Among the animal kingdom, the mighty deer is one species that’s very well known for its antlers. But what exactly is the secret to deer antler growth? Seeing as the antlers may just be the most prized part of the deer, how does one maximize their growth? Jason Obermiller and Eric Fitzgerald of Rackology get in depth about the secrets of this elusive subject. From genetics to nutrition, Jason and Eric break down the science of making sure your deer’s antlers are the best they can be.
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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE:
Extraordinary Growth With Rackology With Jason Obermiller And Eric Fitzgerald
We’re heading out to Central Nebraska, North of I-80 and we’re going to connect with Jason Obermiller. Jason has created something that he calls everything you need in one bag. What’s everything you need? You need a deer attractant. Everybody knows deer likes to come to someplace there’s food. The other thing is minerals and the importance of minerals. Jason shared something to me that I didn’t realize, it’s that during the months of January to March, that’s when the bucks take the mineral out of the soil and store it in their bones. Why do they do that? In June to August, they’re growing horns and soil makes a big connection in what happens in the wintertime and early spring to how big that Mr. Wonderful is going to be for you. Jason has got a lot of tips and techniques that he’s going to share how to grow big deer.
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We’re going to head to Loup City, Nebraska and we’re going to connect with Jason Obermiller. Jason is the Founder of Rackology. Jason, welcome to the show. Let the people know a little bit about you.
I’m originally from Loup City, I haven’t strayed too far from home. I’m a high school science teacher and that leads into how Rackology was founded. I was doing my Master’s in Biology on antler growth and extend it from there. I’m also a professional taxidermist which helps to tie things together from the standpoint. I see a lot of these deer every year, the antlers that come through my shop and I can ask a lot of questions as far as what they’re feeding if they’re feeding anything. That gives me a lot of insight on their deer as far as what happens if they’re only feeding this and what happens if they’re only feeding that? That’s been a great tool for me to see hundreds and hundreds of deer to compare the results of what I’ve been finding, teaching and taxidermy and Rackology. In my background I’ve hunted and fished my whole life, I’ve been doing that ever since I was a little kid and I always love the outdoors and I love the critters.
Give us some background on the birth of Rackology.
I was doing my Master’s study for Biology and I was doing it on antler growth. In fact, when we got published, the title has something to do with antler metrics and deer, I can’t remember at the top of my head. When you research something like that for a Master’s, you tend to get in-depth and go into what it takes for deer, elk, moose, everything was mixed into that study as far as antler growth goes. I continued that research finding out all the nutrients, everything that deer need, which wasn’t that difficult to find.
The difficult part with formulating the stuff was everything’s got to be in specific ratios, consistent ratios, and certain minerals aren’t available for another mineral. At the right ratios those other minerals either won’t be absorbed or they won’t be absorbed as efficiently. It gets even more complicated as far as other minerals that involve those first pair, other vitamins that involve different combinations. It gets confusing and crazy when you get in-depth but that’s the direction I took, but I had no intention at all. There was no intention of ever coming up with Rackology.
When I started doing this, I wanted to have the best stinking stuff for my deer, even when I came up with my formulation, I always kept tinkering with it and researched everything else out there on the market. At the time I figured, “If somebody else is already making something like this, I’m going to use their product.” Rackology wasn’t even in my mind at the time and the more I researched, the more I found out. You have the bad ones which there’s not a whole lot to them. There are ones that are decent, they’ve got the vitamins and minerals may be, they may not be in the right amounts or the right ratios. You’ve got ones that are decent, they’ve got some of the right minerals and vitamins but not all their ratios are always square with what I research.
I’ve talked to a number of other biologists that worked for deer ranches and what’s cool is these guys aren’t doing anything for business-wise with this, their sole job is with these deer ranches. We look at our formulations and what we’ve got going and it’s matching up with stuff that they’ve been doing for 20, 30 years. There have been a few little differences, but it’s based on them having pen-raised deer versus us targeting more free-range. We’ve started to get into the pen-raised stuff. We’ve sent some product, some pen-raised for deer and for elk, and we’re in a decent-sized elk ranch. When we see what the results are with these guys, it’s when we’ll come out more with what we found with them.
That’s how Rackology got started, it was off of me wanting the best thing for my deer and not being able to find it, I started making it and word spread. My partner, Eric, he’s the agronomist. He was having the stuff and eventually started getting it bagged. The pushover was, I went in there one day to pick up a few bags to go put some out and he says, “We’re out.” I’m like, “What do you mean you’re out?” He says, “I sold your last bags here the other day and I forgot to let you know.” At first, I wasn’t upset but I was as a little bit anxious because I wanted to put the stuff out for myself, that’s why I came up with the stuff not to sell it. In the meantime, he went through almost 0.5 tons selling it and he’s like, “You’ve got enough money now. You can get a few more bags and we’ll have another ton made.” He wasn’t selling it for about peanuts at the time. One thing led to another and it happened again and finally he’s like, “You need to think about doing something with this.” I told him at first that I didn’t want to because I had some years of researching into this and last time we talked, I felt like whatever sitting over my brew pot and I didn’t want anybody to know what it was.
