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?