Well I arrived at what I do a little different. I watched what Grant Wood puts in his video's, but buying a drill plus a crimper is just out of my budget. When I started looking into flail mowers and watching how they worked, the idea occurred to me I could get better results with a flail than I could ever achieve with a bush hog. So last fall, to experiment, I broadcast seed into standing beans to see what happened. What I was trying to achieve was not going in and cutting down something the deer were eating (beans and peas) and letting the field sit there for a month while I waited on a spray, disk and reseed. I liked how that worked, I just broadcast grains and brassica's into standing peas and they took off. Then this spring, I went out, broadcast beans and peas into the standing cereal grains and mowed them with the flail mower. The one problem with that was I had area's in some of the fields that didn't have good germination no matter what I planted, so this year I started subsoiling those fields completely and starting over.

Now I switched gears and am working towards having a perennial (mainly clover or fusion or alfa rack) in all the fields, because none of mine are bigger than half an acre. And from what I have seen on my camera's, the deer hammer the clover mixes every bit as much as the beans, but so do the turkey's, which I wasn't seeing in beans. This gives me a crop that is there year round and I don't have to contend with the deer mowing down a small field of beans right out of the gate when they sprout.

I am essentially managing 24 "green fields" on 1100 acre's by myself. It would be different if I had 2 fields that were 5 acres each. But I don't. But with the flail mower and the 3 pt spreader, I can go cut them all and fertilize in 1 day, and then spray the next with my ATV. I have a couple new guys that are working with me to help identify the natural browse we can work on next. So I have started flagging persimmons. I am hoping when the timber company thins next spring, that will allow us to get down close to the SMZ that runs through the property and then maybe we can clear out around the white oaks some. We are supposed to get 2 more fields that are about half an acre when they thin.

So imagine a guy joins a hunting club, and starts planting using an ATV and a groundhog max. That was my first 2 seasons. Then I bought a subcompact tractor. So I have watched what has happened each time I planted, and watched how the deer reacted to it, and have adjusted off that. So while I will be 55 this year, my planting experience is only 4 years in the making. And it lets me have some control over what we do, versus being in a club that has a tractor but won't let me use it, and plants the same 3 grain mix in the fall, and clay peas on some of the fields in the spring, and never soil tests or limes and calls it good.

And I look at and listen to what you guys do as well.