That’s one thing I hope people take from this, this has come about innocently and from the scientific standpoint of wanting the absolute best for our deer, not just our Rackology meal on our mineral, which is our flagship products. Our food plots, we put extensive research into doing all that and our food plot fertilizer. Our thing was, we’re not going to spare any expense, we want the best of the best and making that as the most reasonable price as possible for customers. Most of the hunters out there like us, we can’t afford to go out and spend thousands of dollars on stuff. Even if you go into a store to buy small bags, some of that stuff for this little bag is $20, $30 for an attractant and that’s not what we set out to do.
For the folks that are reading and trying to bring a solution to their problem, let’s say they buy your product and so on, there’s probably an expectation on the time frame. When you’re working with your herd and you start using your product for them, when do you start seeing a difference in your herd?
You watch TV and hunters have been fooled and brainwashed. There are a lot of words that come to my mind over the years, “Buy this and you’ll grow 200-inch deer and buy this, it’s the best thing.” Nobody can make a guarantee on what their stuff is going to do as far as growing these giant deer. If you back up to the science side of things, you can only grow, number one, what the deer is genetically capable of growing and number two, you’ve got to have the right stuff available for them. After the rut, we start pouring it heavy after hunting season because here we can’t have it out during the hunting season. As soon as the season is over with, we start pouring it to them heavy, simply because they’re worn down from the rut. We don’t want them having any issues over the wintertime, and within 3 to 4 weeks, we see a huge improvement in the body condition on our does and bucks. Especially the bucks, because they’re the ones that are rutted down. As far as body condition, 3 to 4 weeks is a quick result that you start to see.
As far as antler growth, the nutrients, the nutritional value that the deer need, they start packing that in February or March. As soon as they lose their antlers, they start with what they eat, the minerals that can be stored on their skeleton, they have first to store that on their skeleton before they can make antlers. A lot of people are led to believe, “Put this stuff out and right before the season, you’re going to get over the summertime and grow these big antlers,” and that’s not the truth. The deer need to first take it in over the winter months and in the spring, they pack that onto their skeleton. As soon as their antlers drop, they’re pedicle where the antler is attached, the stem cells there begin to start growing a new antler bud. It starts growing as soon as that thing sheds and heals over.
Let’s say I’m on my farm back in Tennessee and I’m trying to say, “I need this many tons of feed.” How does one gauge how much feed you’re trying to put out for a period of time, for the guy that’s trying to consider that?
In our Rackology meal, that was our flagship product that I designed for the deer to be eating that every day or every other day, something they’re going to consume a few times a week and get their DVM for that. If your deer are living in a place that’s starved of appropriate nutrition, they are of course, going to eat a lot more of the areas that are high in nutritional value around. If you have a soil that naturally has some good mineral in it, they can go and drink water or somehow ingest that into their system, the dirt maybe, they’re going to consume less of it. The cool thing is our product is a limiting factor in itself and the deer will only eat as much as they need. We have one individual, his property is on the South Loup, it’s all sand and grass pasture. It’s almost two miles to any field and he goes through quite a bit of it and that’s a worst-case scenario there. You have a normal area where they’ve got some more vegetation around. In some of my spots, 3 or 4 months, I probably went through 5 or 6 bags out of my feeder.
An interesting thing is you’re trying to think and for me and the readers go, “How much do I need?” The answer is you don’t know until you start putting it out. The second thing that I was thinking about as you were talking is about the uptake of minerals and storing it on the frame of the deer. That’s not a simple thing to do, is it?
No, it’s not. When the deer have to absorb that, they turn it into deer mineral that’s attached to their skeleton and in their system. Once that’s accomplished, then when they start growing their antlers, they begin to pull it off their skeleton and they grow the antlers. To start the process, they need protein. Depending on the time that you gauge an antler, it can be 30% on up in protein because it’s a protein matrix. The protein is building a scaffolding if you would or like lath in an old house. That’s the protein and then what hardens that lath is the mineral that has to be pulled off the skeleton and laid down.
After the protein matrix has been finished or as it’s finishing, then these minerals are laid down. It’s a long process. You watch them grow all summer and those antlers are soft, they don’t get a whole lot of mineral in there yet because it’s actively growing. In fact, the tips of those antlers look like bulbs. They’re like a stem cell that is actively growing that antler out to whatever its maximum genetic potential is, coupled with what available nutrients that the deer has already taken in. Putting it out over the summer months, is that going to do some good? Yeah, they don’t start to solidify until towards the end of August. By the end of August, you’re getting maxed out to where antler growth-wise.
