming!

Wow Is that you and that your Buck CNC?

Dang it is a nice one. How much do you think he scored? have you gotten a lot of good ones like that?

I hope to someday shoot a good one for the wall! Hopefully using your tips and tactics will pay off for me. Thanks again and keep the posts coming!

Thanks! Yes, that was a deer I killed.....Not sure what he scored but it wasnt much probably.

Morning glories are starting to bloom and get showy…….Not sure why people dislike this plant so much…..It would suit me just fine if the whole field blooms out like this....... Not to mention it adds a “vining” layer onto your biomass the same as something like vetch …….Saying that they don’t “feed” anything would be pretty short sighted. I wonder sometimes how folks picture that things are supposed to look and why……..Or when all of the turkey management discussions are going on why some things are never mentioned that seem to be such an important cog in the wheel……Maybe these are some of the things that leave folks scratching their heads….Does anyone ever discuss the richness of the soil or plant diversity driving an insect food web??

If you ever tried to harvest a field of soybeans with morning glory( tie vines) you would understand why they are disliked so much. If I find a plant in my garden I spray it and the plants next to immediately to be sure I kill that SOB.

I understand why farmers would not like it but wildlife management is not the same as farming. Farming wants to grow a high yield of ONE crop......Wildlife Management needs plant diversity to make things go round and round......

You know I’m not against farming in any way and understand we have to feed society…..To me though, farming and wildlife management are just two entirely different world’s with completely different variables, goals, and constraints………We are looking at it through two totally different lenses. The things that are so much of a concern for the farmer have no bearing on what is or isn’t a constraint for the wildlife manager……In fact, many of the goals of a farmer are in direct contradiction to the goals of a wildlife manager.

For example…..if you want things like turkey and quail to thrive then you need to produce thriving food sources for them……Critters like crickets and tiny snails don’t just exist alone in populations by themselves…..They live within a dynamic food web ……You dont JUST grow crickets to feed the turkey and quail, you have to grow the whole system…..and that is done through growing the richness of the soil and promoting plant diversity……not eradicating it……If you want to produce critters like crickets and tiny snails then you have to create the habitat for them to exist in. That concept applies to below ground as well as above and to the habitat for more critters than just the deer and turkey. I think for the most part we focus solely on what is happening above ground and forget about what is happening below even though the latter is likely the more important. There aint a whole lot for a turkey to go scratching after in a biological desert.

In the end you really should be focused on growing the “whole” ecosystem shebang if you want to grow the critters within it. Be able to see the whole circle and how to grow it ALL instead of becoming so fixated on one or two things that you get tunnel vision. It’s very obvious to see just how much we have lost sight of the bigger cycles when we have these discussions about native plants……Very, very few people seem to recognize that any of them have a purpose except for maybe three or four that they cherry pick and deem as “good” simply because deer eat them……. That's tunnel vision.

This is called Butterfly Pea……..It’s a legume.





It’s also proof that nature is trying to show you the blueprint……..you just gotta be observant enough to see it…

This guy looks like someone pissed in his Corn Flakes this morning......I got the feeling when I was snapping the pic that he was saying......"WTF are you looking at ??".......If he hangs around I think I may call him Fred..... He looks like some kind of small predator with them talons he's got.....

These little guys are starting to show up more zipping around now........

Kinda just thought this was cool looking.........

Most everything I’m showing is coming from about a 3 acre area………I’m just scratching the surface too of what’s blooming and buzzing and flittering around. There’s a LOT of insect and plant diversity in a small area……In this situation, each acre is being very productive in producing all the different components of this food chain we’re talking about. These are the most productive acres in this sense in the immediate area because of how they've been actively managed and its why this turkey or turkeys are keying in on it……

Now if you could replicate this and make every acre of lets say a 1,000 acres have the same “pound for pound” productivity and diversity across each acre of land……..then that’s when you start changing the game with scale…..If each and every acre is filled full of cover and food then that increases the carrying capacity ……Each acre is able to support more so the total amount that the property as a whole is able to support increases.

I really believe that if you want to know what has happened to all of the wildlife like turkey and quail it’s really not as much of a head scratcher as folks make it out to be……Look at what we’ve done to the “land” and how drastically we’ve changed it……there’s your answer. You gotta open your eyes a little wider too and look past just what’s on the surface…….How many thousands of acres of overgrazed cattle pasture do we have now with shallow degraded soils and no diversity??.......... How many thousands of acres of ag land are there now void of soil and insect life??......How many thousands of acres are there in monocultures of grass being cut for hay with zero diversity??.......How many thousands of acres are hit with a scorched earth treatment for site prep or nothing but pine needle understories??........I ain’t hating on nobody…..just pointing out the obvious.

I could go on but when you add it all up that’s the answer to where the wildlife have gone. Just look when you ride down the road what you see?? How many acres can you point your finger at and say “Hey, there’s a big chunk of land covered in rich black topsoil and a vast abundance of plant species??” In some form or fashion one or both have been stripped from a big part of the landscape….That’s the foundation that supports these wildlife populations….. rich soil and diverse plant communities. We’ve eliminated this foundation from across many, many acres………

Speaking of turkeys, I have a small field of Whitetail Fusion and alfa rack, and the turkeys are just about living in it. It's hard for me to believe as many pictures as I am getting and the length of time they are staying that they are eating bugs. But it makes me believe I have found something that is good for the turkeys.

CNC, I have enjoyed this thread as I see both sides of the habitat management equation and fully understand that we all have different operational constraints. However, coming from a region of the state that has a rather poor land quality in general, I have seen where rich plant communities as a result of many years of prescribed burning has had significant impacts on game. I have seen pics of fields on this site that I would only dream to have on my places, but that has not been a reality for me. My plots are all former log decks and we are currently trying to build them back up as there isn't a rich OM layer to work with. Been using lots of Petcher seed blends which seem to do well in poor soil conditions. I do some of my fields conventionally and some with nothing but a spiked chain harrow drag as they are sandy, and have seen improvement in my poorest fields from this method. That Howardtown Cur of yours should work out well for you ! I am sure you are starting to learn that they are different from most breeds, but I doubt you will find anything with more prey drive. Their ability to bay and catch will keep a lot of wounded deer from feeding coyotes.

Thanks!.......I completely agree with you on the benefits of fire……It's definitely one of the major tools in the box. I think we could slightly tweak the typical fire regime that people are doing now and merge it with some of what I’m showing to produce your most optimal outcome……Really the only reason fire has been excluded from what I’m doing is because of concerns with several “smoke sensitive areas”……So I’ve been managing using other methods.

Something that I have really noticed a difference as a result is in the ratio of broadleafs/forbs/legumes to bunch grasses. I do have areas of bunch grasses but the recycling methods I’ve been doing have heavily favored the broadleafs……What I see when I go to these quail plantations though and land managed with frequent dormant season fire is often understories heavily dominated by grasses…….I think there should be a happy medium in there and that’s exactly how the original system likely functioned……

Yes, you did used to have periodic stand replacement fires that came through naturally……but what you also had in between those fire cycles that most people arent replicating today were herds of grazers that roamed around and recycled a lot of the grass/carbon production back to the soil……The way we’re doing it now is mostly taking all of that above ground carbon that the grasses are producing and sending it up into the air every couple years…..What I think should happen that would make things even more productive is if a good portion of that grass was put back into the soil and THEN a fire sent through……That would keep enriching the soil too at the same time….....

I'm really excited about my cur dog......That's Lu-lu.

I’m renting one of those machines that you feed it square bales of hay and it spits them out for you. I may do this on some of my logging decks since there’s not much there now. I have some other fields (Sandy loam) that won’t grow much at all. I drilled them last year and they did ok but nothing spectacular. May add some hay to that field as well. What’s your thoughts? Thanks

I think that’s an excellent idea……..Blow it on right after you drill in your fall plots and then come over the top with some nitrogen…….If you’re still in the position of the fields struggling to produce then something like millet and periodic doses of N during the summer with help too…..It’s just what you’re needing to begin reclaiming an area like that……Nature used pure crabgrass originally in my field……You can mimic that with millet.....A thick stand of a fine grass crop is what you're looking for

Let me add one more thing to the post about fire….Here’s another area where I think we are a little off with our use of fire and could tweak things…… Now take this with a grain of salt as I may be dead wrong but I’m just going on common sense observations here……

When deer season ends in February folks start lighting up their drip torches and it looks like the world is on fire around here…..Lots of prescribed burns start taking place and one of the big talking points for “why” we’re doing it is that it mimics the natural fires that used to occur in the southeast long ago…….Here’s my knock on that idea though…..In order to ignite “natural fire” you need cloud to ground lightening and dry tinder…..How many lightning storms do we typically have around here in Alabama during February??......It’s actually pretty rare that we have those type of events during the winter, right??? On top of that…..we’re talking about the time of year when things are typically the wettest……So what are the odds of frequent natural fire from lightening occurring during this time?? It’s pretty damn low if you ask me….I’d say rare even.

Now……when would it be much more reasonable for a lightening storm to occur in Alabama and set the dry woods on fire?? During the summer correct??.....Maybe July, August, September......During the growing season……..And what does a slow low intensity burn during the 90+ degree heat of the summer typically accomplish??......Sweetgum/hardwood control……..I believe that “natural fires” were likely low intensity growing season burns that helped control the woody species and not the frequent dormant season burns we are using ……I also think the impact of the grazers controlling the grasses was a further measure that kept the fires low intensity since they reduced the grass fuel load in different areas.

My point is that if we are actually mimicking nature then we’re probably burning at the wrong time and thus creating a sorta bastardized version of what things actually looked like that is weighted too heavily toward grass.

What I'm doing is attempting to replicate the things that guy was showing in the video…….I think he’s likely hitting the sweet spot using cattle and fire both as well as how he is setting things up structurally and still actively managing during the growing season…..If you were a high fence owner then you could as Bob Ross says……”Really get crazy with it”……..and bring in a small herd of some exotic grazer and allow them to be your grass managers instead of cattle. The key would be having an eye for how much was too much......

I believe the the purple flowers are called "slender vervain".......

Something else you might could do with those spots is if you can find someone in the area who has some round bales of hay that may have gone bad or something……Take a whole roll and set it out in the middle of the field just after deer season and maybe slightly bust them open a little but leave it in a decent sized clump…..Just let them sit like that all the way through turkey season and you may even add multiple clumps to each field……You might could even turn loose a few tubes of crickets in the hay bales and call it a microbial inoculant..... ..Whenever you eventually come in and mow you’ll just run over and finish scattering it with a mower or something. I have been told that turkeys really like that. It would be a great way of getting some richness started though in a degraded area

You may need to subsoil those. I was not able to get very good penetration with my disk on mine until I did that. Then I added lime, and I had to add triple 17 to get them to really perk up with cereal grains last fall. They came up ok, then yellowed and I kept adding nitrogen, and nothing. Added some triple 17 and off they went. Most all the fields I did soil tests on didn't suggest anything but nitrogen.

One of mine I have subsoiled twice and added lime as well, and it still needs it again, so I think we are going to add some horse manure to it. If you really want to create biomass, plant sunn hemp next spring. Onoe of them this spring, I subsoiled it and planted buckwheat and peas on it as is. They came up really good.

I actually accused a landowner of turning crickets loose in a white clover stand. That place was loaded with crickets.

I’ve referenced the book “A One Straw Revolution” a million times in the past but if you’ll look at the ways that Japanese farmer incorporated white clover into his farm, I believe that is the more natural and more productive way of using clover……The Japanese farmer considered white clover to be the most important plant on his whole farm and a key specie to driving the whole cycle. It was the most important because it was what brought nitrogen into the cycle for the other plants……It’s suppose to be a companion crop to the other plants……He didn’t try and grow pure clover plots….He simply seeded a small amount of white clover across his orchards and crop fields each year until it just became part of the landscape……That’s how I see clover being used but instead of that being a Japanese farmers fruit orchards and fields it’s a quail plantation or what have you…..Same management style though…….Grow it in large scale “prairies” as a companion crop by simply broadcasting a little as you going along……That’s what the seeder box on top of that big Ranchworx aerator was for .......

