“Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant (except for the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil) on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.” Genesis 1:29-30 NIV
I find that with anything in life, it’s good to understand the reason it was created. Family, career, relationships, it’s good to know why these things were put into place. When it comes to the almighty food plot, it’s good to understand the actual purpose for the green plant. Its true purpose is to be food for all creatures. The green plants were designed to work on their own to execute that purpose. Unfortunately, our sin changed that relationship.
“To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”” Genesis 3:17-19 NIV
Working The Land
These two passages describing the beginning of man’s relationship with nature have guided me in my understanding of how to work with the land to help nature do the job for which it was designed. The green plants are to be used for food, but thorn and thistle must be removed through painful toil to allow the green food to grow.
I am blessed to have access to approximately ten acres of ground that I have been granted permission to modify by the land owner. I do not own this land, but I allowed to make pretty much any modification to it I see fit, so long as I’m not ruining the value of the land (i.e. dropping valuable timber). There are so many different ways to go with managing property, even one so small as ten acres. The first thing that jumps to everyone’s mind is ‘food plots’, but is that always the best path?
In a different article Maximizing Access to Hunting Property, I outlined the three main component of good deer habitat that everyone knows: food, water and cover. Before you decide what you want to plant or (just as important) remove from a property, you need to understand how deer use the area and which of those three ingredients you want to add or subtract.
This ten acres, for example, is primarily bedding. Twenty years ago, this ten acres was a horse pasture that has been allowed to grow up. A few of these ten acres had been used as a smaller horse pasture until three years ago. There is also a power line that runs right through the middle of the property. What this all translates into is different ages of ‘old field’. The twenty-year growth now has decent sized aspen and oak trees growing amongst the brush. The three-year old horse pasture has some native grasses, fruit trees and briars that have grown up into an absolute tangled wall. These two areas definitely constitute good cover.
Since the power line gets mowed by the power company, they weren’t going to be used as either bedding or water, so I decided to turn it into a food plot. I don’t have any large mowing equipment such as a brush hog, so I figured since they’re going to mow it anyway, I’d plant some food perennials that require mowing to maintain, so there is a good crop of clover and rye. This property is also incredibly wet with poor soil drainage.
Ten acres, if I’m being honest, is not enough to truly change the activity of an entire deer herd. No matter what I do, I’m not going to suddenly attract a whole bunch of new deer to this little property. It’s important to zoom out and understand how my little chunk fits into the larger picture. There is good agriculture approximately 300 yards away. There is a small swamp in between this property and the agriculture (probably the runoff from all of the undrained water) and mature, open mast trees on either side of the swamp. On the other side of the property are a major road, some homes, and then a massive swamp and farmland.
I’ve come to find that this property is a doe bedding area. There is food relatively nearby and good cover. The deer will generally bed in the old fields during the day and move to the agriculture fields or mast trees at night. I have found that it does not usually hold a buck, although I get good bucks on camera cruising through during the rut.
Find It or Create It
As I wrote in the aforementioned Maximizing Access to Hunting Property, your job as a hunter is to either find or create property. A Basic Hunter’s ability to ‘create’ good hunting property is usually limited. That involves either owning land or having permission on land to which you are allowed to make changes (I fall into the latter category in this case).
From there, you probably don’t have (or can’t talk your spouse into buying) farm equipment such as a tractor or brush hog. Don’t even get me started on cultipackers and no-till drills. Since I don’t have access to any of these major land-moving necessities, I have to lean heavily on two things: working with what the land has to offer and the sweat of my brow.
Let’s talk about how we all can work with what the land has to offer instead of turning the land into what we want. What I want on this ten acre parcel is to create a lush food plot with a mix of soybeans and brassicas. Whether through watching too much YouTube or knowing hunters who use these food plots to their grip-and-grin success, I’ve been hard wired to desire this deer Mecca environment.
Unfortunately, pesky things like terrible soil, small acreage of plantable field, and those dang soil tests all point toward the fact that neither soybeans or brassicas will grow in this area. Trust me, I’ve tried. I planted a half acre of brassicas one year. They actually grew. Not well, mind you, but they grew. Maybe they didn’t produce softball-sized radishes, but I would safely say baseball-sized is more accurate.
Trouble was, early October produced back-to-back hurricanes that came up the east coast and while it wasn’t damaging to any properties, the rain sat over my part of the world like my grandpa sitting the locust thicket waiting for a buck. They. Did. Not. Move. The upshot was that I had a nice frog pond where my brassica plot once stood. Let radishes soak in dirt and water for two weeks and you get absolute swampy mush of zero consumption value for deer.
You could argue that the amount of rain was an anomaly and you’d be correct. Every year I’d take that risk and have no possible alternative for the deer if it failed. This is one of the many reasons I switched to a perennial mixture of cereal rye and clover. I can work with what the land gives me instead of trying to force something that I have neither the time nor the money to accomplish. All the rain in those hurricanes, while not ideal, wouldn’t destroy the food source. These two things can grow in just about any soil situation (within reason), the rye helps to loosen the clay dirt, and most importantly of all, I can use a regenerative agricultural approach instead of a monoculture crop mentality.
Regenerative Agriculture – Think Like a Buffalo
I do not mean that you should pile drive a folding table from the top of your pickup #billsmafia. You may have heard about regenerative agriculture as a gardening trend for millennials who just moved to Montana to for that WFH farm life of having a garden and a chicken coup (tbh it sounds pretty sweet). The idea of regenerative agriculture is to not kill everything in the soil to make room for the crop you want to grow.
Think about most farms around you. Every spring the farmer discs or tills up a bare patch of dirt to remove the ‘thistle and thorn’. The dirt from harvest time to planting time is essentially devoid of life. The farmer adds seeds and nutrients into the ground to grow the green food. By the sweat of the brow, indeed.
Regenerative agriculture always has something living in the dirt. The best example of regenerative agriculture I’ve heard is that of what the Great Plains used to be in America. The native prairie grass would grow, which would be worked over by a herd of buffalo or other animals. I say worked over because not only did they buffalo eat the grass (think ‘mowed’), they also trampled it and fertilized it through their excrement or the decaying bodies of those that died.
The buffalo did this until there was no more grass to eat, and they’d move on. What they left was a stubbled plain ready for vigorous regrowth. They did not leave it completely devoid of all life. The prairie would grow back and the buffalo would return and repeat the process, repeating God’s designed process for thousands of years.
When it comes to the small food plot I’ve grown over the last few years, I take the approach of becoming the buffalo. The deer do some of the work to help eat down the rye and clover. Every few months I go trample (read: drive over with my truck) as the rye starts to get high. There’s plenty of water there already. The power company mows it every summer.
What I am left with is a year-round food plot about two acres in size. The deer go after the clover in the spring, summer and fall and hit the rye in spring and winter. It is by no means their only or best food source, but it does concentrate the few doe families who live in the bedding to take somewhat predictable routes from their bedding to the major mast crops or ag field. Since they frequently bed in these areas, it also become a decent rut cruising area as the bucks know there will usually be does year after year.
Once I got it established through frost seeding and broadcast seeing at strategic times of the year, I now have a low-maintenance perennial food source. I still have to clean out the occasional thistle and thorn, but there is something spiritual about following the process God intended us to use.