I’m about to try something I’ve been thinking about for several years but just never could take that extra step and experiment with it. I’m about to try and plant my field by cutting my throw and mow down to simply “throwing”. There’s gonna be a little twist to it though.

Anyone who followed the old QDMA forum probably remembers all of the posts by dgallow that showed his experiments with mob grazing cattle. For those who didn’t see it….mob grazing cattle is basically taking a big wad of cattle and using hot wire to temporarily fence them in on a small area. Its done so in order to bring the vegetation back down to knee high or lower…..reset succession….fertilize the area through manure….improve soil fertility….feed cattle….etc...Dgallow began to use the cattle to plant new seed for him by throwing out seed ahead of the mob grazing and having the cattle tromp in the seed and get it established. I’m gonna try to do something similar using deer instead of cattle and using corn instead of hot wire. I’m gonna broadcast my seed and at the same time I’m gonna broadcast 50-100 lbs of corn per acre across the same area. My field has dead hay around knee high across the whole thing. I’m counting on the deer to tromp it down as they pace around hunting for all the kernels of corn that I’m going to broadcast. Anyone who thinks they can't have that kind of effect needs to come take a look around my sawtooth oaks right now. Its been beat down to dust.

We’ll see how it goes….I have a lot of deer and a very soft soil surface so it should work well in theory. If it does work then this is gonna take this whole process to a new level of ease and efficiency. Just keep in mind that I’m way down the road already in the soil building process so this is likely something most folks will have to build toward and not come right out of the gate being able to do. It just depends on the variables on your property and in your fields.