2016 Food Plotting – the season in review.

It may be a little early to write a season in review, but now that I’m sitting in a ground blind a couple of times a week and I have thousands of trail cam pics of the plots, it seems like a good time to at least start.

As far as food plots go, in my area of east-central MN, we had almost ideal growing conditions all summer long. My plots never, ever wanted for rain. According to our friends at FarmLogs.com, we were 49.4% wetter than average. Wow!

So actually this good news is also a cautionary tale. Don’t count on this year, or any year, being the “norm”. The average is the thing that never happens. Basically, this year is the year I could hardly do anything wrong because the constant rain would have bailed me out. The only mistake I could have made this year was planting on low ground assuming that it would dry out.

Here are a few other thoughts:

– Grain mixes in the late summer and fall – Oats, wheat, rye. They are all awesome. Lord, I love grain. I love it and the deer love it. We both have our reasons. I planted 2 plots of rye in the late summer and I put a heavy dose of oats in with new clover as a nurse crop in a strip in one plot. The deer have savaged it all.

I love grain because from a land manager perspective, it’s just so damn easy. Kill, till, plant. Done. And even better, the grain plots will come back in the spring and provide some early season food when the deer really need tasty green stuff. Also, when planted as a nurse crop with other blends, it takes browsing pressure off the “target” crop.

The deer aren’t talking about exactly what they like about grain, they are more voting with their mouths by eating the stuff down to the nub. The will not leave the grain plots alone.

– Brassicas plots grew very well this year, I had my best overall brassicas plot ever. Part of that was rain, part of it was that I got some good advice about the amount of fertilizer that brassicas really need.

My other note about brassicas is that it’s absolutely true, the idea that deer take a while to develop a “food memory” such that they will eat brassicas in areas where this crop isn’t normally part of their diet. I’ve been planting brassicas at my present location for 5 years now. This is the first year where at least the majority of the deer seem to “get” what to do with them. For the first 2 years, they were hardly touched.

So the bottom line is that I firmly believe if you’re going plant brassicas plots, plan on a multi-year commitment so your deer figure them out.

– Diversify. RandyW has advocated for this approach as well, and he’s absolutely right. Each of my larger plots has 3-4 “strips” planted with different crops that have different appeal to the deer.

This is the first year that I feel my plots have had full-growing-season appeal for the deer. They seemed to be in the plots the whole year, but eating different things at different times.

What did you learn in 2016?

Grouse

Clover lasts a long time, but not forever.

Soil prep timing in wet soil is a big challenge.

Hinge cutting is fun and a fairly easy task.

Edges are a big part of food plots. As well as buffer cover. The better the edges, the better the plot is at drawing day light activity.

basseyes wrote:

Clover lasts a long time, but not forever.

It seems to me that after 3 years, clover plots seem to go into “diminishing returns mode”. Yes, you can (and I do) go with a heavier spray routine to try to drive out grasses and broadleafs, fertilize, etc, if it seems possible to eek out another year.

But all that work and expense needs to be held up against the deer’s preference for young clover and the cost/benefit of just burning the plot down with Roundup and replanting.

Grouse

This was my first year doing a food plot. It was kinda a list minute thing, I planted rye labor day weekend. The last month the deer have really been hitting it hard. Thanks to you guys on here for steering a guy in the right direction. We already have more plots planed for next year.

Grouse,

Have you ever gly’d anything in early fall? Assume it’d be a waste of time and money?

What did I learn….I learned that giant ragweed and water hemp SUCK!!! Gly resistant weeds in general do, but these 2 are my arch rivals. I have a new plan ready for next year with a different chemical, but my struggle with these 2 weeds that last few years has taken it’s toll on me.

I think it’s been 3 or 4 years now that I have been planting winter rye and with great results every year I have increased the amount I plant. This year I put in 20 50lb bags. The majority of that was as a cover/nurse crop for fall planted clover, but some was just a filler for failed/over browsed beans plots. I couldn’t agree more that grain is an awesome food plot. Easy as heck to plant, grows in the harshest of conditions and the deer hammer it.

I also went heavier on the clover compared to years past. A couple plots I have had beans/corn in the past I finally realized were just too small to have row crops. I do love planting row crops, especially for winter food sources, but a small plot with high deer density will almost always fail. Those plots have now gone into a fall planted clover with rye as the cover crop. My clover gets more attention from the deer than anything else on the farm. From the first sprout to come up in early spring to the last one left standing in late fall/early winter. This makes for a great food source for 9 plus months of the year. AND, it also is fairly easy to plant and maintain(especially in fall with a cover crop). Some fertilizer and maybe a mowing or two if the deer don’t keep it trimmed. It lasts for 3-5 years which makes less work in the spring.

Last but not least I learned to check and then double check your planter setting before planting row crops. I screwed up big time this year but using the wrong settings on my planter. I got complacent and cocky if you will and it burned me. I ended up planting the beans at corn spacing and corn at bean spacing What I ended up with is way to many corn plants too close together which cause me to have lots of cobs, but little ones. My beans were spaced too far apart allowing weeds to grow because they couldn’t canopy. I also had few bean plants which meant fewer beans. Next year I will check the setting, double check the setting and then have someone else check them.

basseyes wrote:

Have you ever gly’d anything in early fall? Assume it’d be a waste of time and money?

