Hey All,

My buddy inherited some land, around 400 acres, from his parents in central Alabama a couple of years ago.

My buddy leases 60 acres of pasture/ag field to a corn farmer (just farming rights, no hunting rights) and the farmer harvested the corn last week. I went out Saturday too take a look at the 60 acre field, and the farmer left a lot of corn on the ground from the tractor. The deer and dove have already gotten into a lot of it.

Two questions, that I am fairly sure I know the answers to, but I just want to get y'all's thoughts as well:

1) We can currently hunt the field as-is come this Saturday at noon, correct? The harvesting of the corn is an accepted farming practice, even if some of the crop is distributed on the ground because of harvesting.

2) Can we disc up a 4-5 acre spot (prepared seed bed) and just spread 200 lbs/acre of wheat seed/feed and hunt over that? We have a tractor that can disc the soil properly and we also have a spreader that can spread the wheat evenly.


I am pretty sure the answer to both questions above is correct, but I would just like y'all's opinion.

Thanks!

Been doing this for over 50 years....Yep...you are Legal!!

Are we allowed to disk the area after we spread the wheat?

You can....but it will sprout on its own if you are intending it to be for Deer.

Not 100% sure. You can broadcast wheat into a cut cornfield to generate a cover crop but it seems like I remember something a while back that if you prepared a seedbed, (disc'd that 5 acre section you're talking about) then you had to make an honest attempt to cover the seed by dragging or lightly disking. It's been 12 or so years ago but we did something similar and disc'd about 15 acres and sowed wheat across it at a very heavy seed rate. GW came in, told us the field was considered baited and shut us down because we did not make an attempt to cover the seed and it was obvious we had seeded it very very heavily. He didnt write anyone a ticket but told us if we'd turn the seed in, we could hunt it the following weekend. I'll also mention that 200 lbs/acre on wheat is not common practice on a prepared seed bed.

Pretty sure I know your buddy that inherited the 400. Came from his uncle?

No you do not have to cover the wheat. Or try to cover it. Per our GW in Russell county.
We get checked every year, usually opening day but sometimes the field gets checked the week before.
He lets us know it checked out and good to hunt.

Thanks Joe. That's a good resource. Looking at that video, they probably got us on a nonadequately prepared seed bed. To be honest, the area he said would not pass looked pretty dang good to me for a wildlife application and I'm sure good for the majority of the guys top sowing wheat. We broke that area up really good with several passes with a heavy disk but there were still small grass clumps showing just like he had in that section in the video that he said was inadequate. We were probably at or under the 200 lbs per acre as far as broadcast seed density.

Best advice will be for you to call the district office for your local game warden and leave a message with the woman up front. He/she will return your call pretty quick. And if they don’t, just call again. They will be the best source of info...and it’s not like they have a cellular tracker that will bring them to your location on opening day just to double check you...They have plenty of bubba outlaws that they’d rather show up to ticket as opposed to someone who called that wanted to learn the law, and seemed to be considerate of what they can and can’t do.

However, I doubt spreading a little wheat will attract them when they have several acres of corn to eat. If they are there, they have been there and it is because of the corn. I would seriously consider just setting up and not waste $ and time on top sewing wheat.

sounds like yall just need some extra guns on that 60 acres

There’s only about 120,000 acres of cut corn in the TN valley right now. It’s hard to concentrate birds