So big picture ideas now…….The problem when you start talking about REALLY scaling up these ideas and concepts to create vast areas of rich actively managed habitat like this is that mechanical means of doing it really becomes limited or at best it would be very intensive to try and manage acreage in the thousands by mechanical means. I was thinking about how someone could feasibly and realistically use that Ranchworx machine to implement some of concepts and about the best scenario I came up with would be to use it to create 20-40 acre “prairies” in your best soil areas and maintain however many of those blocks or corridors was realistic for you……..That’s still kinda small fries though …….

If you want to really talk about having a profound impact on habitat in Alabama then change the way we raise cattle to make it look like what the guy in that last video was doing……Make the blackbelt look like that instead of looking like one big cow pasture with some hedge rows…….Yeah, I know I’m not talking about something simple and I’m not in any way suggesting that anything be forced…….but there are folks out there who are very creative. Most of it just revolves around changing a mentality of how things are done…..Change the ideas in people’s heads and the groundwork will take care of itself I believe…….

This may sound really out of the box to some but others will get where I’m going with it….but another way I got to thinking that someone could use that Ranchworx machine and likely be the most effective at replicating what a natural actively managed understory would look like……..would be to get on it a few afternoons a week with you a little cooler of beverages and just randomly joy ride around pulling that machine behind you…….I think another one of our issues with the way we manage is that we do everything too uniformly….Nature is usually the exact opposite and its like that for a reason……It creates a mosaic of “layers” within the plant communities. It gives that little quail or turkey somewhere to feed right beside somewhere to hide…..The less prey species have to travel the better. The more they move the more they usually die.

You know when you really get to lookin……there’s a chit load of different ones these critters…..The bright yellow ones are one of the more commons ones but they act like crack heads and wont sit still long enough for me to focus…….the camera that is.

You know it may seem really far fetched to talk about changing the way we raise cows to impact wildlife but in reality we really aren’t that far off with our “on the ground” resources. The chess pieces are on the board already…..it’s just the manner in which they're being used.……all that is really needed is a tweak in the stocking density we’re running…….Hypothetically speaking if Alabama were a monarchy and being run by a King then you could simply make a decree that all cattle stocking rates be cut down to 1/3 of their current levels and bada boom bada bing you’d probably see a big change just from that alone.

Here's what I mean.....If we were to take a big piece of property like the Sedgefield Plantation that just sold……The simplest way of managing to produce this natural effect I've been talking about would be to wrap the perimeter of the 6,000 acres in a low fence and then introduce a cattle herd that roamed the entire paddock at their free will along with the use of periodic fire…….The most important question would be how big to make the herd so that they leave the desired footprint without over doing it…….The way we are raising cattle now in most situations is simply “over doing it” from this perspective……

Again, if we were King would could just make everyone adhere to the this same rate and not let them run cattle at any higher rate than what we deemed was ideal…….We cant do that though but the concepts would still work the same if someone were creative enough to make it happen through different avenues. I think it mostly involves economics and psychology…..It’s also why I mentioned in another thread about making soil OM have a $$$ value associated with it.……..Probably just pipe dreaming but at least its dreaming BIG!! .....

Yellow crack-heads…….check. Look at his eyes how bugged out there are………Hmmmmm.

If there’s an app now that will recognize plants for you just by showing it to the camera……I wonder if anyone has made one for recognizing the different songbird sounds and inventorying them.....or just bird sounds in general??? That would be a simpler way of doing a diversity survey than chasing butterflies. I’d think you could use that as a measuring stick of sorts…….From a food perspective what is good for songbirds is probably good for turkey and quail, correct?

I have really enjoyed this thread CNC. You have me staring out the window at work all week waiting until the weekend so I can take a trip to the camp.

Your camp must be a weedy mess too 😆😆

This is more of the new growth from the areas I mowed midsummer……Deer are hammering it now eating the tops out just about any and everything. They target those tender "high energy" growing tips of the new growth.....I’m pretty sure this is goldenrod. Something is even nibbling on the ends of those vines....It may be from some kind of insect.

A little updated pic on the area where I was playing around creating "layers".......It’d be way simpler to just let cows do this….

Back in the beginning of the thread I was talking about the canopy effect and how to get your crop of biomass to efficiently decompose……That task has been accomplished…….With about 6 ish weeks to go until planting everything is lining up just about perfect.

I stomped down a little area to show where we're headed with it…..This would probably be excellent fawning cover…..most of it is 5ft tall or better… It’ll make a perfect biomass crop to plant my fall cereal grains and clover into. There’s still a little component of crabgrass in it that comes in at the very end that actually works great for making “hay”….. a LOT of ragweed.....lot of dog fennel. That Ranchworx machine would be so sweet for this process…..Talk about “gitter done”…….It’d be like standing around one evening in early Oct watching that cold front headed our way…….and someone hollers………”Food plots!?!?!?”......and then you say……”Hold my beer and watch this.……….Bam!!!!.......Food plots………”

OK..I am beginning to understand WHY you like weeds so much! You are Smoking it right???

Why would you think that?

I’m not sure how big that seed hopper was on those Ranchworx machines.....I dont think it was very big.... but you could make one of them even sweeter if you could install a long, flat seed hopper on it that would hold about 1500# of seed or more…….Load that sucker up…..set the spread rate how you like it and be like……

Here is a rough engineering blueprint of how I’m talking about this machine needs to look with the bigger seed bin…..I think it would work best to have the seed spread out in front of both rollers…….

Maybe someone will find the humor in the engineering blueprints……I started to mock up some “architectural drawings” of a cabin idea too but figured I spare folks……

While we’re designing this new machine though I got another idea that would make it better……So let’s say we’re gonna drop seed out of the front in a line the same width as the rollers as we go along….What would be cool is if there was another little wheel inside the seed bin that turned in some ratio with the big wheels so that as you went faster on the tractor the little wheel in the bin went faster and dropped more seed….and vice versa as you slowed down it slowed down and dropped less seed……That would keep you from trying to maintain an even speed all of the time like if the seed were being independently spread by another mechanism the way they have those made now.

Planting fall plots of cereal grains and clovers doesn’t have to be done with precision planting especially if the soil conditions are good. We really overcomplicate it. There’s no need in having to slow poke it along or worry about a bunch of excess chit to tear up and have to work on every time you use it…..You could simplify some of these existing machines down and increase productivity and ease of use greatly. You can spend numerous weekends at the club trying to plant or you can fill the hopper up on the machine above and go do it in a few hours.

Simplifying the process………All of these little plants already emerging are crimson clover……It’s just hiding out in the shade of the other plants……When it cools off the clover will explode …. Planting in October will be more like just “releasing” with a little overseeding.…..

That reminded me of this manure spreader...

That's a pretty cool old machine......

I cut down my sunn hemp on one field saturday and then subsoiled it. You talking about adding some biomass. It was 6 to 8 feet tall and thick... Even with the door opened all the way on the back of my flail mower, it would still plug it up. And we put out a load of horsemanure, which had a lot of saw dust in it on a clay field.

Take some pics next time.......It would be cool to see the progress.

I swear I think you could walk out here and take a picture of a different critter every day……I was doing it to liven up the thread with some pics and see how much diversity I could document but its kinda become a fun little challenge sorta like trapping or running trail cams……How many different critters are using this one field? Some of these critters are pretty cool looking and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen or paid any attention to some of them before……We talk a lot about “wildlife management” but we just mostly talk about deer and turkeys……There’s a lot of other wildlife out there apparently.

How much biological diversity do you have?

This is one of the prettiest ones yet to me……It’s either a Spring or Summer Azure I believe…….

I feel like this one might have been trying to send me a message......

C'mon hunting season...... (Sighhhh)

Something is wearing out chinaberry sprouts……I think its deer but sometimes bug damage can fool you……



Red Admiral

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail

Red Spotted Purple

Pearl Crescent

Instead of Mark Twain of weeds your new title should be Madam butterfly

Maybe so…….I know there’s a chit load of them……It’s really one in the same though with the diversity in the native vegetation. Looks like something tried to eat this one.


Palamedes Swallowtail

I think this critter is a hummingbird moth possibly………The field is about to have an explosion of yellow pretty soon with goldenrod blooming out. It’ll be interesting to see what shows up then….I’m pretty sure it’s all the different colors that’s guiding them each in like airport runway lights.....red, blue, purple, white, yellow......

I wonder what color doves see best???

I got a theory that kinda seems like “Well duhhh”…..but maybe it isn’t ……But like I was talking about in the thread about deer health…..I would imagine that the health of a turkey or quail is just as dynamic as far as their needs…. especially when you start looking at the different nutritional needs within the different stages of growth. Like I said it’s just a guess but I’d imagine that the timing of the blooming of these different native plant species coincides directly with the nutritional needs of the young birds at that particular time. Each of those plants are drawing in particular insect species and its very likely that those are the ones that contain their current nutrient needs…..The general concept is what I’m after here…..Right now and over the last few weeks there has been a real boom in the amount of flowering species and in turn the amount of insect life has boomed with it…….which ought to coincide with the time when young turkey chicks are growing full steam and need an abundance of food……which would make sense…….Nature has a design to what’s occurring and why.

I have a theory.

Sleepy Orange

Actually enjoy some of this...if nothing else it makes me think pretty hard 😀

Careful......too much of that can be dangerous.

Ya well i was referring to tractor time, not your rambling...🤣



Just kidding man... I like the pics too, I'm ready to go after some deer after this summer we've been through...

Check out all of the pollen on these two......just thought it was kinda cool.

Black Swallowtail

So on that idea of thinking real hard……..I’m not sure how many that is now but that’s quite a few different species of butterflies that I’ve counted within a 3-4 acre area and there are still others that just haven’t held still enough yet. I bet I’ve got at least half of all the butterflies listed for Alabama using this one field……probably more. If you’re focusing on the whole picture when it comes to things like turkey and quail management then that should make your wheels turn at least a little bit…….even with deer management……..

An abundance of diversity……..check.

Mother nature is amazing. I enjoyed the pictures and the read. I have seen much of this before on the QDMA web site. The old farmer that was experimenting with this died I think. I was sorry to see that site go to crap. Much more than just deer hunting. I think you were on there too. I do some of this, but on a small scale. Our place is red clay hills and draws, not much flat land to plant on. Mostly broom sage and briars. There is more than one wat to skin a cat.

Thanks!......Yeah, I was on the old QDMA forum for a good many years as Crimson N’ Camo……That’s where the CNC originated from. I hated to see what happened as well…..I don’t think it ended up benefiting anyone in the end and it ruined what was an awesome thing they had going with that forum.

It's about that time.........This one cant be very old.......

Southeastern Bush Cobra

Ole spreadin adder

I hope he's dead now! I would've crapped my pants walking up on that.

All seriousness, good photography CNC.

Thanks, I appreciate that……I usually take my camera along with me every morning when I let the dogs out to play and we typically see something new about everyday it seems like……My lab is hell on the critters………The snake was actually buried in a hole but she sniffed it out and got it pissed off….It was hissing loud and dang near sounded like a little rattle snake…….

I think she’s caught the same poor turtle 4 or 5 times now….She even bit off the edge of his shell and marked him so I know for sure it was him again this last time she brought it to me…..

I got some well needed tractor time today. Also put me a top on that sucker..

The caterpillars have been thick over the last few weeks……Oddly I don’t think I ever saw a single Army Worm that I know of…..The caterpillar numbers seem to dwindling so maybe their cycles are about done with now……Planting about 3 weeks away.

This video is about as entertaining as watching paint dry but the end product of what he's making is pretty cool....espcially when they use the cement mixer.......It's basically making his own "seed coat".........One of the things I've found very cool about watching the videos of this old Japanese farmer is that the seasons and climate where he lived in Japan match ours here in Alabama damn near perfectly.......and the vast majority of the seeds and plants he used are the very ones we use most often for food plotting......What he was doing was not "food plotting" for deer but A LOT can still be learned from his ideas, methods, timing, etc.........

