I think we all could give examples of a certain field, or a certain property, where both schools of thought have shown to work or not. But in general, presence and shooting in a spot will shut the deer down. But I'm telling you, the science of greenfields will make fools of us all. We have a small white oak ridge (maybe 1 acre in total size) surrounded by cutover, and on years when the trees have acorns you can hunt it every morning, and every evening, and kill the crap out of deer in bow season, and they just keep piling out time after time, even bucks. Yet there's a greenfield directly across the cut (you can see it from your tree on that ridge), and if you kill one stinking deer on that thing, it's O.V.E.R, period. What's the difference??? I suspect it's the openness of that plot, the lack of security the deer already feel. Even more crazy, we simply NEVER see bucks on the food plots, doesn't matter if we hunt/shoot them or not. You could see 20 bucks a season in the cutovers and hardwoods, but there'd be NO buck action on those fields. My conclusion?....If you have bucks coming on to fields to begin with, it probably has little to do with the lack of pressure, but I still recommend NOT shooting on your fields anymore than you just have to or want to. What we do is kill every stinking doe we see in bow season, then once gun season comes in, if we wouldn't mount it, we don't shoot it. No specific rules. But there's just 4 of us, all buddies.
