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

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

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

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

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

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


I'd still have to do food plots though

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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