I’m gonna go English Lit class on that last video for a minute…..

The first thing that jumps out at me is that the area this guy is living in is just outside of Boone, NC in the mountains…..We’re talking about the mountain, mountains too where bars live…..not ag land by any stretch of the imagination…..The old man said when they originally cleared the land though that it was so fertile it would grow 2-3 ear corn without any fertilizer……a peck to a hill…..Sounds like they were planting “three sisters” mounds….Then he went on to say that in just a few short years that the land got so poor it wouldn’t even sprout seed anymore due to the topsoil erosion. I think that is a very good representation of the potential fertility the land possesses and the drastic differences that can be created due to how we manage it……even in mountains of NC the land has the potential to be extremely fertile……

The next thing that I found really striking about what he said is that this degradation of the land kept on and on by his forefathers until the point that they were literally starving and it was only then that he sat down and pondered over what to do different…….That in and of itself is very telling about the stubbornness of the human psyche…….

Something else that jumped out at me about this video is when the old guy talked about not even using any “fertile” referring to fertilizer……You’re talking about someone that probably barely learned to read and write as kid if he even did.....and he doesn’t even know the right word to call fertilizer………Yet he could look and understand nature just the same as anyone else….....probably better due to the strong attachment to it....…It doesn’t take having a college degree to understand these things.

Started getting some things prepped to plant ahead of some rain in the next couple weeks……..



I’m gonna mostly just top sow these areas in clover like the pic below……same spot as above planted the same way……This is just pure crimson clover…….Gonna mix in a little white clover again this year.



A couple more spots where I’m gonna do the same thing…….The biggest portion of what I’ll plant in cereal grains and clover is still standing.

Got mine done today. Just Bush hogged at the house and drug down at the old lease. Partner wanted to disc at the new lease so we did. We will see how this year goes. First year I’ve never at least sprayed prior.

I havent spread any seed yet........Gonna go see what I can get tomorrow and just spread it over the top and maybe run the mower back over it one quick time......

I spread my seed regularly

I've never sprayed prior.. I just bushog and disc till no green is showing or will survive then plant

The rain worked out just right.......rained all night.......Noticed the ends of the cereal rye already starting to bust open this morning and a lot of volunteer crimson that's already established.......I should have a food plot a week from now.

Houston.......we have lift off.

Question for you CNC. I have a new piece of property that I have not sprayed but did recently bush hog. Would a be pointless to spread the seed or should I actually hire someone to come disk since.

I really dont have enough information to be able to give you an answer on this one.......The reason why is because every spot is gonna be a little different with the variables that are being dealt with......What I can say though is that most fields are likely gonna need to be worked with in some form or fashion for a season or two before you get things working just the way you want.

Sounds good I had it disked last year and it was fine thanks for the info

I watched this video the other day on behavioral psychology……It talked about how our brain divides things up and stores them into groups or boxes…..It used the rainbow as example…..A rainbow is a spectrum of an infinite number of shades of colors but for our sake we divide it into 7 groups and call this range of color orange and these yellow, etc……It talked about how one of the inherent flaws in doing this is that our brain then has trouble in distinguishing how similar two things might be that were on the boundaries of these defined lines……For example there may be two colors that are very, very similar but on either side of our imaginary yellow/orange line and so our brain categorizes them in separate groups and far more differently than they actually are………

I say that because this idea of disking or not is very similar in these regards to me. We have drawn a line in the sand in our minds and fail to see that in many situations what could be done is not that far apart……Here’s an example of what I mean by this……..Just because you take a disk out there doesn’t mean that you have to till it down to nothing but bare exposed soil……..It’s not an all or nothing decision of the yellow box or orange box…..There’s the option of running the disk over it enough to just lightly churn everything up a little if that is what someone wishes to do…….

That’s one of the things I like about the Firminator. I can adjust the disk so I lightly disturb the soil but still leave a good bit of residue on the surface. Planted in some loamy soil last weekend with 2 passes. First to spread fertilizer and another to plant grains/cultipack. Spread clover and let the rain work it in. If rain is not forecast I drag with chain link or run just the cultipacker after spreading small seeds.

Still have the option of disking if needed

Houston we are a GO for booster separation.......



............Houston?............Uhhhh, Houston??????


Hello?????.........Is this thing on???

Throw and hope 21 is a success.
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This is day 6 now and she is going green........

Here's a pretty good podcast from Mossy Oak talking a little about planting with these type methods as well as others...... There's still a fair amount of BS here and there but it just is what it is at the moment......These guys are still some of my favorites

https://mossyoakgamekeeper.com/podcasts/ep53-a-food-plot-roundtable-discussion/

I guess you gotta call it something but the problem with having all of these “methods” is that people lose focus on the underlying principles……They get hung up on things like whether this guy uses buckwheat with “his method”….. and this guy uses soybeans with “his method”…….etc………It ought to just be called “planting”.

The clover is coming in THICK……..Crimson clover is so easy to grow that it leaves me scratching my head as to how we can overcomplicate “clover” so much……The one possible negative here is that there’s so much crimson coming up between the volunteer seed and what I added to it that I’m afraid it may outcompete the white clover seedlings…….I may have actually been better off in this situation to not have added any more crimson to it and only threw in the white……That would have cut costs even more too…..This is one of the reasons I made a couple smaller plantings of pure white without any crimson.

Ok, I’m going to ask a question, how do you spray then spread seed if vegetation is neck high? Not looking for a three page lecture.

I havent sprayed in years now but if you do want to spray and you're having that issue then try mowing one time during June.......This is what I have started doing to help keep the vegetation more manageable.......You can also spray after you mow even though some folks will say you cant do that.......or you can lay it down in a mat and spray it.......

But how do seed in that tall stuff

In the past I've just ran through it with my seeder making a little bit narrower passes than what you might usually and everything worked out fine.......This year I mowed first and then spread the seed and it seemed to work out just as well.......

I guess my process that I'm doing has gotten whittled down to mow and spread seed in October........mow in June.........That's pretty well the extent of it now.

Did you spray it before mowing?

This is the first year I didn’t spray at all. So far so good.

No, I probably havent sprayed in 5 years now.........I havent added any P&K for maybe 3 or 4 years and this is my second year without adding any nitrogen......No spray, no fert

I do the run over & throw. I dont spray or mow. I run over area with 4 wheeler. Spread seed & fert and run over again. Ain't fancy but works.

I did that last year but had to go back and mow it because I couldnt see the deer in it.....especially right at dark

I’ve been reading and also listening to some podcasts on regenerative ag lately. Most are really big on no inputs of synthetic fertilizer or herbicides. The other thing I’ve noticed is that many of them are using blends of 10 or more varieties of seed. I’ve seen some with as many as 17 varieties but they admit that some plants may not show up.

Please don’t consider that normal agriculture practices. That’s just hogwash for deer plots

Ain't got a clue what's right or wrong but I know a dog in the fight when I see one 🤣

I’m not totally against spraying or adding fertilizer. But if I can reduce my fertilizer costs in the future it’s interesting. We rent a field to a farmer who does a cotton/peanut rotation so I’m kind of familiar with what goes into production ag, at least in our area.

My current method is to spray, mow, spread fertilizer then make a single pass with the Firminator using the least amount of angle in the gangs as needed, usually 5-10 degrees. I’m getting anywhere from 40-100% coverage of crop residue as a mulch after the single pass. Goal is to keep as much surface cover as possible over the entire year.

I’ve got several years of soil sample results on one property and an initial base line this year on another. If things improve and I can cut my fertilizer, great. If not, I’ll burn the thatch off in a couple of years and run a set of disks through it buried to the hub and maybe break out the disc plow and roll everything over. I also know I’m generally working with some pretty good soils to begin with. JohnG and those guys working with prairie soils are wrestling with a totally different beast.

One common theme I hear in a lot of habitat discussion is “site specific”. If I can save a little money, great. If not I can resume planting using traditional methods. Your mileage may vary and if it does great.

I have a field that I didn’t plant last year that I’m going to try this on tomorrow. I would disc or drill but it has several stumps in it. Going to seed/fert heavily and mow. We’ll see

So here’s what I don’t get about saying “If it’ll work”……..Saying that is like we’re starting from the premise that the Earth was once barren and void of plant life……and then one day man invented the “plow” and he was therefore able to suddenly turn a world of dust into an oasis of lush plant life………….But its just the opposite……Nature has been growing plants very effectively and pretty much without fail for eons without needing to do all of this other stuff to make it work…..So when you say “Will it or can it work?”…….I think that question has already been answered and you have the example……The real question is “Can YOU figure out how to make what you’re wanting to do work?”………There’s really no question about “can it”………

That's real awesome. Wheat grows in the cracks on my driveway were I blow the seed out the back of my truck bed.

What a joke.

Is that an argument for, or against this technique? It could be either.

Most of Goatkiller's posts are about the equivalent of a Molotov cocktail made in an empty bottle of OE.......He really needs to work on that.

If you throw rye out in your lawn before the next rain it will be green all winter.....

36 pages of essentially that..... and you'd think there wouldn't be much more to talk about.

Look it came up!

Stay awesome.

You’re just making stuff up…..You seem to think differently in other threads……..Here’s just one of your comments recently……Doesn’t sound to me as if it’s as simple as you’re making it out to be?

Took this pic at a place I went tracking……There’s about three acres behind me that looks like the bottom of the pic while the perimeter looks like the top …….I once was blind but now I see……or maybe I don’t.

Nah. You’re blind as hell

But he can grow a really nice stand of weeds.

My kids overseeded my lawn last weekend for winter. CNC could probably learn something from a 12 year old.... they did a fine job with very little and basic instruction.

What could there be to discuss that would require 36 pages of pictures of weeds and discussion of technique?

Total joke is what this is.

That picture got my allergies going just looking at it.

No schit. Mine too

Honestly I thought that pic of goldenrod was beautiful.

Tallest dog fennel I ever seen…. Damn if it ain’t

Here is a couple of pictures of our larger fields using the Throw 'n Mow method and seeded three weeks ago yesterday. Timing was great and had good rain the week after planting. We went to the T 'n M method back in '18 and the results are looking great!

Good looking stand.

Spray and cut before seeding, or what?

Sprayed with Glyphosate about two weeks before planting. Threw the larger seed, WMS TriticOat & AWP, into the standing vegetation, bush hog over the top of the larger seed. Then we threw the smaller seeds, Nitro Radish and Clovers, over the bush hogged thatch and culitpacked for good measure.

I can get pictures of deer all day in a hay field.

I'm seriously not picking on you CNC... it might shock you or anyone else for that matter that I throw and mowed a patch last weekend. I couldn't get the disk and big tractor into the plot because of the muddy roads. My ground is dry as talc powder but I have some road issues leftover from the wet year we've had.

Honest Injun.... Looks thin to me CNC. Are you gonna go back and throw some more seed on it and bush hog down that 12 inch long stuff the deer don't eat? Doesn't look like the deer are utilizing your plot to me despite the picture with a few in it. Couple more weeks of dry weather in the forecast will make things worse not better IMO.

I am not going to live in a glass house my own plots look like crap. I planted a few weeks ago and it was too early IMO I should have waited. I just couldn't do it the seed store was hollering at me saying they were going to sell my seed/fert to someone else if I didn't come pick it up. I don't expect them to store it for me so that's probably fair but everyone is so hyper to plant early that was a mistake for me. Also to be fair it's a long way from the TN line to South AL so planting late is not a blanket answer for everyone on this site we planted some of our ground in Middle TN early and it has done fine.

Yeah, it is starting to get a little dry but I couldn’t be any happier with how my field is doing……It’s coming in just about as thick in crimson clover as I think a field possibly could…..It’s all being heavily utilized too…….I’ve had new deer showing up on camera for a couple weeks and picked up another new 6 pt just a few nights ago…….…..I actually think that as they are hoofing the ground and helping to process the “hay” I put down that they’re stimulating more volunteer crimson clover to sprout……This exclusion cage has been out about 12 days now and you can already see the difference……..

