FOR A COUPLE YEARS THE FARMERS AROUND US WAS GROWING SOY BEANS AND CORN. THE LAST COUPLE YEARS THEY ARE GROWING COTTON. OUR DEER HERD SEEMS TO HAVE DEMINISHED. DEER DON'T EAT COTTON.

Deer do eat the plant when it is young and just coming up out of the ground. Once it gets about 6" out of the ground they stop eating it. Once the plant tops out, they do eat the tender tops and small tender leaves. Deer eat the blooming flower and the cotton "pod".
Because of the height of the plants they feel comfortable traveling in the cotton and they do bed up in it. Cotton is sprayed with insecticides for bugs. This equates into fewer bugs to pester the deer.

Lack of: concern, awareness, effort, aggressiveness, education, willingness, work, proactiveness, etc... by other members hunting our leased land.

I.E. Learn WHAT to spray on clover. This is a wet area so read and find out what clover does best in wet conditions? (It's Berseem, btw). When to spray. Chemical ratios. How to use glyphosate. Take the bull by the horns and look around & make something better without having to be asked.

Overall, it's the Jan 31st and you know that it's: "See ya next Oct 15th or opening day of gun season!" And the member drives away and produces little or nothing substantial in making the hunting land better between Feb - Oct but you see him every weekend during hunting season but he just can't make it to the camp to work outside of hunting season.

I feel your pain Bucktrot. Nobody makes it a prority. I tell members the work days a month or more in advance, so they can tell there boss, hey i can't work saturday the whatever, but they don't tell him squat. Then they tell me, hey i gotta work this saturday. Most places wont make you work a saturday, that you've asked off, a month in advance. They just dont bother asking. But you know what? These same people, never kill squat.

Soil, neighbor pressure.

good info

we've had some problems in the last couple years with poaching at night. You would be supprised how many deer are taken at night from poaching. Game wardens won't get out at night to catch them, they would rather bother legal hunters in the day time.

I think a lot of problem with hunting is unrealistic expectations. You see something on a TV hunting show inside a fence and think you can have the same thing. Or you see a Midwest hunt and think you can have something similar in Bama.

We are all guilty of it.

Deer will also flock to cotton fields once the cotton is picked to get the weeds that will grow during the fall and winter. We saw 5 times the number of deer in cotton fields than we did when the same fields were planted in corn. Once the corn was gone so were the deer. I am happy because cotton is being planted again this year.

Game wardens I know love catching night hunters

uh, yeah.....

I don't agree deer man 24 we have a warden down this way by the name of Clem Parnell and a few other of his buddies. They love catching night hunters down here in our area.

Clem and I roomed together at the Police Academy, there is not a better outlaw catcher in the state than Clem.

We can have the whole "food/geography/dna" discussion if you want to, but there's another reason why the midwest is so much better than Bama....it's almost exclusively bowhunting (and virtually NO rifle hunting). I bowhunt AND gun hunt, but I'd vote to give up gun hunting first.

The reason the midwest grows better deer, is the same reason they grow better corn, or anything else. The soil. BSK, once told me that in his opinion, he thought the midwest deer were a different subspecies. I agree. They don't act like Alabama deer. Where i hunt, you couldn't throw a mature buck into a 300 acre bean field, out there they just walk out by themselves.

Oh, I wholeheartedly agree Blumsden, I'm just saying picture Illinois (for example) if it was hunted just like Alabama. If there were hunting clubs on every piece of land up there (like there is in Alabama), and they all had too many members so the cost could be kept low (just like they do in Alabama), and if they rifle hunted all those corn fields and shot every average buck and doe that walked out (like they do in Alabama), it wouldn't be much/any different.

You got that right!!!

And, he is a good guy to boot!

They'd still kill bigger deer, just fewer of them.

No matter what we do, it will never be like the midwest. Can we improve our hunting? We sure can. Find 2000 acres of land to lease, with only 4 members. Improve the habitat. Limit the pressure, only hunt a few times a year. Only take 1 buck a year. In, say a decade, you'll have less pressured, more mature deer. Not easy is it. I don't think the midwest has huge chunks of unbroken land, like we have here. 300-400 acre farms have little woods surrounding them. Strips of woods between fields, funnels deer, and make them easier to kill. I have friends who know nothing about deer, go to Indiana and kill 150 class deer.