My place is 320 acres and for the last 7 years I have been serious about making the place as good as it can be. I own it so I can do whatever I want. For me the biggies have been:

1.Neighbors-None of us have control over this but I am blessed. My 300 ac south neighbor feeds tons of corn/protien and has not shot a deer in 10 years, the 200 ac south of him is totally unhunted. There is no hunting to my north and little if any to east because of town. The west neighbors appear to hunt some but I never see them and have not heard them shoot in years.I hunted every morning/evening the last two weeks of January and did not hear a rifle shot other than mine.

What I do have control over is:

1.Timber Mgmt-I burn regularly and all of the varied planted pine tracts are thinned at appropriate stage. Because a buddy was a timber guy I have been able to clear cut smaller tracts every few years to keep bedding cover on my property but that is over. I am 64 so best case I have maybe10-15 hunting years left so I am gonna cut about 30 ac this summer and repeat every 3-4 years.

2.Food-I know the deer have PLENTY of natural browse to do fine, especially with the thinned/burned pines, what my neighbor feeds them and I also keep my field and plot edges in early succesion. That said I plant about 8 acres of summer plots and will never stop unless I am forced tp. I have been doing summer plots around 6 years and the benefits really started showing the last 2.There has been a very very noticable change in both quantity and quality of the deer seen. I also plant good quality fall plots, have about 2.5 acres of Perrenial Clover, and probably 30-40 pear, persimmon, chestnut and sawtooth oak trees in the ground. So they have more, high quality food than they can choke down.

3.Pressure- My place is lightly hunted, afternoons only, Thanksgiving and Christmas weeks and that is it until January 15 when I arrive for my yearly rut hunt. No does get shot in plots and a plot does not get sat on a bad wind. The number of daytime deer sightings have soared since I started doing this.

4.Plot Design- I like sitting on plots and seeing lots of deer, Unfortunately seeing a mature buck out in a food plot happens very seldom at my place. So I have tried to get the best of both worlds. Most of my plots are designed with not just a plot but also shooting lanes and lots of edge cover I can see into. My absolute go to stand looks like this.

View to front. About 300 yards to curve in road, huge crossing across it.I killed both of my bucks this year right at top of photo.



View to left. Heavy trail coming in from bottom left, all those woods are thinned so I will see them long before they get to plot.




View to right. About 300 yards to back of plot. Several heavily used trails cross the shooting lane. pic is worth a thousand words.