1. Crops: Some crops that deer seem to love are soybeans, clover, alfalfa, rye, corn and oats. Standing corn is used for both food and shelter. This is the category that food plot plants fall into. For more plant information please feel free to check out our free resources at www.diydeerfoodplots.com/
2. Forbs: These are herbaceous plants (other than grasses) generally seen growing out in open areas. Deer eat these and hide in them too.
3. Shrubs: Known as bushes. The deer also eat these and use for cover.
4. Trees:
Mast-bearing hardwoods: Oak, beech, hickory, chestnut are the ones that deer prefer.
White oak group is preferred over red due to more bitter taste of the red. White group examples are post oak, white oak, chinquapin, and chestnut oak. These trees generally produce acorns every year.
Red oak examples are red oak, black oak, pin oak, willow oak, and water oak. Most of these bear mast every two years.
Beech trees seem to be inconsistent with mast production but deer do love these.
Fruit-bearing hardwoods: Apple, pears, cherry, persimmons( all time favorite), and plum trees are the most common. The deer eat the fruit and the leaves. Deer hunters love these trees, especially whenthey are ripening at hunting time. Other wild fruit loved by deer include: wild grapes, scuppermongs, muscadines, mulberries, and sumac, osage orange fruit,maypops,paw-paws and honey locust.
General Hard Woods: Maple, birch,ashes, elms, and gum trees are notable here and provide cover and food depending on conditions and area.
Soft Woods: Pine, spruce, cedar, hemlock, firs and junipers also important for food and cover pending conditions.
As part of your food plot locationstrategy you may consider the fruit and mast bearing trees are excellent drawing features in deer habitat.
Here is the most spectacular and interactive daily operation I have ever seen. Just wants to make you get up and go there! What I particularily find fascinating is the use of the methane gas to produce power for the barns. This is way too cool. Enjoy
whitetail deer are selective feeders. They are known to feed selectively in a home range where foods they like exist. Fortunately, for us (deer food plotters) they will even give up large amounts of available forage in favor of tastier items and will move to an area where these better items are available.
Why plant food plots? Well the simple answer is nutritional help. Did you know that whitetail survival is dependant on good nutrition? The buck needs at least 16% OR MORE protein in his food in order to reach maximum breeding ability as well as fertility. His antler growth will also be shorted by poor nutrition. Now here is the catch. Native forages generally have 13% protein levels. The same applies to the does. Does under nutritional stress will decrease number of fawn from the normal 2 and may even have no fawns depending on how bad the situation is out there. So it is easy to see why adding foot plots can encourage quality of deer as well as number of deer.
Here is another important peice of information for you deer lovers. Native forage is limited in production to somewhere between 100 and 500 lbs of feed/acre on average. Deer forage from food plots can reach levels of 10,000lbs/acre of forage. WOW is that impressive. This is another good reason to put your food plots in this year.
It is now fall, but it is not too late for planting for planting fall food plots for your local whitetail deer. There are lots of varieties of fall planting optionsavailable to deer managers. The idea is to get started, offer better nutritional quality and quantity than what is available out there. All wildlife in the area benefits when deer lovers plant good nutrition for the animals we love to see.
Accurately determining the size of your deer food plot is one of the elements of having a successful food plot. It determines proper seeding rates, lime application and fertilizing rates. Here are some examples of how just guessing can lead to big problems in your food plot.
a) Too little seed leads to poor uniformity and decreased competition for weeds. The result here: you spend tonnes more time in weed control and your deer food plot annuals or perennials forage won’t flourish.
b) Too much seed result in plants that are too close together. They don’t get proper nutrition due to competition from their own. This results in plants that are more susceptable to poor moisture levels, decreased fertility in the soil, and increased weed competition.
c) Too much lime may potentially swing the pH to the opposite side of neutral. Neither acidic nor basic soils are good for most plant types that we chooose for our food plots. The vast majority of soils are acidic enough that this may seem unlikely, but I have seen it happen.
d) Too little lime or lime applied to the wrong level in the soil will not raise the pH sufficiently. This means the soil will remain more acidic than you would like and the nutrients and the fertilizer will not be available to the same extent. You may as well throw you money out!
e) Too much fertilizer is a bit self explanatory given the cost of fertilizer. Remember anything you do for the plants, you do for the weeds. The other important thing is that too much of a good thing can actually be toxic to the plants you are desperately working to grow.
f) Too little fertilizer is a little like depriving yourself of proper nutrition and then wondering why you are sick and weak and feel awful. You need to give the soil what it needs based on your soil test, nothing short of that is really a good idea for the forage, even if money is tight. It leads to weaker plants and thinner forage and may allow weeds and schrubs to take over the plot. Then you will end of spending money dealing with that problem.
when getting ready to do a food plot tillage is often a big question. What do I need? What is available and what does what.
There are basically three different types of plows that you might run into when looking for tillage equipment for your do it yourself deer food plot.
There are disc, moldboard, and chisel plows. In the disc plows for plots and other tillage requirements there is a big round disc which goes deep into the soil and rolls the soil over and mixes it. Not to be confused with a disc for finer work.
The moldboard plow is a breaking tool also. It lift the soil column and then drops in back down inverted.
The chisel plow is one that has long shanks that go into the ground. These are narrow shanks and do not mix or disturb the soil, they just break it up.
Do not confuse this with a subsoiler which goes much deeper as this severe depth is rarely required in food plots.
