Deer Food Plots and habitat enhancement begins with what the habitat currently will sustain year around. From there we enhance the habitat to provide, more deer, or more bucks. In addition by keeping them on your land year around with cover, feed, and water they don't leave your property at critical times as for instance the hunting season.
Selected seeds planted in selected deer traffic areas provide the need holding power required to satisfy their needs. In addition in the fall when deer move for the rut and hunter pressure many deer in the area move to your property because of the food plots you have provided.
Feeds as leafy brassicas, beets, turnips, sugar beets, rape, peas, soybeans, pinto beans, winter wheat, oats, barley, buckwheat, sorghum, alfalfa and clover are some of the plants available to increase your deer population's health and productivity. Big bucks are a product of nutrition, age and genes. We can of course increase their nutrition level directly. Their age indirectly by increasing the habitat ability to support more deer, if hunting pressure is managed, the herd average age will be increased. Genes in wild deer are honestly beyond anyone's control, but big deer are auctually freaks, or animals that grow outside the normal size of an average population. That is why in normal wild deer the B&C bucks are at such a small percentage. We raise that percentage greatly by increasing the chances of the average bucks size, and numbers to put the odds on your side to provide 160 point whitetail and 180 point mule deer.
Lime is usually added to western soils to get the ph level to between 6-7. Then fertilizers that are high in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium provide the minerals, and the plants become the "vehicle to get those minerals into the deer's body. Some plants as clovers and beans actually put minerals back into the ground .
A good blended combination tends to balance out the food plots for a couple of years.
Water is always a consideration in the west and it is simple to say the seeds that work, will always do better if additional water is available.
Plot planting is done in direct relationship as crop maturity in that a spring plot may have all of the above to provide a specific food source that will change through the year, but there will always be something that is desired by the deer, available for eating.
Summer plots generally go in to provide deer magnets for hunting season and high energy plants to carry the deer through the hard winter months while the does are pregnant. The spring plants are available for the deer that winter well and must begin antler growth and lactation, or milk production for the doe, to feed the high successful fawn birth rate and survival which insures us of a growing herd population.
Food plot location is critical to keep big bucks from becoming nocturnal after the first gunshot. A the realtors say, "Location, Location, Location." Where, what, size and how these plots are put is of massive importance to the outcome and use of the plot by the deer.
As predators are opportunist, so are deer in the sense of feed. The will browse through what they like the most at a given time, and leave the rest for a later time. The blended multi-seed planting is a little more difficult to plant but the results are very pleasing and successful.