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.