We got a guy that came on here and he’s going to be pouring it to them all summer. He’s putting out our straight vitamin and mineral mix also so that if the deer lack in anything, it’s going and taking a higher dose to get them caught up. As far as gauging goes, you need to go out and put a bag out and try it and see how much they’re consuming of it. At different times of the year, they’ll consume differently, which is another cool thing. I’ve had guys that bought the product and they put it out and are like, “This 50-pound bag was gone in 2, 3 days.” That depends on the number of deer you’ve got there, their nutritional needs at the time and there are other times of the year where you put it out and they come and they nibble on it and that’s about it.
People that purchase the product at the “wrong time of the year,” they could say, “They didn’t eat that much of this stuff.” More than likely, it has to do with the fact that they didn’t need that nutritional value at the time. It’s not like other products that put a high amount of salt, over 30% salt in there so the deer come and eat it all the time. That’s the thing that a lot of people have been misled to believe that, “They love this product.” No, that product has got a bunch of salt in it and you could have accomplished the same thing with a salt block as to what’s being accomplished there.
You’re attracting the deer. You’re not helping them out.
Also, not with salt and with the other products. With our stuff, they’ll eat what they need and what they don’t need. Throughout the year, you’ll see them visit the feeder for different time durations based on what their need is.
Looking at this particular buck here, and this is a buck that’s a product off of some of your stuff?
You bet. A good friend of ours, Jess, on our website or our Instagram, are both on Facebook, we’ve got some pictures of him that he gave us a 2.5, 3.5 and a 4.5-year-old deer. On that property, genetics-wise, he doesn’t have 180-inch genetics but when you see the difference, the jump that he made, at first I argued with him when he showed me the trail camera pictures. He’s like, “I’m going to kill this deer.” I’m like, “That’s good.” He goes, “This is the deer that I’ve seen for the last couple of years. I started feeding you guys this stuff last year and the thing blew up to this.”
As soon as the deer lose their antlers, they start with what they eat. Share on XAt first, I was like, “I don’t think that’s him.” He says, “No. He put that much on. I’ve been feeding other stuff before. I’ve never had anything do this before.” I didn’t laugh at him but I chuckled a little bit when he said, “I’m going to kill that deer.” When you get to know Jess, when he says he’s going to do something, he does it. I don’t know how many days it took him sitting to connect with this dude finally but he was a full Rackology buck and in fact, he is coming through the area, feeding on some of our Rackology food plots. A cool deal there, that deer was all the way around.
If you’re building the herd and then you have to call your herd to get your genetics squared away, you’re like raising cattle if you don’t have good genetics, it doesn’t matter that much.
That’s no kidding.
Let’s talk about the photo and how it relates to what you’re doing.
That’s a group of South Dakota bucks in Northern South Dakota. They hadn’t been growing a whole lot of sizes in that area, nothing spectacular anyways, and they started feeding this stuff that winter and she definitely noticed a real jump in there in overall antler size on everybody. One thing I also noticed is the body condition on those deer. A lot of people, the first thing they’re looking at is antlers, my whole thing was if you have the healthiest deer possible, it’s a no-brainer that their antlers are going to be maximized also.
I grew up on a ranch, and when you look at body condition of critters, you don’t see ribs, their hair looks sleek, they look healthy, even the sheen and color of their fur. Pet owners know this, when you get good pet food and you have bad pet food, your animal’s body condition doesn’t look as great. These two, she said were there every day and I have about 4 or 5 other pictures of some other bucks. Two of them, they’re bigger but this is the one that I emailed. That’s what’s going on in that picture, the feeder, the dish thing is right behind them, the trough that’s hanging off that post, and you can’t see it.
Speaking of body condition, I got this news talking to one of our dealers in Texas. Chuck, on their place, has been putting it out now since last year. He goes, “I’ve got to tell you something. I knew that your product was based on the research but I didn’t realize how good it was.” I’m not going to over-exaggerate and I’m not going to brag about things, it will maximize your genetic potential is what I tell people. He goes, “You wouldn’t believe this. I’ve fed about everything else under the sun and we have never had a 200-pound deer on our ranch down there in Southern Texas.”
At first, I thought he said 200-inch deer and I’m like, “200-inch deer, that’s a huge deer I’m sure you have.” He goes, “No, not inch, it’s a 200-pound deer. We fed everything and we’d never even come close. We’ve got a number of bucks and they’re going to be over 200 pounds. Looking at past game camera pictures, the antler growth that we’re seeing, we’ve never seen that in years past.” The antler growth comment was great but what I gravitated more and celebration was not only was he a believer before this, but this guy cracked home. That’s what he’s telling all of his customers down there, they’re growing 200-pound deer, you don’t see that down there.
