For those who haven’t experienced the sheer amount of does we have in NW Alabama…

This is a 5 acre food plot mind you. Eaten to the dirt in less than a month.

What is planted in the plot? Why did they all of sudden start eating it?

Looks like some sort of brassica. I’d be willing to bet he finally got a frost to turn them sweet and the deer found them.

Small acreage food plots are not a good measuring stick in my opinion for determining if you have too many does……..How many other 5 acre fields are there around this one planted in the same thing??.....What if we have a 4,000 acre quail plantation and we plant a 5 acre soybean field in the middle of it??....Do the results really tell us anything about whether we have too many deer for the 4000 acres??...No, not really

Send em to my place…we don’t shoot any cause we don’t have that many. Works well for the rut

That's not alot if it took them a month. Mine would clean that up in a week easily. Plus right now down here all they have to eat is food plots and corn.

There’s probably another 7 acres of food plot on the same 130 acres.

An 8-9 species blend.

Do you have an exclusion cage for reference? Simple to build and anchor and gives a real good indication of what you are actually growing through the season. My primary plot at camp is only about 1/3ac and looked almost barren by the end of January except the cage which was 18-20” tall.

We have exclusion cages on all of our fields. It is pretty shocking. Our fields look like well managed fairways and the cages are lush. We started using them years ago to help with how well our seed mix was doing.

Just shoot the does. I love shooting does. They taste great.

Is it bad to have a lot of does? The best deer hunting in the state is places with insane numbers of does.

Are the deer underweight or malnourished?

If given the choice, I’m always going to want to hunt places with higher than average deer numbers. I’ve spent too many years of my life seeing zero deer on deer hunts.

Same plot.

It’s all about resource allocation. Currently I have more deer than I can comfortably support and skewed ratios. Just been lazy shooting does the last couple years.

Fewer does will make for better hunting, especially during the rut.

Thank you! That’s a much more telling picture.
When I still had a club, and membership was down, some members would balk at the added expense of lime and such. Claiming that fields grew all the same regardless of pH. We started using exclusion cages to show what we were growing, absent the browse pressure, and even did a few test plots where we only limed half and put two cages out. The results ended those yearly arguments about the extra $100.

When was this pic taken? It looks to me to be a completely different time of year than the previous picture.

It was taken near the end of summer. Spring planting

So anyone who's plots are eaten down have too many deer???

That’s the logic. I can’t wrap my head around it. There are places with sustainable deer populations that are really very high.

Yep....its badly flawed logic

If you had too many deer the plots would have never gotten as high as the first pics!