Increase Your Deer & Wildlife Population With These Innovative Planting Techniques
This article describes some innovative planting techniques to increase the deer and wildlife population on our property. We plan to implement these crop layouts this year and can’t wait to see how it works out!
One of the things that I truly enjoy about owning a farm is watching the wildlife. Seeing the deer bring their fawns through the fields or watching a family of foxes playing under a stump near the barn across the road. Even watching an opossum or raccoon eating chicken bones out of the compost pile. To me it never gets old.
Every year we farmers donate hundreds of ears of corn, and fields of alfalfa to the birds, raccoons, turkeys, and deer; without our permission. Well I decided that I would like to encourage the wildlife to stay on Thistle Downs, so we have started developing a series of wildlife and deer food plots. The most important components of our plan are observable access for my family, privacy, and year-round forage for the wildlife.
Focus on the Sweet
We have a pet pig, her name is Belle. Every morning I give her some grain and a glazed donut. The first thing Belle always does is find that glazed donut. Sometimes I hide it under the grain, but she will push everything out of the way until she finds it.
Bears are baited in Maine with old bakery products, some dairy farmers resort to molasses on hay to get their cows to eat, when the grain or corn is depleted. Last summer we planted 2 acres of enhanced sweet corn, next to about 25 acres of cow corn. Guess what? The birds got about half of the sweet corn and did not touch the cow corn. Animals love their sweets.
Well I have spent the winter feeding the wildlife up in a secluded spot on the back 65 acres of our property. When I set out bagged feed corn, it just sits there until everything else is gone. When I put out a bag of sweet feed or sweet
corn, gone in 2 days. We are going to use this first hand intel to build a smorgasbord of sweet deliciousness that will last all year long.
What to Plant in a Food Plot
We are going to plant several different crops, some together and some separately. We are probably going to plant forage turnips, and sugar beets together. They don’t need to be mowed, the greens are nutritious, and the roots will provide winter feed for deer to paw up during the hard winter months. The forage turnip greens do not turn sweet until they start to form fruit, where the sugar beet greens are sweet from day one.
We will also plant soybeans, they will provide deer with a great protein source moving deep into autumn. These don’t need to be mowed either so they will planted around the beets and turnips in a transitional way.
We are going to plant small stands of sugar enhanced sweet corn (you will hear more about this when I get to the ‘where’ and ‘how to plant’ sections.) The birds tend to snack on every single ear, which will make the ears unmarketable to the public. If we were planting sweet corn to harvest and sell we would have to plan some form of protection. Since we aren’t, we will not be employing scarecrows or air cannons to keep the birds and wildlife out.
My wife collects the flower tops off of the red clover and makes a tea from them. It is naturally sweet and requires no sugar or honey to enjoy. Once again this clover is a favorite of whitetail deer (I wonder why?). The clover DOES
need to be mowed to keep the short tender shoots coming up that the deer love so much. That is why it cannot be planted with the beets, turnip, or soybeans.
Red clover and white clover are often planted with alfalfa seed, mowed and baled for all types of stock animals. We will just keep it mowed with a 6 foot rotary cutter, to keep the stalks tender and palatable. The clippings will go right back into the soil as organic enrichment. The red clover will be planted around the sweet corn plots where they can be easily maintained.
How to Plant a Food Plot
The main thing that we need to take into consideration with planting is the size of the seeds. The turnip, beet, and clover seed is very small so they will require a different planter than the corn seed which is much larger. I will use a spreader or broadcaster for planting the small seeds and a 2 row corn planter for the corn seed.
My soil is a bit on the rocky side, so I choose to use a chisel plow, with a landscape rake behind that. This saves me another trip smoothing the soil out after plowing. The chisel plow gets as deep as I need it to, turns lime and fertilizer into the soil nicely, and easily moves rocks and stubble out of the way. The best time to plant the small seed is on frosty mornings, the seeds will stick to the soil nicely.
DON’T plant on rainy days!
“Plant in the mud, expect a dud.” Some smart farmer taught me that axiom years ago.
I just bought a No-Till corn and bean planter, so after this year I will be able to plant our corn right through the clover in the springtime. No plowing. The advantages are the elimination of soil erosion and better soil health. The advantage to the wildlife will be a nice crop of tender grass until deep into the winter, right up until snow cover.
Once we have germination on all of the fields, and the shoots are approximately 3-6 inches tall, it is all up to the weather. This is a critical time for young plants, rain and sunshine are key.
Where to Plant a Food Plot
This year we are trying something new and very exciting with our planting configuration. This is completely original and all based upon a very simple concept, “observable access for my family, privacy, and year-round forage for the wildlife”. Remember that?
None of the wildlife plots will be seen from any roads and will have no public access. They will be islands within our property, completely surrounded by forest
In an experiment that we ran last Fall, we left one 30 foot round island in a cow-cornfield. The deer loved this small sanctuary. They would come out eat and go back in. They often bedded themselves in there all day. It quickly became a hang-out for several does and young bucks.
Question: how many deer are standing in a 7 foot tall 10 acre cornfield?
The answer is 0 to 1 million, but you will never actually know. The visibility will be zero.
Now what I am proposing is to plant that same 10 acres in clover, but plant your corn in small islands, in a zig-zag pattern, each surrounded by clover, and only 30 feet in diameter. This will create a grid and easily discernible observation lanes. (see diagram).
From all observation points, deer movement will become apparent and easily observable between islands. In the diagram I have four observation towers for use dependent upon wind direction. We could go as high as six towers around the perimeter though.
To the right of this field is a small transition plot of soybeans that leads into the 2 acre field of sugar beets and turnips.
I have shown this idea to a few of my friends who are avid deer hunters and they were very excited about it, and though they cannot hunt here, they are welcome to take our ideas and use them on their own ground, and so are you!
The Payoff
Does this cost money? Absolutely. Does everything that we do here on the farm necessarily have an economic pay back? Not as far as we are concerned, some people take vacations to Europe or the Carribean or some other paradise. To us this farm is paradise, and when we do go away on vacation, our favorite part is getting home.
We watch the deer all summer, the geese in October, the baby rabbits, foxes, and squirrels in the spring, and we even have a couple of bears that we caught on camera last November. It is simply a question of values. Our values may be different than some, but our lives are so much richer!
Love, Peace and Light.
Terry has a Master’s Degree in Business Administration. He has taught in the New York State School system for 18 years, where he teaches Career and Financial Management, Agricultural Business, Marketing and Distribution, Sports Management, Wildlife Conservation Management, and Resort and Recreation Management. His time has also been spent as an FFA advisor for 12 years, and he has been farming his 100-acre family farm since 1991. Terry has a deep love of all types of agriculture and takes every opportunity to promote agricultural education.