Funny you say that but I have two leases 2.5 miles apart. New lease partner wanted to disc the new property so we did. Planted both properties right before the last hurricane. Neither property got over 1/2 of rain but guess which property had to be over seeded cause it looked like shucks? The one that was disced seeded and drug or the one I literally seeded and drug live standing plant material down on?

That seems like just plain Jane common sense that having a layer of hay across your field helps conserve more soil moisture than not having one but there’s such a larger psychological hurdle for most people to get over that they somehow dismiss that fact as even being relevant to them.

Here’s something else I’ll add too about the situation Goatkiller……This is the second season of attempting to go completely fertilizer free…….I could truly still use some nitrogen added in at planting though…….The only way to see that was to try it…….It’s not bad, bad but I’m seeing a period of time where the cereal rye is showing some N deficiency……What’s happening is that the hay crop that gets put down hits a stage where its sucking nitrogen during a rapid decomposition process……I think late September early October is probably at the tail end of when the variables are right for peak decomposition to occur……high temp and high moisture periods at the end of summer…….So from about day 10-20 after seedling emergence I’m seeing that effect plant growth and still is to some degree……It seems to be growing out of it now but mixing in some 34-0-0 with my seed at planting would have probably produced a little better results…….I need more summer legumes to help counter this…….I may go back by the seed store and pick up a little more white clover to top sow here soon…..I do agree with you that some plants do better when it gets cooler…..I think that is especially the case with clover.

This may be what I'm experiencing. My plots that were planted 2 weeks prior to my neighbor look awful compared to his. Mine were planted into heavy straw/residue and his were disked clean. I actually applied more N at planting than he did. I planted using the same method on another property and have similar results. I've added 33 units of N to some of those plots and they are starting to look better.

Guess I need to incorporate more 33-0-0 at planting when I have a heavy residue at the surface.

CNC, I know you do T&M and so do I for the past 6 years or so. If you had access to a no till drill, would you quit T&M and go that route. I'm not talking about disking, just drill through the thatch?

You know its funny you asked that because I was just thinking about that same thing……I guess it would just depend a lot on the situation but if we’re talking about a scenario where it’s a hunting club or a private landowner who is only planting small 1-3 acre fall plots scattered across a few thousand acres or more then I don’t think I would use a drill even if I had one available….I for sure wouldn’t if you’re talking about having to buy one JUST for fall plots…..It just seems like it would be more cumbersome and slow to haul that thing around from plot to plot just to plant cereals, clovers, and brassicas…...also just a lot of unnecessary cost and maintenance……Now, if it were maybe a private landowner who had a couple hundred acres of sho nuff ag fields and they also wanted to incorporate a high end summer planting program as well then I would probably look to a drill as being the better option

Let me add one more thing to that……..Hopefully this doesnt come across as arrogant but I say that knowing or with a strong belief that I myself can take each situation or individual plot and finagle each one the way it needs finagling in order to make T&M be successful whether it be sand or clay or regardless of its current conditions good or bad………For someone who may not have as good of a grasp of the concepts and ideas then a drill would probably be a much simpler way for them to insure success……

I don’t know if this is the case with your situation but something to look at moving forward is the amount or ratio of summer “grass” that is growing in your fields…….If you have a situation for example where maybe you have a field of mostly bahiagrass putting out large amount of carbon during the summer with few broadleafs and legumes mixed in…..then you’re gonna be dealing with a large nitrogen deficit going into the fall that must be overcome before it stops robbing it away from your fall crop as all of that carbon is trying to be decomposed…..To reduce that impact and bring everything into a better balance….you would want to do something like maybe spray a grass select herbicide at some point during the spring or summer with the goal of reducing the carbon output from the grasses…….Ideally I think you want about 1/3 grass…….1/3 broadleaf…….1/3 legume mix growing…..

I think having a solid stand of clover growing with your cereals really helps to feed the cereals nitrogen once it is well established too……If you look around in the pic close you’ll see some of the rye that was firing yellow on the ends but most of it is doing fine……Its wasn’t just yellowing though but I also noticed the individual rye plants were losing vigor/turgor pressure and not standing up erect……I don’t know if it means anything but some of the blades were spiraling too……All in all though everything has pretty good color to be running on its on……..We could definitely use a shot of rain soon

Something else I was thinking about I forgot to add……….What would have likely made my planting this year ideal would have been if I had come across the top of it the same day I spread my seed with some chicken litter……. Given the choice between a drill or a spreader truck…….I’d probably spend the money on the spreader truck or whatever equipment best fit the size and access of the food plots……You could take this to another level with some litter……… I’m saying this under the assumption that litter doesn’t hurt turkey populations and leaving that for another debate.

While we’re on this topic of nitrogen tie up……..Here’s something else that should likely be considered……..I think you have a window of time after the summer vegetation has been put to the ground that is optimal for getting your seed up and growing before this N tie up occurs…….After the summer “hay” has been on the ground for a couple weeks or so then it enters a phase of really sucking N where its not a good environment to establish new seedlings in…….I went back and spread a little more rye around the outside perimeter of the field a couple weeks after everything initially came up and I didn’t see anywhere near the establishment and jump for that seeding as my initial one. I think you need to put your seed out at the same time you put the hay to ground and then wait to do any other top sowing until after this decomposition drag has passed. It may sound a little funny but its like anything else in nature and there is a certain time when things are ripe to sow your seed and times when it aint.

Something about 257’s method for his plots to take note of in this regards is that he is not growing anything past his cereal grains growing off in the early summer…..which means that come fall planting time he is well past any nitrogen issues from currently decomposing carbon… We could debate over whether that is a good thing overall but for the sake of N tie up it looks to work well ….If you watch some videos on composting…..green and brown……etc……..All of that is done ahead of time and then applied to the planting bed so that you still get all of the benefits of high soil organic matter etc…but this decomposition process and nitrogen suck is not occurring and taking away from any current plant growth…….Its a little bit a different pickle though dealing with food plots compared to raised vegetable beds in this regards.

This area is a heavy red clay…….I keep it mowed during the summer for the most part……I’m not exactly sure what kind of grass it is…….but I use the area just to grow some additional clover forage and establishing it is as easy as just spreading it……This is what comes to my mind when we're having the discussion about all of the deep ripping and sich that needs to be done in order to be able to grow clover in clay…… ….…This will keep filling in and be a solid stand of crimson clover in another month or so…….This would be so easy for folks to do around their lakes, down their driveway ROW’s, etc……and provide lots of additional forage

The white clover is slooowly creeping in......This area was a blackberry thicket last spring...........

Another week's growth..........If you dont put out an exclusion cage then you cant really get a good idea of what is happening......The rest of the field looks the same day after day while the basket gets taller and taller......I'm very pleased with how everything is handling the browsing pressure.....I think that layer of thatch actually helps to keep the deer from eating the plants down to the dirt.....it leaves more or the plant intact to recover.

12/8 Update............Finally got some rain......It gets dry quick in this sand. The field was getting a little yellowy as a result but its rebounding quickly and already seems to be perking up.

My T&M field is yellowing a bit as well, because like yours it is mostly sand. I’ll be hitting it this week with a little N.

Turnips are the size of baseballs and the radishes are about a foot long now. Deer in it every night, in fact there were 2 bucks when I drove home late last night. Just wish it was in a place I could really hunt it, but I know it’s bringing lots of deer through my 40.

Personally, I'm not impressed even a little bit - but for someone looking to take shortcuts the clover came up well I will give you that.

After talking to my lease manager, it is clear I am not putting out enough fertilizer. I think its enough to get the plots up and running, but... even with nitrogen fixing plants growing, I still see some yellowing. I have clover growing on nearly all the plots now, and expect that to help as we progress.

What is getting pounded right now are brassica's. And my whitetail clover/fusion plots. I just broadcast 12 pounds of plot spike clover, 9 pounds of Fusion, and 300 pounds of Triple 17 last weekend on some of my fields. I have 18 pounds of Whitetail clover coming today and plan to broadcast that and get some urea.

Basically I keep broadcasting something, fusion, whitetail clover/fusion, Durana or Plot Spike through hunting season, especially in places where its thin, or in fields that are being pounded. Goal is to be all clover in the spring. Then I can cut, fertilize, spray and maintain.

I could cut and stripe that with my flail mower.....LOL!!

CNC I like your edges around your plots. That was a recommendation our biologist made, but we have a hard time with that, because most of ours are in "woods" to have natural vegetation around the edges. We dont' see lots of deer in our fields, but from the feedback I am getting, people are seeing deer in the fields this year.

Next year we have to work on getting stands pulled back off them better. We just ran out of time this year.

Really about the only issue I'm having is just a matter of scale......I need a bigger field to keep up with the browsing pressure.....

What kind of clover did you plant? My lease manager said I should try balansa and frosty berseem, along with crimson of course. I mainly plant whitetail, Durana and plot spike. The Durana seems to be a little slower out of the gate than the other two.

And I have the same issue on my fields with mostly clover. High usage. I have gone back and broadcast additional seed and then added fertilizer last weekend ahead of the rain.

That's all crimson clover you see in the pic.....There's a lot of cereal rye in there too but the deer have eaten down and the clover has filled in

Next year I think I am buying bulk seed and mixing my own. I am going to go heavy on radish and purple top tunips, get awnless wheat and then add in some clovers. I figure after this year I should have very good stands of clover in almost all my fields.

Then I will try to mow them 3 or 4 times in the spring and early summer to add additional organic material to the top of the soil. Either than or I will have to come back in with Sunn Hemp and then cut it before it gets to tall.

Just looking at those pictures I don't think you have what I would consider too much browsing pressure. If you make it bigger all that is going to do is get everything more growth on it and deer will use it less IMO.

I'm going to post some pictures soon as I figure out how to remove all the meta data and you'll see browsing pressure. Looks like astro turf.

Here’s the problem with radishes and turnips…..Let’s say I would have added a smattering of these brassicas to the mix in my field…..It would have provided a little additional food but by this time in the game my brassicas would already be eaten down like my cereal rye and for the most part that’s that with brassicas……Now, if you say ok I’m gonna increase the amount of brassicas I add into the mix then what will quickly happen is that you’ll end up with nothing but a field of brassicas….and a few lbs of brassicas go a long ways……What you need for brassicas to really shine is somewhere you have a lot of acreage in one spot that can be planted where you can keep the ratio of brassicas in the mix low enough to not choke out your clover and cereal grains but still producing significant tonnage of brassica forage.

Lockjaw, it’s my understanding that that N fixed by the bacteria on the clover roots are not immediately available to companion plants. Once the legumes are terminated the N becomes available

I went by universal and got some DAP and urea yesterday to broadcast. Dap I put on the fields with heavy clover. The problem is those fields are mowed. One of them I have 6 inches or more of growth in the utilization cage and it's just basically an inch tall everywhere else. I added a bag of fusion to it last weekend hoping. The chicory would help.

What I expect is to come back in the spring and mow these fields and have the clover start popping. I wanted heavy brassica to create organic material and also to help loosen the soil.

I expect the clover to establish under the brassica and cereal grains. On fields I have it established already, the clover is doing much better, except on the small fields. Those are mowed.

My soil tests don't call for the 3rd ingredient in fertilizer, so Dap which is 18-46-0 and urea which is 46-0-0 are all I need. And it's much more potent then regular fertilizer.

That could be part of my issue. I'm still learning. And experimenting. My goal is to come into spring with clover on most all the plots rather than planting peas/beans.

And I'm trying to figure out what the deer prefer. Up until 3 years ago, all they planted was rye grass.

How about now?? The rain and warm weather has got the cereal rye growth out pacing browsing pressure a little better now. You can see it shooting back up through the clover everywhere

My fields at the lease look great but my deer have abandoned them since I hit them with AN not sure what’s going on.

Its hard to say for sure but if you add enough of it the strong ammonia smell may temporarily act like milorgranite......I'm sure it'll be short lived if so.

That may be why stuff is off mine but the rain should have dissolved it. The urea was very fine compared to 34-0-0. It sure did turn the cereal grains a deep rich green.

They'll be back.......It may give it a break for a few days and let it get some growth on it.

