Food Plot Location and Design
Planning Food Plot Goals to Attract, Draw & Hold Better Quality Deer By Brandon Gaines hether you have lots of hunting land or just a little, Whitetail Institute forage products are specifically designed to help you meet three food plot goals: to help you attract more deer to your property, to hold them there and to improve their quality by supplementing naturally available nutrition. All three depend on attraction — deer must find the forage you plant and the food plot location in which you plant it highly attractive. The Whitetail Institute covers forage attractiveness for you by making sure all Whitetail Institute food plot products are the most attractive the Whitetail Institute can make them. In this article, we’ll focus on some ideas that can help you do your part even better; making sure your deer feel as safe as possible getting to the plot and using it, and using it as much as possible during daylight. Drawing Power and Holding Power — Initial and Sustained Attraction Drawing Power — Initial Attraction. Whether you have lots of room on your property to plant food plots or just a little, one thing is for certain: planting Whitetail Institute forage products will improve the drawing power of your property. The reason is simple: Whitetail Institute forage products are specifically designed to be as attractive
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to deer as possible. Attractiveness to whitetails certainly isn’t the Whitetail Institute’s only forage research goal. Others include high, sustained nutritional content; early seedling vigor; rapid stand establishment; tolerance of heat, drought and cold; disease resistance; and graze tolerance, to name but a few. That’s why Whitetail Institute forage products excel in all areas of food plot performance. Even so, attractiveness to whitetails is one of the most important, and initial attractiveness is at the top of the list. The Whitetail Institute goes to great lengths to design its food products so that they’re highly attractive as soon as they begin to sprout and grow so that they will start drawing deer to your property right away. Holding Power — Sustained Attraction. After you draw deer to your property, the next issue is holding them there. For your food plots to help you do that, they must provide sustained attraction, and that brings another Whitetail Institute forage development criterion into play — how graze tolerant the forage is. Here too, Whitetail Institute forage products are designed to provide top performance.
A Few Commonly Overlooked Food Plot Locations The first step in maximizing the results you get from your food plots is to identify all the potentially plantable areas on your property. Although that might seem obvious, many hunters often overlook certain areas because they think they can’t be planted. In many cases, though, this assumption is incorrect. Here are a few examples: Logging Roads. There are two big reasons logging roads are often among the best places you can put a food plot. The first is that they’re often already sufficiently free of heavy weeds and grass that you can prepare them for planting excellent no-till forages such as Imperial Whitetail No-Plow, BowStand or Secret Spot with very little additional work. What little vegetation there is on the road can usually be removed well enough with hand tools, a light mower or even just a Roundup-type glyphosate herbicide and a hand sprayer. That can be a huge help if your ground can’t be tilled, or if it shouldn’t. A personal example of an area I could till but don’t want to is along part of an old skidder road that runs the length of my 78-acre hunting www.whitetailinstitute.com