For the folks that are reading, they’ll go, “It sounds good, how do I find you guys?” Where are you on social media so I can either learn more or find your dealer network?
Facebook, we’re on there. It’s Rackology on Facebook. Instagram is @RackologyLLC and you’ll see our logo with the double drop tine, double helix, the genetics. Our website is www.Rackology.org. On the website, you can click on the dealer link. Every week, I’d do some tweaking on there, I’m always doing something. It’s not that I’m never happy with it but I’m trying to improve. Instead of one big long list, I’m getting our dealers tabbed off into states. I figured out how to run the accordion tab on that thing. That’s where they can find our dealer lists.
I’ve been putting Facebook posts out in other states on their deer hunting and bow hunting forums that will allow me. Some of them don’t allow for advertising, but I have been advertising steadily, trying to get dealers in other states because we get calls and emails that shipping is the problem. We’ve got some other stores in the works. I don’t think at this point we’re going to come right out. If you’re following us on Instagram and Facebook, you’ll find out as soon as they’re available in these other stores. We need the smaller store dealers because those are the places where they build relationships and guys might find it on a store shelf if they find a local dealer that carries it. Guess where their loyalty is going to go, so we need both? We’re in five states, but we’re working with pushing on moving north, south and east of us.
What states are those?
From Nebraska, you go north to South Dakota and North Dakota, South Oklahoma or Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and east. We’ve got Tennessee and South Carolina. I’m not going to ramble off all the state names.
You’ve got quite a few on the east side too.
We’re trying to get into. The big kicker is we’ve sent bags to clear out to Maine, Pennsylvania, and New York and every place like that and we’ve lost money, but I told Eric, “People want the product, we just need to send it. Even if we lose some money on it, that’s how it has to happen.” Eventually, people are going to go to their local shops and say, “Can you carry this stuff?” We can ship a pallet of this stuff, that’s when it cheapens it up.
Freight is everything, isn’t it?
It is. It’s a limiting factor.
We’ve talked about the body size and the body mass of these deer and reflecting their health and the antler growth, which is also reflective. We’re talking about the reproductive health here on fawn and immune systems and so on. Why don’t we chat about that a little bit?
I have to say this first, it is absolutely one of my most favorite pictures I’ve ever captured, that I’ve ever seen and I’ve had guys go, “Why? It’s a doe and a fawn.” They want these big racks. Antlers are cool but this epitomizes my vision of Rackology and that’s from the feeder to the doe, to the fawn. You’ve got them all lined up right there. The only thing missing, which I have a picture of the buck is on the left side, but I didn’t want to focus so much on the buck. I wanted that shot right there and to me, it’s one of the coolest pictures that we captured.
The epitome of this is in the real world, we can’t do this but if you were to take the same buck and the same doe and have them twins so to speak. This buck and doe never touched Rackology. This buck and doe are identical. That’s what they grew up on. What you’d notice is as these animals produce egg and sperm, the better their nutritional value, the healthier the sperm and egg are. Your big bucks, because that’s what people are interested in, at age 4.5, 5.5 years old, their antlers, frame, and everything about them is decided when they’re still a sperm and an egg. The healthier that buck and doe are at conception and their gametes, which is a fancy word for sperm and egg, the healthier they are. The healthier the fetus is growing is going to be and the better jumpstart that animals are going to have on life. This fawn was conceived on it and you’ve got it going through the cycle which is right there before your eyes.
I’ve got a bit of a background in biology myself and I think about genetics, and you can do as much as you can to take and optimize what the genetics will provide. If you don’t take and do some degree of management of what you shoot and what you call, you’re only going to get as good as the genetics will allow. I think about survivability in the marketplace for these guys, an interesting shot, and then you have this one. These are some of the big boys.
The guide that sent me those, that’s not his big boys. He knows that we’re putting this stuff out on Instagram and Facebook. In the deer guiding industry, it gets secretive as far as what you got and what you don’t get. If people are following us and they recognize something that they’ve seen or they know in the area, they don’t want that tip offs. These are a couple of good growers, by his standards, one is maybe a shooter. The other one, I doubt that they would probably take where they’re hunting there in Kansas. He’s been putting that out for years. In the summer, he’s putting out all our food plots and using our food plot fertilizer but these are some good deer that he’s growing that most people would shoot. Evidently, he told me that these deer were at the feeder all the time and they were hogs. He said, “They’d run the other deer off a little bit.” He’s got 4 or 5 feeders.
When we think about the food plots, we’re talking about genetics and we’re talking about feed. Now, we’re transitioning to the plots and how you can affect not just by feeding but also on the nutrients coming out of the ground.