Yeah it’ll look like this

My biggest field is half an acre. I planted 1 bag of cereal grains and one bag of a brassica blend. Then it has rows of plot spike, whitetail and durana clover. Then I added more radish and forage collards.

It's being used, but the deer aren't depleting it. None of my big fields have been. What had been is smaller fields that had fusion on it.

Most reviews say durana is slow out of the gate, and that's what I'm seeing. My pure whitetail clover field is mowed. Tryi.g to get year round clover. Then each fall I can supplement with cream grains and brassica in some form
Plus some annual clovers.

The Dap and urea have really perked up my fields. They are all a deep dark rich green and the ones that were eaten down are rebounding in a hurry.

im ready for some more tractor time..

Should have one heck of a spring clover plot this year when things start warming up. The deer have it eaten down pretty good right now but there's still a real solid stand that's established. As soon as it starts to turn spring it'll go boom....

Post season....Feb 11

My fields have been pounded this month. Going out today to broadcast chic magnet and put out minerals.

They got mine ate back to the thatch stubble but it’s a pretty solid carpet of crimson clover covering the field. I think as they’ve ate the cereal rye back the crimson has filled in more and more.



For whatever reason this little area is already jumping and what the whole field should do here in a few weeks as soil temps rise. It ought to be dang near picturesque by the end of spring when crimson seed heads start popping. Notice the good "color"

My fields with clover are mowed. I've got to add something to them next year to increase fall production.

There comes a point where all you can really add is acreage. I try to have my soil continually becoming more fertile over time but I doubt I will ever get to a point where my couple acre plot is not eaten down come Feb no matter what I do. I have half the deer using it now that I used to and its much more fertile yet they still keep it browsed down this time of year. I’ve come to the conclusion that judging anything about the deer density from browsing pressure on small food plots is pretty much useless. It doesn’t take very many deer using a food plot to keep it mowed down. One of the most important things is how the vegetation handles the grazing and responds to it. Does it get stressed out by it or does it stay lush and just keep putting back out more forage? How quickly does it respond?

There’s always threads about this time about what you will do differently next year…..Here’s what I’m looking at doing a little differently.

Things change as time goes on in a soil building process. I used to not even be able to grow clover in this field. Over the last few years though the crimson clover seems to be thriving more and more and this past year it has established thick and grown extremely well. I mixed in a little bit of white clover into the mix with it but I’m afraid the crimson is out competing it on getting established. We’ll see as the spring and summer progresses just how much of the white “stuck” but what I think I’m gonna do differently now next year is to let the crimson clover come back strictly by reseeding and not spread any more fall crimson seed. Instead I’m gonna cut it out of my mix and just broadcast some cereal rye with white clover and see if the established ratio balances better. I should still have plenty of crimson come back on its own.

What I can see from being on the property yesterday is they are still eating the radishes and turnips. They are also eating the wheat. This season was more working towards getting clover and chicory established on most of the plots. This year I'm going with awnless wheat and some annual clovers, and radish's, turnips and kale. I have the fertilizer situation figured out.

The clover and chicory will handle the spring and summer browsing, then the other will pick up on the fall.

This is my first year on the new place but they love turnips here. Pretty often I walk out to the field in the evening and there will be a deer with what looks like a baseball in it’s mouth. They are munching the bulbs like crazy.

I’ve grown spring turnips before for the purpose of just doing a soil building experiment. I’ll have to go back and see exactly when I spread the seed but I believe it was late April or early May as my cereal grains were heading out. It did pretty well at producing some rotten vegetable type biomass to add back to the mix. What I’m really shooting for with having a thriving rotation of clover being a key part of my planting is cheap organic nitrogen.

Here's just some ramblings on some bigger concepts as the Feb sky here in Macon Co fills with smoke…….

So we’re at a point in the year now where we need to “reset succession”……Basically we have a year’s worth of carbon biomass that we’ve accumulated on the land’s surface and we need to get it out of the way so that the new spring growth can freely and efficiently emerge in the weeks to come. I think how we go about handling this biomass has big impacts on the fertility of the cycle over time. Let’s say in one situation I take and recycle this biomass back the soil and in another situation I take and set it on fire…….It would seem to be a pretty simple math equation on what happens if we do this year after year……In the situation of fire I think you rob the soil of a LOT of carbon which robs the soil of productivity. What do we do with the "carbon" in the picture? Burn it or feed it to the soil?




Look at how tall and thick the vegetation has become from recycling the vegetation back to the soil. The question really becomes…….What is the most efficient way of getting the vegetation to the ground??....Tractor?.......Buffalo??

Focus on the big concepts at play here……We’ve got a big bunch of above ground carbon that we’ve grown off and its not hard to see how that our long term management would be more productive if we can find ways to efficiently put it to the ground and convert it to black dirt. Mechanical means become more limited the larger the scale gets.

Biomass management……That’s what a lot of this boils down to whether it be food plots or native understory vegetation. A drip torch is an easy way of dealing with it but at what long term cost to soil productivity?

I can tell you for certain, a flail mower would mulch up what you have there into particles that will decompose easily, but aren't so big or thick to prevent new growth from emerging. I did the bush hog thing the year prior to getting my flail mower, and it cuts fine, but.... I just get a more even and finely mulched material to recycle. I was amazed last year to see what it did to 6 to 8 feet tall sunn hemp. That is a touch stemmed plant when its tall, and it handled it no problem. I wish I could have put seed out first, but it was to thick to try to broadcast into.

I do like turnips and radishes for biomass too. I grew some radishes this year that could have been a whitetail institute video and I see something is eating them too. I think that is also a good forage to plant. Hoping the cereal grains will take off so I can mow them in a month or so and turn that into clover fertilizer.

Then in the fall, I will alter my planting to make sure I have annual clovers to add nitrogen back.

I would love to do a burn on my place, but that would be more to kill sweet gum, and get rid of the pine needles. If there is vegetation growing, and I can knock it down, usually with a bush hog first, then I can mulch whatever grows with the flail mower. By far, I prefer to cut a field with a flail mower. Much smaller particles. And its more evenly distributed. Sort of like throwing seed by hand versus a spreader. The biggest obstacle for a flail mower is running it low and hitting rocks.

I will post some before and after pic's once I start cutting.

We’re gonna use Watusi ……..Their giant horns will help to quickly lay massive amounts of vegetation down as they feed along…… like being equipped with their own “flail mowers”…….

That last comment was a little bit of a joke but not a joke……Once you get this carbon formula figured out and how the cycle builds on itself……then your real problems revolve around how to deal with more and more biomass. You may go from something easy to handle in the first few years to suddenly finding yourself in a jungle…..

I dont think we are really following the “natural” cycles of things using fire the way we perceive to be doing. Not to say that it didn’t have its place but the big cog in the wheel here that we are missing is the fact that a huge portion of this understory biomass was recycled back to the soil by large herding animals. It probably used to be a situation where something like 70-80% of this biomass we’re talking about here was either consumed, processed, and pooped out by herders or it was trampled down to the ground by them and only a fraction of it was burned in fire…….In this day and age we have a situation where virtually 90-100% of the carbon is burning in fire every year or two on many properties. That may not seem like a big deal unless you understand how important that carbon is to soil fertility.

As this process builds on itself and biomass production increases more and more it makes mechanical means of dealing with it become more and more cumbersome. While it definitely wont be a solution for everyone…..using some kind of herding/grazing animal just seems like the simplest solution. I’m getting a little bit of woody encroachment coming into this area that will need to be dealt with this year. This is where I could see using fire in the rotation as a tool to deal with such things in specific situations or on a less frequent rotation. Imagine looking at a few hundred acres of this though with just you and a 6 ft flail mower. Even using a tractor and bushhog gets rough and tough on equipment….“Scale” is gonna be a big factor. What is simple on a few acres will be far different when its scaled up.

What is interesting is in the stuff the biologist sent me, one of the things they would like to see is a 3 year rotation on bush hogging understory. So each year you do a certain section or sections, then in year 2 you do different ones, year 3 others and then in year 4 start over. What I noticed last year is when I went back into food plots that I had not disked for over a year, and ran a subsoiler through were earthworms. I did not see them in soil that I had disked before. I know worm casings are very beneficial, hence my move to the flail mower and less seed bed prep.

To me this is alot like cutting down a tree. If you cut it down and leave it, yes it will eventually decompose, but it may take many years. You could also run over it with a forestry mulcher, which will speed up the process, because of smaller particles. I did some major tree pruning many years ago on a rental property, and I was utterly amazed how I could take a huge pile of limbs, run them thru a chipper and reduce those huge piles to very small piles of mulch. This is why I like the flail mower. I don't think I will ever have an issue of having to much biomass on any of my fields. Granted I subsoiled them and disked them after, but the fields I had sunn hemp on last year really don't have any of it visible. It's a pretty stringy stemy plant, and I had alot of biomass sitting on top of the ground before I did any work.

I noticed my first year when I came out in the spring and bush hogged the cereal grains from the previous fall, that while it did indeed cut them down, it left large clumps which even after disking still stayed on top of the soil and were probably disked again in the fall before I really started to see some decomposition. So the smaller I can get the biomass particle, in my mind, the quicker it gets broken down and incorporated into the soil.

I see this on the hunting lease alot, where they shred material from bucking trees and even leave large piles of logs. Those take a really long time to break down. Our skid steer guy pushed off a log deck 2 falls ago. I planted it, and didn't get much out of it. This year I went back and limed it and subsoiled it, but what is wild is there are still large chunks of wood in the ground. I got better production this year than last, but it still is not like what I get off a green field. And I sometimes wonder if some of that is not unlike pulling a log out of a swamp. It really doesn't decompose well below ground level.

Because I have such a small percentage of my lease planted, we try to plant anything we can. And we also want something growing there year round that can keep up with browse pressure and provide very high nutrition. I wish I had some fields large enough to effectively plant soybeans or clay peas that could go to pods.

I do think in a few years I won't need to be adding fertilizer like I am now. It's getting the plant mix right so one crop provides what the next one needs. I like the brassica's and so do the deer, but they use a lot of nutrients. Maybe this fall I will try a couple plots without them and see what the deer do with just clovers and wheat. What I notice in the summer is the deer will come to the clover plots and eat for a while, like half an hour or more. Alot of time this occurs at night, but sometimes during the day as well. They also like the chicory. All my deer seem to like a leafy green.

That sounds like a good idea.......You gotta do what you can and its why its so important to understand the concepts at play. You may have different constraints than someone else but the end goals are the same....It's how you adapt to get there......

A little more about this concept of understory production……..Something I’ve come to realize over the years as I’ve tracked through more and more understories across an area of the state where the black belt transitions into sand……is that when we think about the better soils producing better deer herds and better bucks, etc……Yes, the soil is the engine that is driving the cycle but it’s indirectly impacting the deer and wildlife……The next link in the chain and the one that has DIRECT impact on the animals is the understory and vegetation that's produced from that "fertility". What I have noticed from tracking through it is that the better soil produces a hell of lot more intense understory and its this understory that in turn has the ability to support more deer. The more fertile the soil is…..the more it’s able to produce dense tonnage of forage and cover and the more its able to grow different species of plants that the lesser soil is not. So we cant change the underlying soil from sand to prairie soil but what we can do is manage the lesser soil to be more fertile and still produce very vibrant understories……Just like with the food plotting though…..the fertility of these lesser soils is heavily impacted by soil organic matter.

Going back to some of the other things you mentioned Lockjaw about the speed at which this biomass decomposes and processing it up……There’s a few variables at play here. Probably the biggest factor in the equation is the condition of the soil microbial community. If you dig much into some of the no-till farming stuff what you see happen is that as the soil life becomes more numerous and vibrant the more dead plant matter its able to consume and recycle in a faster amount of time. A lot of this idea of “fertility” comes from the soil life and its ability to recycle and process this carbon. I think we impact the vibrancy of it in a lot more ways than we recognize.

