Aldeer.com Forums Alabama Deer Talk Quality Deer Management Throw n Mow Q&A

Feel free to throw your seed out and mow. There is zero harm to your seed and the plants you sprayed will have already taken the chemical up and be dying

I haven't done a thing yet.....Looking for a weather pattern change and I'm gonna throw some seed out and probably just drag over my field.

Planting several of my fields Friday. I don’t spray, so I’ll have some competition with what’s growing in it now, but sometimes you do what you have to do. Worst case I’ll plant a couple hundred pounds of corn.

Didn't get all of my plots done today, but got my 3 big ones. 4 wheeler broke down, so had to hand seed it. I mowed first then seeded so we could walk through it. I prefer to seed then mow, but not the way it worked out. Hopefully the rain this week will drive it down under the fluffy straw.

Spread the seed and cultipacked then fertilized , hope we get the rain forecasted for mext week ! Hope to have some pics to post !

Got 11 plots seeded and dragged best looking thatch I’ve had in years.

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.

Interesting...

Had I decided to do this a little earlier I would have ideally liked to have spread the seed and corn well ahead of any rain so that the deer had a week or so to trample around on the hay and seed. I think what I’m gonna do now is to go ahead and spread a little corn out over the 2 acres to be planted ahead of this rain in order to start concentrating the deer and get the trampling process started. I’m not gonna put out a whole lot because I don’t want to have a bunch just get soured if we get a bunch of rain. After the front passes, if we get a substantial amount of rain and the 7-10 day forecast looks good afterwards….then I’m gonna go ahead and spread my seed and the rest of the corn. This might be a good situation where we could layer our planting on maybe spreading 50 lbs/ac now and another 50 in a couple weeks. That’s not something that would work well for hunting clubs that have to plant on work weekends but may be a better option for folks like private land owners who are able to be more flexible about when they do things. As time goes on, the standing biomass is gonna get more and more trampled down to the soil as the cereal grains establish and they begin feeding on them as well.

What about soil compaction from all those deer feets?

I don’t foresee that as being an issue in my fields. I’ve got about 8-10 inches of organic humus as a top layer of soil. This is sandy soil too and sand just doesn’t compact.

Here is what much of what I’ll be broadcasting into looks like……some areas are a little thicker with dog fennel and ragweed



There are a few broadleafs here and there still hanging on but most things have been eaten to a nub at this point or withered due to drought………Some Florida pusley. Notice the browsing...….



Teaweed browsed down to a twig….It’s still there though. How many “summer plots” would still be hanging on at this point?

This dry weather has them browsing everything. I've finally seen browsd on beauty berry and its heavy.

40 lbs of corn applied today by hand with a bag spreader. I didn't get it spread out evenly across the whole two acres but that's ok...this was just to get the process started. I probably covered an acre or better just cranking on the spreader and slinging it out as far as I could. I think after the rain I'm gonna load the tractor hopper down and probably go with 100 lbs/ac of cereal rye.....a couple pounds of turnips per acre.....100 lbs of 34-0-0 per acre......and maybe 150 lbs of corn per acre.....I think that's probably overkill on the corn but I'm overkilling it on purpose this first go around to help insure I achieve the effects I'm wanting. I'll back off with future plantings according to what I see happen this year. I'm guessing 50 lbs/ac would probably suffice. I'm gonna go ahead and buy a couple more bags of seed and come back in a few weeks with another 50 lbs of rye layered over the top. We'll adjust seeding rates accordingly in the future as well.

Hey CNC, what's the tall, "feathery" stuff in that top picture? We have a lot of it in our plots.

I believe that is fennel weed. “Dog fennel”

Smells like licorice when you bushhog.

Or summer cedar

All he’s got is glorified patches of weeds. I’d lose my shucks if my place looked like that

My place did look like that with a thick layer on bottom.lets just say I don’t have total confidence in throwing and mowing just yet so I bush hogged and disked mine. I planted a week ago and now have hairlike figures poking out of the ground with more rain supposed to be coming.

Half assed my plots at the lease last Saturday and had tails on the seeds yesterday should be perfect with all this rain. Never just drug live grass down on the plots but couldn’t get the tractor down there in time this year. Seeded and bush hogged today at the house so should work out great on them also.