I got the grass killed back here. Eric and I finally had the chance to go out and we rented a tractor tiller combo. We got the plot all tilled up and as you noticed, there’s a lot of pretty heavy grass there. We went over the thing 2 or 3 times to get it tilled in good. Eric is planting our sanctuary with a lot of mix there which is a good combination of perennials and annuals. It gives you the best of both worlds without going a full bore one way or the other. The two plots together are about a quarter acre. The other one is obviously about an eighth of an acre but we tilled it up.
He’s hand broadcasting that with a spinner and he had the trigger things set on about too. Eric being an agronomist, it makes me think there’s a lot of food plot material on the market and believe it or not, food plots still take some research. Some companies have umpteen different food plots in it. You go to the store, look at what’s available and stand there and have to scratch your head like, “What do I plant? What do I even want to plant?” We’ve tried to simplify it as simple as possible. We’ve got an annual brassica mix, which is a great full-bore forage. You can plant the stuff in the spring and it will grow great and be food over the summertime.
The highest nutritional bang for your buck would be planting the thing early fall and getting a heavy growth after those deer throughout the fall months. Our perennial blend, you can get that in early spring or late fall whenever you want to start it and you’re going to have a long-term plot there. The sanctuary that we’re putting out, it’s going to get a lot of good growth right off the bat with our annuals. Also, it gives a deer immediate forage over the spring and summer months, which will then lead to these perennials into the fall months.
Eventually, you can leave it as a perennial plot. If you want to over-seed with some more perennial seeds, you can. If people want to kill it back every spring, it’s one of the longest growing food plots if you were to plant it in the spring. Food plots are half of the key to the situation and a lot of people think, “We can put out bags of stuff.” That’s how I formulated our Rackology so that I know people that can’t or don’t put out food plots will get the maximum amount of nutrition.
Food plots are something that if you can put them out, you need to because it’s the most natural way for deer to consume nutrients. It’s palatable because it’s all-natural and that brings our product line around 360 or 365, plot 365 that we got. It’s another great way for the deer to get their nutrition is from a food plot. Not only that, states that you can’t supplement in, this is the only way the deer are going to get some good nutritional value and then we’ll take it a step further. That’s why we went full bore formulating our fertilizer.
You’ve got the feed on Rackology and then I was thinking, “If you’ve got your food plots and your feed, does your feed then aid in the uptake of nutrients from your food plot as a complement?” I was thinking about micronutrients.
Some of the ingredients that we’ve got in our Rackology meal and vitamin-mineral combo, are geared or you could call it a prebiotic. It’s something that gets the gut room and ready to start digesting more efficiently. Having that in the combination is the best of both worlds. If people can afford to do everything, the more you do, the better it’s going to be to a certain extent. It does complement each other, and on the same token, eating from the food plot that roughage is good for the deer too. I have to say that they both would complement each other.
For the hunter out there that are trying to get an edge on his neighbor, “I want to make sure that I attract those deer to my property and my neighbor hunts too.” Do you find that this functions well as an attractant?
The deer that you had a picture with Jess, he’s got a large volume of deer that hangs out on his place and is not going over to the neighbors often. Does it hold deer there? You’re right, it does. Having that combination holds them even tighter. In places where you have the meal, the Rackology out, if they need this stuff, it’s going to hold them there. Having greens on the ground is going to hold them there. Also, I’d say equally and when you combine the two, if you don’t give the deer any reason at all to leave, they won’t know. With that said, I’ve done a lot of research on this on radio-collared bucks. They’ll take a sabbatical once a season and sometimes more of it. One big trip and that’s when you may lose some of your deer that might get shot. Bucks cut their feeding down sometimes by upwards as half if not more. During the rut, they don’t eat. They’ve got other things on their minds.
In your work, you talk about water availability. Let’s say that a piece of ground, water is a certain distance away and versus having water, let’s say over the feeder. As far as the volume of water and proximity to water, travel patterns and so on, what were your observations when you were studying them?
One thing I will say is with a food plot, especially a good lush one, deer aren’t adapted quite like antelope and some of your desert critters, but deer can drink less water if they’re consuming plants that contain high volumes of water. If you have a good lush food plot and it’s able to sub irrigate, the deer are going to get quite a bit of their water value out of those plants. What type of limiting factor is water? Water is huge. If you don’t have water around, you’re not going to have deer.
It’s like in the wintertime, this one pasture that I hunt, it’s north of my place and after the cattle would get out in October, November-ish, he shuts tanks down. There is absolutely no water out there in that whole section and you can tell that the deer move from being out in that tall native grass. It’s a great place to hide and they’ll go out there to bed and stay. They’ve got to go about a mile to get to the water and the majority of those deer staying around the perimeter of that property and not in the middle. Water is huge from that standpoint.