Another big factor at play here in the decomposition process we’re talking about is what’s called C:N ratio……For every so many “X” units of carbon you add back you need “Y” amount of nitrogen to balance out the equation and allow efficient decomposition. It’s actually some of the microbial life that uses the N but that another rabbit hole…..One of the reasons you see decomposition happen so slow in some situations like where mulching has taken place is because you are adding a LOT of processed carbon back at one time without the accompanying nitrogen……This bogs down the process like flooding a carburetor. Too much C without enough N

So in a nutshell if you want to feed massive amounts of carbon into the soil quickly and efficiently then you have to bring in the nitrogen as well in some form or fashion. This is where your buffalo, elk, sheep poop used to come into play along with your legumes. This manuring process also stimulated that microbial community as well as stimulating the seed bank. This process is what is trying to be simulated when we talk about improving and growing soil.

This is a little spot I showed in an earlier pic that I’m gonna post again just to make a point about something. This spot hasn’t had an exclusion cage around it or anything…..its exposed to browsing just the same as the rest of the field. When I look around at a field something like this jumps out at me .....I ask myself…….”Hmmm, why is that area growing so much better than the rest of the field?”………Because what this picture tells me is that there is still more potential …..and if I understand what is causing it in this one little spot then maybe I can take that and figure out a way to recreate the same conditions across the rest of the field. I have a hunch as to what is causing it and I think it has something to do with the hole you see in the background that I let my dogs dig last fall. They would have had their butts facing the camera as they were digging. I'll explain more.......

That last pic is very interesting. Are you hinting around that we need to disc everything?

As far as prescribed burning, I feel I need to do it yearly due to all the pinestraw. Does burning it not increase the PH through eliminating the acidic straw? Is my thinking wrong?

I bought a no till drill two years ago and have used it primarily on a big lease that I’m in. It works great but I had just as much success broadcasting seed into grass before a rain. Mother Nature has been doing this forever and she doesn’t use any implements. The main benefit of the drill is using less seed. It seems as if every seed that is drilled will come up. I’ve given thought to selling it.

This is just a guess but here’s what I think may be causing that particular area to grow better and it’s a little bit of a catch 22…….

For about a decade now I’ve been building top soil on this field and as I’ve done so there’s been a black layer of dirt that has been building over time getting deeper and darker. Currently its probably 10-12 inches thick across much of the field. That black layer of organic soil is a big nutrient reserve that acts like a slow release fertilizer as decomposition is taking place. As my dogs started digging that hole they took that black layer…….dug it up…. and piled it up behind them. What I think you are seeing is the rapid burning of that black dirt and the accompanying nutrient release. You’re seeing a part of that built up nutrient reserve being rapidly released.

The reason that it’s a little bit of a catch 22 is this……..When you’re talking about recreating that condition across the whole field what you would in essence be doing would be great for a very short period of time but devastating over the long term. Its all a matter of an accounting equation here and whether you are burning it faster than you’re adding it. I could take and stir up this black layer of soil and cause a rapid short term release of nutrients but if I do it over and over then I’ll be right back where I started a decade ago.

Now keep in mind what I’m about to say would only be something to consider once a substantial nutrient reserve was built up in the soil but there’s likely a sweet spot to this where if you could go in once or maybe even twice a year and simply stimulate the top one inch of residue and soil then you would provide the new plants with a little nutrient release without running into a long term deficit. Think about buffalo hooves passing through and moving on……

What I think would really benefit the field would be adding a manure application. I see what would happen if the system were fed more nutrients… I haven’t added anything to this… I think you have to be careful about using synthetics once you get a field to a certain point though. You have to take into consideration that it’s the soil life that’s causing this cycle to go round and round and if your heavy application of synthetic fert zaps a bunch of it then you haven’t really gained in long term fertility.

Could be something as simple as where a coyote pissed or s***. Deer ate all around it.

That's a plausible option I guess....I tend to believe there's something else going on though than just some coyote pee. Is that spot not being browsed at the same rate as the surrounding area or is it producing forage at a faster rate?

Dgallow back in the day used to talk about having to recalibrate your eyes to see things differently when you look a field or an understory.…… The picture below is one that I always look back on and see exactly what he meant by that. This picture is probably from 10 -12 years ago and it was of a little spot where I was gonna try to grow some sunflowers one summer. The funny thing about the picture is that at the time I originally posted it way back when, I was doing so because I was excited to show the little seedlings that were emerging and that was all I saw……Years later when I look at the same picture, I don’t even hardly notice the plants or care what they may be because of the erosion that’s taking place around it on a near gulley washing level. You have to recalibrate your eyes to see the things that are the most important. Far too often we get hung up on what magic bean to plant to fix our problems instead of seeing the real issues at hand

I stand corrected!!.......It wasn’t just where a coyote had pooped……its where one had pooped over and over in the same spot……. Good call Detective!...........

So looking at our little spot that’s doing better than the rest of the field it would appear that what we need is more poop…….



It still isn’t JUST as simple as a coyote pooped there though…..

Yes I have to tailor what I plant to take advantage of what is decomposing. This is why I started with beans and peas in the spring, and then went to cereals and brassica's in the fall. The problem was I don't have big enough plots to really plant peas and beans and not have the deer mow them down in a week or two. And that is what I saw with clay peas. The deer would leave them alone until August, and then one weekend, I have a beautiful stand, and the next, all that was there were stems. So I tinkered around some, and really the solution is a mix if I want to do that. Buckwheat, soybeans, clay peas and sunn hemp. All fix nitrogen, and the deer will eat all 4, the least consumed one being the buckwheat.

That works well, and gives me a ton of biomass, but, when I get towards fall, there is no way to broadcast seed into it and then mow it. It's just to thick. Which means I have to mow it, disk it, and then plant it. I want to get out of disking, because one of the things I want in my soil is worms, and disking kills them.

What I have been trying stop doing is what I see every club do. They plant peas in the spring, and then in August, they go and mow them down, spray the fields with roundup and then its another month before anything is planted. So just about the time the deer are really using the plot, you mow down their food, and its 6 weeks before anything viable is there. This is when, especially if August is dry, the deer are struggling in the woods to find good succulent native browse and we are transitioning over to mast.

So I tried broadcasting cereal grains and brassica's into standing beans. That works pretty well. I could probably do this on a couple of my fields. Then its just a rotation each time I plant. But what I also found is I needed something better on the small plots. And this is where I got into the Whitetail clover and Fusion. I actually prefer Fusion, but you have to be careful with broadleaf herbicide, get a little hot and you will kill all the chicory. What I found with these two plantings is the deer hammer them. Especially in August, they seem to really like the chicory. And they stay in them and eat for a while. Usually 30 or more minutes. The turkeys also like the clover. I have one field that has been mowed down since august and no matter how much I fertilize it, between the turkeys and the deer, it stays low. I expect it will start taking off this spring once it warms up. So I probably will not cut it much, if at all this year.

So now, I have to figure out what I can plant in the small clover fields in the fall to increase production, and am going to add some brassica's and awnless wheat. I may need to add some radishes for aeration. What I see with the turnips is they tend to sit on the top of the soil.

I really started all of this 3 years ago. This will be my 4th spring. I seem to run into a new issue each time I solve one. But I am totally convinced the small fields need to be clover/fusion. So that is what I have been focused on from last fall. I think I just need to add in some annual clovers in the fall to add nitrogen in the spring.

And I got some good advice on fertilizer based on my soil sample. So now I get 18-48-0 and 46-0-0. Basically 1 bag of the first and 2 of the second per acre. If I was buying regular Triple 13 or 17, it would take about 10 bags per acre. I need 100 pounds of nitrogen and 50 pounds of the phosporus (or whatever the middle number is) per acre for cereal grains and brassicas. Then I usually do 0-20-20 in the spring, but I will do the 18-48-0 this spring instead. I need enough cereal grains to mow down to start create the biological fertilizer the clover needs. So in theory, at some point, I should need very little additional fertilizer, and can come in with pellet lime now and easily maintain my PH. All I know is it takes a while when I have to put a ton of pellet lime on one field with my 3pt spreader. That is why I would rather just run around to each field and make enough passes to lay down an even layer of it and maintain.

Spring fertilzer bill will be around $200 unless the stuff has gone out of sight. Then in the fall, it will be around 3 times that. And I may have to come back and add more nitogen since that seems to be the engine for decomposition.

So tell me again where the screen name Lockjaw came from??

[img]https://imgur.com/a/wwzJf8y[/img]

I don't talk much in person.

Ok so here are two screen shots. 1 is of a video of me mowing my sunn hemp with clay peas from last fall. The other is my first Whitetail Clover plot.

The mowing one is cutting stuff 6 to 8 feet tall. You can see how thick it is, and you can also see off to the left what the flail mower did to it. This field was planted in beans and pea's with a little sunn hemp from the prior year, and then cereal grains and brassicas were boradcast into that. Then I came back and limed it with pellet lime, and broadcast the same back into it, and fertilized it and then cut it. After the screen shot of the video, I subsoiled it and disked it, and replanted in alfa rack, fusion, clover, cereal grains and brassica's. This spring I will just mow it and fertilze it, and I have some johnson grass I have to try to manage.

The whitetail plot I didn't devote much attention to, it needs some more grass and weed control this year. That is what the plot looks like once it warms up, it looks more like a putting green in the fall. I think all I am going to do to it is add some more pellet lime and spray and fertilize.

I bought a commerical flail mower, so it has a door on the back side I can open. It can be closed, half open or fully open. When I cut heavy thick material, I usually open it wide open. That prevents my 1026R from bogging down and allows me to cut it and a decent clip.

What I also like is the big roller on the back acts somewhat like a cultipacker, so if I have a field I can broadcast seed into before I cut it, I can basically run over it and pack it and lay a layer of mulch right on the top of it. It's the best I can do without spending the $ on a drill.

Looks nice!

Mythbusters: Food Plot Edition

So it’s a common theme to hear folks say that they like for their food plots to be short because its more tender and the deer prefer it that way.…..So I thought we’d do a simple little test here to see if there is anything to this or if it’s just a myth.

In theory here, the deer have an entire field of short forage that has been browsed down and should be the young tender shoots…….The forage in the exclusion basket has been growing untouched since just after planting…..If the theory is true that they prefer the shorter forage then this spot should go untouched after removing the basket…..If it is quickly eaten down then I think we could conclude that this isn’t necessarily true…… Agreed??.....Will they eat the tall forage or leave it alone??



Basket removed............

Well……that didn’t take long…..First night it was heavily browsed……. Myth busted???

Now here is something even more intriguing about this situation………..The deer attacked this taller vegetation just as soon as I removed the basket yet the spot in the field with the coyote poop pile has been sitting there untouched for weeks….To the point that the coyote poop is nothing more than just decomposing fur…..I don’t think the fact that its “coyote poop” would matter its been so long….Heck we had 7 inches of rain a couple weeks ago……..It makes me wonder if there is something going on with a high ammonia content that is deterring the deer from feeding on it.

I think they’ll be on it like a chicken on a junebug

You're spot on......Look a couple posts back.....I just posted the results from the first night. I was actually surprised it happened that quickly.

I said in an earlier post that what I need is more poop……but the exclusion cage test here really has me wondering if more fertilization would actually have a positive impact from the deer’s perspective……Sure, it would likely look prettier to our eyes but would the deer like it better??......Would more N or ammonia actually be a deterrent??

Here’s something to keep in mind……I imagine some folks will read this and the first thing that will come to mind as a comparison will be the N application that most folks spread during December and the accompanying green up……Most of those situations are going to be an apples to oranges comparison with what is occurring in my field. The reason being that in a traditional planting that has been using tillage for years your “unfertilized” situation is going to be one that is likely pretty void of nutrients all together and the plants are heavily dependent on the fertilizer to have vigor and produce growth. That’s a big difference versus the “unfertilized” area of my test field that still has a large nutrient reserve built up for the plants to pull from. Its not a matter of All or Nothing…..It’s more like you’re comparing “Fertilized and More Fertilized”……and I’m speculating that your Goldie Locks Zone is the natural cycle that I have going without adding “more”.