I’ve sprayed gly as late as mid-September, but for your situation we need to talk specifically about what you’re trying to accomplish by spraying in the fall.

Are we talking about spraying food plots to get a jump on spring planting? Or are we killing off unwanted brush on fencelines and trails? I’ve sprayed blackberry brambles and buck brush into September to clear trails and road edges. That works fine.

For plot use, you *could*, but there are a lot of potential issues. First, here’s where we need to do the old read/follow label directions thing. I’m paraphrasing here, but from memory I believe the labels say to the effect that foliage must be green and actively growing for gly to be effective.

My concern with even early fall field spraying would be that some plants may be dormant or going dormant and may not absorb the gly to produce an effective and even kill, even though most of the field appears to be green.

The other issue I can see is that in the fall, many plants will have their seed pods on and dry, so while spraying gly may kill the plant itself, it will not kill the pods/seeds that that plant will then deposit in your soil when you work the plot. Gly is a contact killer, if it hits green leaf or green stem, that plant is Dead Plant Walking. It doesn’t matter what happens after that, the plant will die. But it has no residual effect in the soil, so it does not kill seeds.

An additional concern would be how soon do you intend to work the plot? If you intend to work it soon after you kill it in the early fall, it’s not optimal, but it could work out ok. With the above caveats about the release of weed seeds and being ineffective on any plants that are dormant.

I wouldn’t spray in the fall and then try working that ground the following spring because there’s so much time passing and so much variation as to when (in my case, at least) it’s dry enough to get in to start working ground. Maybe I can start in late April or early May, or maybe it rains like he!! all spring and it’s late may or early June. We’re talking up to 6 months of lag time here between spraying and working the ground, which IMO is too long.

That’s a long answer to a short question, but I wanted to lay out the whole picture. Much depends on what you’re trying to kill and why.

Grouse

Appreciate it, that makes a lot of sense.

I was thinking of getting a jump on plots but didn’t do it cause I thought it’d be wasted time and cash, done way to much of that with plots.

Never thought about the brush angle for trail edges, that’s a good idea. That I would definitely do.

I spray Roundup on most of my access trails on my property because it’s just too slow and time-consuming to have to walk them with the brush cutter every year to keep the blackberry brambles and small woody brush from growing up again. I have several miles of trails, fenceline, and the driveway ditches.

I built an ATV spray rig out of parts to get exactly what I wanted. I have a 100% duty cycle pump and a 4 foot wide boom, with folding wings with a shutoff valve on each side. This allows me to use the folded booms as “side shooters” to direct the first nozzle on the boom wing to spray the side to kill brush that tends to canopy out onto the trails. This also allows me to drive along a fenceline and aim the nozzle right at the line to kill brush that’s growing under and beside the fence.

Yes, Roundup kills everything! So after I get the brush killed, I can often just switch to a good 2-4-D broadleaf killer. That leaves the grass, but kills the saplings, woody brush, and blackberries.

If you buy your chemicals at good prices and in bulk, spraying is very economical.

Grouse

TheFamousGrouse wrote:

I spray Roundup on most of my access trails on my property because it’s just too slow and time-consuming to have to walk them with the brush cutter every year to keep the blackberry brambles and small woody brush from growing up again. I have several miles of trails, fenceline, and the driveway ditches.

Just a thought…
We have some trails thru our property that have never been sprayed. One trail I can think of has never seen a sprayer or mower and likely dates back to the 1920s. It even survived a logging about 20 years ago. You may find out the trails in the wooded areas will survive with simple ATV traffic. ATV traffic generally compacts the soil and overhead forest shade creates fairly harsh growing conditions for a lot of plants. The ferns, grasses and forbs that do grow simply get flattened out by the ATV. Most of the maintenance we do involves clearing deadfalls. We might mow a trail once a year (or not) and periodically cut branches reaching into the trail.

Might not be a bad idea to let one of your trails go with simple traffic and see if you can eliminate the effort associated with spraying.

Few random things we experienced.

Normal??? NOTHING is normal. This year having one of the wettest august ever and this much heat into mid November has kept the deers diet on low sugar and low carbohydrates. Alfalfa is still the #1 thing being hit in my fields. Some sort and beans, but not a lot. Once the cold finally arrives, that will change.

None of our sugaring plants have turned yet. Still green and little signs of that changing soon. Beets, barras, and others won’t get hit hard until they turn and the deers diet changes.

Communication! I least a 12 acre plot to my neighbor for next year for crop corn. Been having anywhere from 12 to 20+ does/yearlings in there every night. Unexpectedly, he sprayed it and killed it off for a jump on this spring. That yellow field has been empty for the last week and the deers patterns have changed….feeding in a neighbors field. Didn’t think this out and had no discussion of doing nothing until after gun deer season.