The other thing that water is big on, I was talking with one of our customers, he’s out of state and he got in on the tail end to some argument about baiting, spreading disease in other states. I said, “On the research I’ve done, what I found to be the biggest disease spreader is water.” Our vitamin and mineral mix, there are enough minerals, salt content and everything. It’s probably going to take care of a number of viruses and bacteria. They’re going only to be able to live long in that feed before they die because it’s too dry and it’s too nasty of an environment.
Usually for people who just started hunting, they want the best stuff from their deer. Share on XWhereas water, most of these microorganisms can stay viable in that water for days, if not weeks, and places that are arid and have those tricklers or those guzzlers, those water deals that people put out for deer. If all the deer are going to that 1, 2 or 3 guzzlers, to me that screams a much larger disease potential than having a few piles of feed here and there. I’m getting off the topic here onto this other one. I do get the concern of maybe having any potential for spreading disease but your water sources are more primary disease vector even though it’s not alive than some food sources.
Here’s the other thing too, when deer are out eating, you watch them graze across the field and one week they’re all hitting this one little spot, they’re all exchanging saliva there. The next week, a different type of a plant comes into season and they’re all in this one area eating heavily, exchanging saliva there. Even your food sources are going to be an exchange even in nature. A lot of people think that they’re out there grazing and they’ve got this whole pasture, whole whatever to graze on, but deer are selective and picky about what they’re eating at different times of the year. I’m more concerned disease-wise about water than I am about feed, and so water is huge.
You think about it as an add-on and an edge. Talk about what this one is.
It’s our Plot 365. It’s our premium perennial blend and it’s got a good mix. This is one thing that I had Eric’s help with. Him being the agronomist, I knew what I wanted but I want to make sure that these were things with what my research was leading them back. I have an intense background in biology. I went deep into nutrition also, not that I went far as becoming a nutritionist but I went heavy into those avenues. I’m one that when I feel I may be a little weak in one area, I like to bring a professional one and it just so happens Eric is an agronomist.
We get a number of different clover types that are in that chicory stuff and it’s listed on the back. It’s not like it’s a big secret for anybody’s food plot. The ratios that Eric did come up within there are something that is big because a lot of times, you don’t stop to think and this is where Eric’s knowledge is huge. If I were to put 25% this, 25% that, is that going to be good? The answer is no because there are certain plants that you don’t want as high a volume because they’re a lot more aggressive growth. They’re going to take up more space and they’re going to choke your other stuff out. Rationing of those seeds, it was a big thing that he shed some light on for me. The other thing too was his selection of not just any old clovers, what certain specific types, number one and number two of those types, where that seed comes from also plays a role in its viability.
We didn’t want to spare any expense on anything because we’re making it for ourselves first and foremost and it just so happens that people love our products. The Plot 365, that’s supposed to signify as a perennial plot, you’ll get year-round use out of that even into the winter months, your clovers and your lagoons will stay green. You’ll see deer out grazing on an alfalfa field in the middle of winter and even though it’s brown, they’re still getting some nutritional value out of it.
It’s not your normal fertilizer. Is this you guys with the rental tractor?
That’s the front of the bag. This is something that we’d been thinking on, researching and working on for quite a while. What speed things up for me was we had a call, the fact is after we did one of the podcasts and the guy is from Illinois and he says, “I believe in your products but we own a guide service and legally we can’t put out mineral. We can’t supplement our deer. We can’t give them anything. We can’t even put mineral out in the summertime, nothing absolutely at all. If you can figure out how to put your Rackology, everything in one bag, if you can put that into a plan, you’ll have something.”
I went to Eric and I said, “We need to kick this thing into high gear. This has to come out with our new line of food plots and everything.” The thing that we kept coming back to is most fertilizer on the market, is all NPK, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. Plants need that. Everything from cell structure, cellulose growth, chlorophyll, root and stem elongation, all those nutrients are super important for that plant. As far as for the critters that are eating it, plants don’t take in nutrition. They don’t try and take extra nutrition for the animals. They take in what they need and as by default, they do absorb some from the soil.
That’s why animals have to eat X number of plants in order to get their nutritional value. What I wanted was not your normal N, P, K, I wanted our Rackology as much as possible to be in those plants. Eric set out to do that and what we came up with is something that is as natural as possible, which is crazy. It’s got the fertilizer part to it too because the plants need that but it puts in a number of those nutrients, those minerals and vitamins. Normally a plant when they’re growing, some of these minerals are big enough that they don’t cross the cell membrane as efficiently.
All of our Rackology products for the deer are chelated, which I noticed a number of competitors in stores now that I didn’t see before putting chelated on their bag. I don’t know if they chelate it or if they’re just putting it on there and I’m not sure if we caused that or not but it made me feel good. What it does is it takes these components and it chelates them for the plant. It allows them to be as absorbable as possible and allows more of it to cross the cellular membrane and up to take that for the plant which then gets passed onto the deer.