The problem I see with a short field is there isn't much biomass there. So take clover, its not really actively growing at the rate it would be if it was warmer. It's starting to perk up a little bit, but its not growing at a level where its growth is outpacing the deers consumption of it. At some point it will. And I don't have have some super high density either. My most heavily used clover field looks like a putting green right now. I doubt there is anything there over an inch tall.

When it is actively growing its 8 or more inches tall. And the leaves are much larger.

I also moved a feeder to a field, and set up a cell camera on it. From the pic's I have been getting, it looks like the deer are moving away from the brassicas and eating clover and cereal grains. And I expect to see the chicory start to grow soon too.

Nitrogen would help the rye, what you need is phosphorus and or potash for the clover. I don't need to apply potash to my fields based upon my soil sample, so this spring, I will put DAP out instead of 0-20-20.

Are you going to plant anything there for a spring crop? Didn't you say its mainly crimson clover and cereal rye?

One of grant woods video's he was on a property where the property manager planted clover on half the field and eagle buffalo mix on the other half. Then they came in and planted eagle beans in the spring. The deer clearly preferred the beans on the side planted in the buffalo blend over the clover blend. His contention was that the rotation of buffalo blend and soybeans created the nutrients the other crop needed as it decomposed. I have seen that in my last hunting club, where they would plant clay peas, and then come back in the fall and plant cereal grains. There was a very distinct color difference in the cereal grains that were planted in the section of the field where the clay peas were.

I think we may be bumping up against the law of diminishing returns here

Here is what I mean by that…..When I look at the forage in my field I don’t see any visual signs of nutrient deficiencies. I see healthy plants that are just being heavily browsed. You could look at from the standpoint that I need to add more nutrients to produce more yield but I think you reach a point where there is only so much yield that can be pushed out of 1 acre of land. If overloading nutrients to try and achieve more yield reaches a threshold where the forage becomes less attractive or palatable to the deer then are you really gaining anything by adding it??......As far as overall growth produced at the end of the growing cycle I’ll be fine because it’s about to all go boom and growth take off as spring temps continue to warm up.

Well Grant is in a position where he gets to do all the stuff most of us cannot do. And he is a biologist. I am a part time green field guy. And no one is sponsoring me.

I don't mind having to fertilize. I think you look at your crop and see what its doing. Yellowing cereals or brassica's means you need to add nitrogen. Slow clover, phosphorus and or potash. I think having it limed right is what makes it taste better. I tried some of my greens this year, they were all pretty sweet. If you have ever gotten ahold of some bitter kale, its gross. If I didn't have a 3 pt spreader, then fertilizing would suck.

What I have learned over the last 3 going on 4 years is the deer really like the clover. They like the chicory in the summer too. They like beans and pea's, but I don't have the acreage to really plant that and provide food like I can do with clover. They like sunn hemp, and if i want biomass, that is my go to plant. They like the brassica's and cereals in the fall. Adding ag lime helped, but getting the right mix and amount of fertilizer did the most. As far as production. Next fall, I will add some annual clovers and back off the brassicas a bit and see if that works.

The thing I wish I could do, is have a timed release fertilizer. Or have a crop that addes nitrogen as its decomposing. But its tough even with that to get a field that I can completely plant to the edge of the woodline and get stuff to grow. So the edges of the fields always tend to have less production and show more evidence of improper fertilizing. One of my old friends always told me to plant clover on the edges, and other stuff in the middle. But the edges are the toughest to get to grow well. I don't know if its sap from the pines, or what.

Less sunlight, nutrients and moisture from the trees around the edge.

Time release fertilizer is a game changer. Slow and controlled growth throughout the season. It never gets too tall that they won’t eat it but always growing when it gets browsed heavily. The most “flavor” and nutrition is in the developing and actively growing portion of the plant. Old growth hardens off and the amount of nutrients diminishes over time.

I don't think its shade. I have south facing edges, ie the north side of the field, that don't grow well too. Subsoiling helped, but they still don't produce well. I may need to make a trip around all the edges with my spreader and pellet lime. Although I will say when I went back with the fertilizer my lease manager put me onto, alot of the fields that were thin suddenly became thicker. It's like a catch 22. There probably is a lack of organic matter there, and I can't get much to grow to add some....... Maybe the north edges just get baked all summer long.

I am going to see about time release for the fall. That is when I really notice issues. Rain picks up, and of course the brassicas really require alot of nutrients. I think I just need time release nitrogen too.

We hit a soil temp threshold about a week ago….everything is waking up……….

[img]https://imgur.com/a/2ETKaWd[/img]

This is one of my mowed clover fields. Believe it or not, I had brassicas in it too, as you can see from the utilization cage I have. It really looks like a putting green when you drive by it.

Sadly this sits on the road, and the 26 acres that were sold to our "wonderful" neighbor is just on the other side of it. Hopefully he puts up a high fence this year so the deer can't run off on his property if we shoot one. I just seeded this with WTI Chic magnet, since that is what I had growing last year that I got to aggressive last fall and killed with herbicide.

fired up my tractor yesterday and let it run for a few minutes. Definitely ready to get time in and soon!

I wont do anything here until June……I believe June and October/November are your two times during the year to manage the understory. Just gonna let things keep on doing their thing for now…..

CNC, you broadcasting your corn in June?

I'll likely just mow over it one time in late June or maybe even early July.......I had a turkey nesting in it last June when I mowed it

I fired mine up, added some stiction remover to the oil and got the hydrostat adjusted so it would stop creeping. Definitely ready to do some work with it. Wish I could afford a turbo kit for it. Tractor Time with Tim just turbo'd a 1025R and it picked up 10 pto HP.

I used to go in immediately after deer season ended and would bushhog everything down. I quit doing that though and wait until at least June now because I found that the turkey hens like this type of cover this time of year.






I may not even do anything this year. The pine goats are just about active enough around my food plot that their hoofing and browsing is in a pretty good balance with them knocking things back enough to keep it in its current stage. If you have enough deer concentrated in an area they do a pretty good job of resetting things…..Kinda like if you put a bunch of goats on a spot…..Not enough goats and succession out paces them…….Too many goats and they degrade the habitat……Just the right amount of goats and things dang near take care of themselves. I’ll have to deal with a few sweetgums but other than that I may just let everything just do what it do…..Didn’t PCP mention something about young turkeys liking a grass area?? This has just been created naturally from the deer just really concentrating through this area....It has a "mob grazing" and hoofing type effect that has thinned it back.



Hard to beat crimson clover this time of year post rut and entering turkey season……..Its like a back and forth struggle with it and the deer where the field jumps and they eat it back….it jumps and they eat it back……

All my established WTI clover plots look like that. All I have to do is spray it and fertilize it. I had one I didn't tend well last year and its gotten a little weedy, so I hit it with a mix of Clethodim and Imox saturday. Once it warms up more I will hit it with some 2,4DB. HAd some poison ivy in it last year so I may end up hitting that with some roundup. I can't get a tractor into it, so it would be nice to be able to cut it with a weed eater instead of using the hedge trimmer attachment. That gets heavy.

I think you will find that method will work well at first and then you’ll start getting more and more grass issues when you go to spray it……eventually running into herbicide resistance. Its because if all you grow is clover long term then your C:N ratio is out of balance……not enough carbon to the amount of nitrogen. It causes you to start running soil carbon deficits over time. As the soil organic matter decreases this is when you start fighting those grasses harder and harder. I’m not trying to choose for anyone the route they choose to take…..only explain the science of what is happening. If you’re into soil building….long term pure clover is going in the opposite direction....you still have to bring in carbon to feed the soil long term to avoid those issues folks run into.....

What I realized over the winter is I need to add something to the pure clover plots. So probably awnless wheat this fall. I also know from soil tests that I don't need potash, so its pretty easy to fertilize them if I use DAP. I have one field this is going to be a PITA on, because I can't get my tractor down into it. Or rather, I can get down, not sure I could get back out. It wouldn't be bad to cut with a weedeater, I have a commerical one with a shoulder strap, but I don't want to be doing that if there is poison ivy in it. Probably have to take dawn and a scrub brush and go over to the creek when I am done if I can't get it killed.

It has a seep in it, so when we get rain, it is wet and drains. What forms around that is a kind of grass like you see around marshy area's. That has been the tough one to control. I may end up having to dig a ditch there to help it drain better. It wasn't noticeable the first year we opened the field up. Also the typical marsh type weeds too. But the clover will be almost a foot tall by June. And it gets hammered.

I really wanted to be on a rotation of peas/beans in the spring, and then broadcast cereals and brassica's into that in the fall, and never disk. Each would provide what the other needed and I would essentially not ever need to add fertilizer. But I don't have enough fields of size to be able to do that. I really probably have 2 I could successfully do that on. If we get cut/thinned this year, and get 2 additional fields like we have been promised, then its possible I would have 4 fields I could do that on. And may. Heck I could come in with sunn hemp and lab lab and make a field a jungle I am sure. But that is to thick to broadcast into, I would have to cut it first. and then the mulch layer would probably be a little to think to broadcast on top of. Unless we were going to get a very heavy rain for a couple days straight.

It's hard to do this justice with a single pic…..But there are just 100’s and 100’s of webs hanging everywhere……I think this is probably a pretty good indicator of the insect food web at play…….This is just the part of it we can easily see……the predators. Turkeys like insects don’t they???

All the turkey talk and saying I couldn’t remember the last time I saw a good drove must have conjured them up on me. There’s been a group of maybe 15 hens running with a couple gobblers across the road for at least the last 10 days or so…..I noticed yesterday there were only about 5 hens with them and this lone hen showed up in my field. I suspect she is one of the same group that has split off from them. She’s been out here by herself all morning pecking around in the clover and just eased back into the bushes…..I’m guessing that these hens are going to nest.

They are camped out on my clover fields.

March 24th

They must not have any food if they eating that nasty crimson clover....

I love how clover perks up in the spring. My chicory I planted in Feb is coming in good now too.

Yep, these deer are starving with nothing else to eat but weeds........

Mine have pretty much left my fields.

I had a nice buck and multiple doe's in one of my plots last night. It's basically whitetail clover, Fusion, and whats left of tall tine tubers. And they stayed there for a good while too.

I did email the biologist and asked her if I could plant something or add a soil amendment to help replace minerals since we aren't allowed to use them anymore, and she said my fields and natural browse will give them everything they need. Sort of makes me wonder...... if the mineral mix isn't hype? I would think if you have properly limed food plots, the plants should be taking up minerals from the soil.

And if you eat a well balanced diet, you shouldn’t “need” ice cream or candy. Yet people still eat it. Sometimes creatures are attracted to things they don’t even need at all.

If you’re talking about salt/mineral licks……I believe that is mostly something they use to help with fluid in their system. The salt is supposed to be a way of getting rid of excessive fluid when they are consuming a lot of forage with high water content. Does this allow them to eat more??.....I don’t know but that would seem like the logical answer.....On the other hand, maybe it gives them high blood pressure.

Or “maybe” they don’t need a salt/mineral lick at all. Maybe they can live just fine with their normal diet but they still like it, and are attracted to it. The role of sodium, calcium, and trace minerals is not a mystery at all. But people and animals frequently take in more calories and salt than they need. I know that comes as a surprise to no one living in Alabama and Mississippi.

Well the upside is I hit all my mineral sites this year before I got word from Westervelt. And I have been doing them for 4 years now, so there should be plenty there for years to come. I put out 140 pounds of mineral/salt mix and 50 pounds of stock salt with it. This is more than I have done in prior years. And I have it in places they haven't been hitting, so if they really want it, it's there.

I suspect WTI will come out with some sort of product you can spray. They have a new forage I saw that is supposed to be like a cover crop, soil builder now. If I can keep them in my clover/fusion plots, then I should be good. I am pretty much done with disking now. On reason I could see it is new ground.

Optional mowing if you want to keep it short for turkey season.......Mowing will thin out the cereal rye the more you do it, especially if its starting to throw out seed heads.

I wanted to get out and do that, but now, with fertilizer where it is, I sort of want to wait and let the cereals get tall before I cut it, that way it will help with natural slow release fertilizer (mulch), and help keep the soil temps down as we head into summer.

I noticed this log deck that the skid steer guy cleared 2 years ago that I have struggled to get something to grow on seems to have a better stand of cereals this spring. I planted some WTI extreme on it too, and I see some of that germinating, so I am hopeful this will develop more. The deer are eating in it, which is a good sign. I may try to expand it a little more this year. It isn't a huntable spot really, its more like just an actual food plot to feed them since its right alongside the road. If I could get a good stand of clover in it, I bet the turkeys would hammer it. I may try to get some lab lab to grow on it.

I have another log deck if I can get it cleared I would plant. It would be the same as the one above. Just a food source. Those spots all require building the soil unfortunately. If I had a dump truck and could bring a load of top dressing in or something, then it would be easier.

The good news is I am seeing doe's on the 2 fields I have cell camera's on. That is encouraging. I hope this move to having alot more clover is going to pay off, because they sure seem to like to eat it. This fall I have to go heavy on cereal grains, that is going to be my fertilizer for the clover, and then I will add in some annual clover to add nitrogen.

I’ve mowed it in the past just to see how many times I could recycle the growth back and for the most part it seemed like the first mowing it just rebounded right back from…..the second not as much and then by the third I was starting to thin the rye a good bit and impacting it and the crimson from maturing to seed. If someone wanted to do one spring mowing right now though sometimes within this time frame of the cereals bolting then it would probably give the soil a little boost from the green manure…..especially with a large % of it being clover clippings. Sorta like pumping the gas pedal and revving the decomposition engine a little……throwing some slop to the soil hogs and getting them stimulated………helping to say bye-bye to any remaining surface biomass that was put down last fall.

I will mow mine as soon as turkey season ends. That is what I did last year and had good results in the fields I had clover in. Then I can see what they do and decide if I want to supplement them with something. I sort of want to plant some more sunn hemp, because of the large amount of biomass it creates, and I can always use that. But I think I am going to do some lab lab.

I have one really big field, at least for my lease that I want to plant something down the middle of it, at an angle that is inline with the shooting house. The idea is that would essentially divide it into 2 smaller plots, and hopefully make the deer more comfortable coming out in it. They mainly came out on the far left side last season. I was thinking maybe some milo or sorghum, or even corn for that matter. Just something to add some cover. Maybe put a slight curve in it. If it was thick enough they might slip in and out of it.

It's going to be hard not to be out disking and planting. I really like doing that.

Nice you mow with a 48 " deck Troy Bilt mower?

Umm , Sorghum IS milo. They are the same thing. You may know weeds like no other, but crops, Not so much obviously.

22" Toro.......

I never claimed to know weeds..... perhaps you have me mistaken for someone else? And thanks for the clarification, I have heard it called both.

These pics were from March 13, 2018……. This was when I was still applying nitrogen in the fall and winter……..

LOL. Yep sorry. There is only one King of the Weeds. Or smokes too much weed..or something like that

I let my fields go just in case the turkeys are trying to nest in them.

The little bit of white clover I spread is jumping pretty good too now……



Picked up a second hen as well………

What I found interesting is the second year at my club, I came in and bush hogged a field of cereal grains after turkey season. When I went back later to disk it, there were small turkey poults hiding in the cut material that had dried. Lot's of them.

I think I may broadcast some lab lab into some of my fields and then mow them and see what happens once turkey season is over. Just add it to supplement the clover. I have a couple I need to kill the grass in. I hit them with roundup last year before I planted them, but it still came back.

[img]https://imgur.com/gallery/2CSH9gi[/img]

This is one of my pure WTI clover plots. I burned all the chicory out last august like a dummy and have re-seeded it. Seeing it start to come up now.

I don't know why it won't post an actual pic instead of the link.

Looks nice!

When you upload your pic, hold your cursor in the top right hand corner of the pic and you should see "copy link" and then "..." (three dots)......Click on the three dots.....You should have a list of choices and the second one down will say "Get Share Links"......Click on that.......It will bring up another list.....Click on the third one down that says "BBCode (forums).......copy and paste that link directly into your reply and see if that works.....

So I was giving the mow or dont mow idea some more thought and decided to go half and half sort of........I'm gonna set a post on one end with a camera and see if I can eventually get pics of some baby turkeys......Probably have to mow it again in a week or two

When I saw them, it was after I cut some tall cereal grains, like headed out. That was with a traditional bush hog, and it left alot of clumps and piles. When that dried, they were hidden all up in it. I walked down to the field and it started moving. Took me a sec to figure out what was going on. There was probably 30+ poults.

I am still torn. I want to cut mine, but really think I need to let it go til after turkey season to max out on biomass. It's not like I am going to get tons' of it from the clover. And I want as much as I can to keep the soil covered and shaded. The clover is really starting to thicken up and grow too. Which is good. My camera in a field was blowing up last night. I had 3 doe's and a buck in it, and they stayed nearly all night long. It was a new clover plant job last fall. And I added chicory too. It was coming in good last time I was down there.

I need to trap some more coons too. I hate them things.

Made a few more modifications......I'm gonna hide my post and camera at the end of the "V" .....

CNC, I found an aerial of your test patch

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😆

Whatever you do don't run your disability check over with your lawnmower.

This is the thread that just keeps on giving. The test patch post just made me choke lmfao

Dayum it man

I had a good amount of white clover that established well over the winter and it was starting to take off pretty good with the weather warming up. Over the last week or so though I’ve just noticed less and less of it. I was standing there scratching my head like “Dang it, I know there was white clover growing right here just a week ago”… …

I went to one of the best patches and found what I figured to be the culprit. I suppose as the crimson clover is becoming less palatable to the deer they are more heavily targeting the white clover now. The tiny white clover stems are hard to see browsing on when they bite the whole thing off. They’re selectively choosing for it now and dang near wiping it out. This is ladino clover....or some of what's left of it for now.

I have some flowering.

Crimson is blooming pretty good now..........

Is it me or is it blooming more in the area you mowed?

The cereal rye is just hiding the rest of the clover from the camera.....It's pretty well all blooming out now.

I need to spray some of my plots and some need a good mowing.

The number of webs this morning hanging everywhere is insane.......The insect populations must really be exploding right now.

The reason I'm showing that is 1) Because I think it looks cool and 2) Because I think this is directly tied to the number of eggs a hen lays as well as the eventual survivability of those hatching chicks.......We're looking at a main food source in those last pics......How much of the landscape provides that kind of insect food source in that density??.....The answer is likely a portion of our equation for nesting success.....

Dont forget the soil organic matter is playing a big role in this too......That's where the foundation of the insect food web begins.....and that begins with carbon.

Mine are all fixing to get mowed and there will be a nice fine layer of mulch then. I have a few spots I need to work on thickening up next fall, that is going to be the ticket to getting stuff to grow in those spots year round. And there will be bugs all up in it. Grasshoppers especially.

The areas where I have white clover growing could probably use mowing.....Its bouncing back pretty well but I think the browsing is probably causing it to lag behind the grasses and such

The main plot I am turkey hunting off is WTI clover, and its getting taller everytime I go out to the club. I had 3 hens out in it the other day for 3 hours feeding.

The field I planted heavy in Durana is also got a lot of tall clover in it, but it needs to be mowed. I am anxious to see how it does once I get the fields mowed and add some dap to them.

Its going to be interesting to see how many of these fields I have established a good stand of clover on after all of it I planted last year. Most that I have looked seemed to have alot of clover growing on them.

Pretty much at peak bloom now I’d say…….You know Lockjaw I think you were right about the mowing causing the crimson to throw off more seed heads……it looks pretty obvious in the second pic. I scalped that left nad a little too short though and had the opposite effect…..Probably want to be sure to trim it tall. Should be good on crimson clover seed next fall....

I dont know if the effect is so much due to the clover being mowed.....I think its the cereal rye competition being taken away that's causing it.....Maybe its a little bit of both.

I mowed most of mine yesterday. Wanted to get that done ahead of the rain that is supposed to come next week. I was really impressed with the amount of bulbs from the WTI tall tine tubers when I mowed the field I had that planted it. I need to fertilize, but have to time that with rain. Last year when I went out and cut the fields, the ones I had clover on really took off. I think it helps to have something as a cover crop in the fall.

Was really happy to see good stands of clover on the fields too. They should really start to take off now that its warmer if we just get rain once a week. The deer are pounding the minierals I put out before Westervelt changed the rules on those too. Saw 2 deer yesterday in a small field while I was turkey hunting. Had 3 out in a field last night for hours feeding.

The crimson clover has gotten tall.........

I noticed on a couple of fields I need to work on seeding the middle better this fall once I cut them. They look ratty because I had to have the flail up high to make sure I didn't hit any rocks the fields "grew" since last fall. It really likes to be lower. I have one I want to expand. If I got the skid steer guy out here, I could expand them more. They are basically log decks. I noticed on the one sitting right up against the cut over that there is a trail pit it it right into the field. Guess that means if someone busts one there and it's not DRT, we know where it's going to go... 😆

I figure this fall when I plant I'll add a lot of clover again and then by next spring I should have really good stands of it need to get one of those solo spreaders. Hopefully that will get some of my bare spots I missed covered. It's so hard to plant those little bitty seeds and see where they go. For an old fella like myself that is.

[img]https://imgur.com/gallery/DEKKim2[/img]

This is a plot I got going last year. I mowed it last week.

Crimson and white were both tall yesterday.
postimg.cc/Tpmhq9wr][/url]

Looking good!

I’ve noticed numerous patches of yuchi arrowleaf clover showing up….I think it's been 4 years ago that I added yuchi to my fall mix…For whatever reason I think my field has turned another corner this year in the soil improvement journey because all of the clover is thriving much better than in the past. Keep in mind this is really sandy soil that would barely even grow clover to begin with. Yuchi doesn’t seed out until late May I believe so if you want it to keep it reseeding itself you have to push your mowing date back until June. It stays palatable longer than the crimson does.

Saw this as I was walking around.......All of the red stems that have been eaten off is dewberry..... One of the more preferred native plants from my observations

Ii have to plant a little different this fall.. a little less brassica and more wheat/rye. I've got to get all the bare spots thick so there will be a mulch layer when I mow in the spring.

Everything is browned down now.......Still gonna wait a little longer though to do any mowing.......There's not any turkeys nesting in it this year but it helps to make the fall planting a little more manageable by knocking everything back in June. The cereal rye and clover will be crumbly dry by then and easy to mow.

SHOULD get some tractor time saturday. Planning on planting the dove fields!

I have cell camera's on 4 fields right now, and each pretty much has nightly traffic in the WTI clover. I want to spray mine, but it needs to rain first.

got the dove fields in Saturday. Milo, millet and sunflower seeds. Got some well needed rain last night and this morning.

The heavy rain and wind we had come through pretty much laid down all of the drying straw......The dog fennel is peeking through pretty good now.

I am hoping the rain perks up the clover, it took a beating last month. I have broadcast some clay peas into some of the area's to try to fill in.

Got a pick of a log truck and skidder on the lease yesterday evening. Not sure how they got that log truck turned around. So hopefully they will be done before deer season opens.

It’s so dry here even the weeds are struggling in my fields. A little Yuchi clover is the only clover alive except the wild sweet clover that comes up. Most of the weeds are less than a foot tall and the crabgrass is pretty thin. May be tuff to have enough thatch this fall to cover at this rate.

What I am seeing is where I have clover thick, its doing well. Where its thinner, not so much. I have broadcast some clay peas to see if that will help, but we need some rain.

As hot as it is, if the ground isn't covered, it won't hold moisture, so nothing is going to grow there. My only way to combat that will be this fall, and I will have to plant some heavy cereal grains there in the hopes come spring, when I mow it, I get enough thatch.

It doesn't matter much anyway right now, ever since the logging started my daily deer visits to my green fields has stopped for the most part. I sure hope they come back.

I've got armpit high soybeans. Probably got $50 an acre in what is planted in the food plots. $30 of that was the seed.

Got me two days worth this past weekend. I need it badly( for my sanity and those around me at home)