I give Eric so much credit for this, knowing what to get and what to put together. Nowhere else are these things found together like this. They may be in separate forms in agriculture, but it is the epitome of fertilizer because now you can put this stuff on. Not only are your plants going to have awesome growth but your deer are going to benefit from those plant sources because of this fertilizer. It needs to have it available in the ground because, ultimately as deer graze on those plants, they graze them off and they regrow. They need to be able to continue to take this up from the soil.
It gets a little bit complicated when you get into how fertilizers work and how nutrients are absorbed by plants and everything. I asked Eric and Mike, “We want to do this the right way. What’s the best way? Should we have this stuff in liquid? Should we put it on the plants? How should this work?” Eric is like, “No, this has got to go on the soil and this is the best way to get it into your plants, number one. Number two, it’s going to be there all growing season, not just a one-shot deal.”
You have the same challenges with pH on the soil that they have to address before it can be picked up properly.
When we designed this, Eric says, “Most people’s food plots, they can go out and plant our stuff, put this on, and they will be fine.” If you’ve got somebody that wants to get serious about their food plot, I would recommend people do this anyway, I would consider getting a soil test. Testing your soil, seeing what you need, where does your N, P, K stand on your soil? Do you have enough potassium? Do you have enough nitrogen? If everything is close to where it should be, then you probably don’t need to add anything but if your soil is acidic, if it’s too basic, it needs to add lime or something to balance that pH out.
Some of our bigger clients, they’re putting ten-acre food plots. We’re working with one guy that potentially in the future if we get his whole business rather than him mixing the stuff himself and trusting us with it. We might be putting in 80 to the 100-acre food plot. They’re not us but getting him set up with it. That’s the type of place where you have to pay attention to the soil because you’ve got such large food plot areas that one little offset is going to cost you a huge amount. If you don’t have a place that you can send your stuff off, which most laboratories around will do your soil testing, we use Ward Laboratories.
You have your local ag guy, your local ag extension. The farmers still get it done.
Find your local agronomist, give him the dirt and he’ll explain to you how to do it. He probably wants 4 or 5 different spots. You scratch off the top surface stuff and fill your bag from what’s below it in 4 or 5 spots and you give it to your agronomist. They can pull a food plot analysis or soil analysis for you and tell you what you’re missing or what you got good. I told Eric it’d probably be a lot more. Guys call him a lot and say, “Here’s what my readout is,” or they’ll email it to him. Then when he has a chance to look at it, he’ll email them back and say, “You can put our fertilizer on, that’s all you need to do or put our fertilizer on but add a little bit of N, P, or K.” We can get down to the wire if you want and that’s the cool thing is when you’ve got two professionals on board with you. You can call us and talk to us about any of those issues, what you need or any type of advice, that’s something that we offer free to our clients. Whereas anywhere else you’d get charged for that type of information or help.
Do they email you or do they phone call you?
We get texts, emails, phone calls, and messages through our website. They come in a number of different ways. We did have had a few questions come through Instagram even.
It’s interesting for me and in the part of the world that I grew up in, you have to lime the farm all the time to take it and get your uptake proper. We’re now going into the soil. A living entity and I don’t know if this is the proper thing to have on or not.
One of our other great food plot blends, that’s a Brassica Mix. That’s our annual. There are a number of types of grasses and brassicas in there. The brassicas end up getting big and leafy. They take over the spot eventually and that’s why you don’t want them mixed heavily with anything else. Soil health is everything, and that’s what our fertilizer also aims to do. That’s another benefit that you’re getting, not only are you putting everything in that soil for that plant, for that deer, the stuff that we have in our fertilizer helps to make the soil bacteria, the soil microbes as healthy and happy as possible.
Last time we spoke and did a , I told this story where there’s a university that did this study, they buried whitey-tighties cotton underwear. They had one field that was fully disked and it was tilled every year and they had another field that was semi-tilled and another field that was not tilled. They buried 4 or 5 whitey-tighties in each field. When they checked it a few months later, what they noticed was the field that had gotten tilled all the time, when they pulled the whitey-tighties out, there weren’t even many holes in it. In fact, they just looked stained or soiled, so to speak, which showed that there wasn’t a whole lot of micro growth in that soil because the cotton hadn’t broken down in that fully-tilled field that wrecked the soil.
They’ve got the other field that was semi-tilled and that one had a few holes in the underwear but not as many as the untilled, the no-tilled field. When you leave those microbes alone and don’t turn around and expose them to oxygen all the time, because a lot of these are maybe anaerobic or obligate anaerobes, it kills them back. That underwear that was destroyed, all that was left was the elastic waistband and to me, that signifies what real true soil health should look like. When all of your microbes are available, they’re working as efficiently as possible. They’re going to help your plant to take in more nutrients. To till it all the time and to do that stuff, it looks cool having a nice neat field or plot, but there’s a lot to be said about no-tilling and having total soil health, I can’t say enough about that.
I’m thinking here as we’ve been at this and if there’s somebody reading and they’re going like, “Am I the ideal or the potential client for Rackology?” If you were to describe your ideal customer or consumer of Rackology, who is that person? What do they look like?
A couple of things, the first thing that comes to my mind are, from the business standpoint, they call it branding, not only our logo and our name but big-time with like, “What are we? Who are we? What do we stand for?” My first thought to your question was everybody is a Rackology customer potentially, whether it’s somebody that can only afford to put out one mineral lick for their deer. They are Rackology customers all the way up to the people that want to do it 100% and they’re year around using most of the products. Granted if you only got one food plot, you’re not going to put all three of our food plot mixes out there.
For me potentially, everybody is a Rackology customer because not only do we have scientifically researched products from a biologist and agronomist, our branding is we want people that are focused on their deer’s health. Whether you can afford just to put out mineral or whether you can afford to do the whole shebang, our idea is you want the best for your deer as possible. That’s who we want for our customers is the people that are interested in doing something for their deer. We get a lot of guys that say, “I put out the corn.” We’re right in the middle of the Midwest and it’s a lot tougher to sell the product here simply because a lot of people have this old thought process that, “They’ve got plenty of groceries out there.” Every time I hear that they’ve got plenty of groceries, I want to puke.
I’ve got tons and tons of pictures of our deer with a cornfield, bean field, an alfalfa field, but yet they’re still coming to the food plot. They’re still hammering Rackology all late summer and fall and they’ve got all these other groceries out there. It’s good that there are all these other food sources out there but people don’t realize that they don’t contain everything that a deer needs. Corn is only 8%-ish protein and growing fawns, antlers, lactating does, you want upwards of 14% protein going up to 16% to 18%.
At certain times of the year, some deer leave and take upwards of 20% but you want to be careful, some companies have a high protein that can have an adverse effect on fawns. That’s something that I see a lot of the stuff in the deer industry, you can tell is not fully researched. They took glorified livestock products and slapped a deer sticker on it that said, “Here’s the next best thing.” Sometimes it can be bad for your deer and you can have high fawn mortality rates because you’ve got the wrong thing or too much of the right thing out there.
Jason and Eric are not here but when I first did the show that came back to Bob, who’s doing a lot of things for Whitetail Rendezvous, I said, “These guys got it together.” You bring things to the table that some people don’t know about, other people may know about but they’re not exposing that because it’s all knowledge. What we want to do here in Whitetail Rendezvous is bring knowledge out and let people percolate on it and digest it and then the business is going to go wherever it’s going to go with all our guests. I’m continually impressed with how you understand what the deer needs. You’re exactly right, too much of a good thing is too much a good thing and can destroy or kill deer. I thank you for that. Any last thoughts, Jason?
My final or overall thought is, customer-wise, they need to step back and ask themselves, and this is the first question we ask if we have somebody that’s semi-serious. It’s not just, “Want a little bag?” It’s, What do you want to accomplish?” You have to ask yourself, “What do I want to accomplish? Do I want amazing food plots? Do I want to put out a meal and mineral? What do I want to do? Do I want to grow big bucks? Do I want the healthiest deer possible? Do I want to be able to go out and shoot a deer?” We’ve got guys around here and we tell them all the time, “You can’t eat the antlers.” They complain because they never see any big bucks but they’re shooting all the little ones and they’re happy doing that. They go out there and that’s what they want to do.
My final thoughts will be, think about what you want to accomplish with your deer and if it’s something that we can help you with, we’re easily accessible. One of our dealers asked, at some point he says, “Will we be able to talk to you guys the way we do now?” My answer to that is yes. We will never get to the point where we’re not going to be available for our dealers and our customers. To me, that’s our niche which is biology for the job. That’s what we want to accomplish and what we want to be there for is that and have people see the results that we see, not just for some big business thing to try and make a lot of money on. What do you want for your deer?
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Next up on the show is a good friend of mine from Wisconsin, John O’Brion. John’s got a company called Grandpa Ray Outdoors, and you’ve known him a couple of times on the show. I keep going back to John because he’s always got something interesting to say about building a great deer herd, a balanced deer herd, a healthy deer herd, a deer herd that has some great competition for the bucks. The does are healthy, especially when they’re lactating and taking care of their fawns. John brings a wealthy experience and years of experience to the table.
important links:
- Rackology – Facebook
- @RackologyLLC – Instagram
- www.Rackology.org
- Plot 365
- Brassica Mix
- Grandpa Ray Outdoors
- John O’Brion – Next episode