With today’s technology, never has it been easier and cheaper to do a land assessment, whether it’s a mile or three states away. On this second installment with Rackology, Jason Obermiller and Eric Fitzgerald discuss tools such as Google Earth, GPS, satellite images, and drones and how they are useful in collecting data. Draft plans well ahead before you put your boots on the ground. If you are not techy, this is the episode for you.
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Rackology From the Ground Up Part 2 with Eric Fitzgerald and Jason Obermiller
This is course 102 with Rackology brought to you by Jason Obermiller and Eric Fitzgerald, from Loup City, Nebraska. In the first part, we talked about what is land management and discussed that. If you haven’t read my show, go to my website, WhitetailRendezvous.com and check it out. Here we are, I called you up and we talked about this. We came to a meeting of the minds. We thought, “I’ll share a lot of land stuff and you can take a look at what I got, then I want you guys to come out on my land.” We’re engaged, you’re consulting now, you’re on the clock. You might go one county 100 miles, 200 miles. I don’t know how far you go. I know you got a process out there. They might say, “You need to come and see this guy,” where you’ve got to do everything possible to build your client list. What happens before you actually get on the ground, and then what happens when you get on the ground?
For me, I never used to be as techy. I’m not saying I’m techy yet either, but my student has been what’s spawned me into getting into the technology as I have. The thing that I always go back to, whether it’s property that’s one mile away from my house, or somebody in three states away, is Google Earth. They may have aerial maps, which is great. It’s all a conglomeration of pieces of information. Aerial maps are great. Pictures that they snap on the ground with their phone when they’re walking through the trees. I’ve had guys with unlimited data that are out on the trees someplace and they’re showing me stuff with their smartphones.
Ultimately, once we’ve figured out where the property is, I like to get on Google Earth, and I like to look at what they’ve got. You can take it and you can tilt it and move it and go from different angles. Once we find out what they want and they can tell me on Google Earth, “Here’s where this field is, it’s corn this year and this is beans or maybe it’s all native grass. This is where the creek is.” Once I know where everything’s at correctly, and we’re at the most updated Google Earth setting. I like to use that because from above is where I can start assessing it. Here’s where the bedding area is, here’s where the feeding area is, here’s where the water is.
I don’t know how many guys that I’ve talked to that have great deer on their line up, and they just cannot close the deal on anything decent. I look at where their stands are, which we’ll talk about that this false stand placement, but they’re nowhere near close to where the line of travel is from bedding to feeding. Older bucks are lazy old men, so to speak, they’d rather just eat, get up, bedroom’s right there and we don’t have to travel a long way to go from place to place. By using Google Earth, you can really see from above where their bedding areas, their feeding areas and so forth and so on.
For me, besides the boots on the ground, Google Earth is very important for me. I use that for my scout going hunting anywhere, I use Google Earth.
Before they even get on your site, and that’s one thing that everybody will talk about. To my thinking the more thorough you are with that process, the before getting to a corner of dusty road and rolling hill, the better off you’re going to be able to serve your client. What do you think about that?
I agree, going with what Jason was talking about. It’s amazing how much we can do now with technology that we couldn’t even do before, or if you did it was so expensive and now it’s so cost-effective. Everybody’s got a camera on the phone. Almost everybody’s got GPS right on their phone. They could plot a couple of points where some of this stuff is, and move them to google earth and know exactly where they stood in that field.
It’s amazing how technology has gotten more accessible, more economical that about everybody could use it to their advantage. We do have guys that definitely are not tech savvy and they’re going to tell you, “I don’t have a GPS, I don’t even have a smartphone but here’s the intersection of the roads that this section’s on. Here’s the legal description of the field, I can give you that and then we can do the work from there.” We deal with guys on both sides of the spectrum when it comes that way.
Jason talked about Google Earth and being able to see the topography a little bit. When you look at a straight down aerial photo, you’re going to get some pretty good ideas, but you’re not going to see the lay of the land. You’re just going to see the different land structures if you’re out there. Some people will say, “Google Earth or Maps are five years old.” There is some software out there that’s very economical that has just year-old maps if you’re more into trying to get last year’s map of your field. There’s some stuff out there that’s under $500 a year to get a full year subscription on. We use it a lot for our agronomy side because fields change from year-to-year. Structures change a little bit.
When they call us, we have that in our advantage we could use of. They don’t want to spend $500 a year they say, “You just print your map out, let me know what I need to do.” Getting a good feel of the property that you’re dealing with, with the aerial maps and Google Earth or whatever the software or has his pictures that they took out there and sent back, knowing the intersection. I think that’s key to start building a good plan for that piece of property.
You mentioned Google Earth and topography. What are the things you look for in your pre-site visit?
We definitely look for natural funnels. When we’re talking about white-tailed deer and managing for white-tailed deer, every different species, you look for different things. Jason definitely the biologist here and has done a lot of work and research on what to look for when it comes to white-tailed deer. We look for travel corridors, we look for funnels. We look if there are corn fields, if there are alfalfa fields here. You could drop a point in one spot and know exactly how far away that deer has to travel from this alfalfa field to what you think is a good bedding area.
We’re looking for tree groves, you’re looking for roads. We all know the further off the road sometimes you get more secure of that wildlife feel. You look at different things and getting all you can from that aerial image to help facilitate the plan that we’re trying to set forth.
A lot of times, you can’t see this on Google Earth. For some reason on my computer, I can’t tilt the screen much. On my phone, if you take both fingers, you can make Google Earth almost lay down so you seem like you’re looking over the top of the trees. What I’m looking for before I’m actually there or the person is able to confirm it is, you look at the tops of the trees or brush, I look for raises or area where land is elevated, even by a foot or two because first there’s a place where I hunt North of town here. It’s even difficult to see it on Google Earth. When you get in there, trees look fairly flat on the way to the river but there are two spots. There’s one where it’s a slight ridge that goes through there, I think it’s where an old channel had cut through. Then there’s a low spot on the other side of it, and now that that’s grassed in and it’s not a slew anymore, those deer, especially the bigger bucks, they like to use that. They’re only about maybe one to two foot below grade and most people walking through there wouldn’t see that, they wouldn’t notice it. It would be meaningless to most people. To me, it’s like you just put a bunch of red flags going through the trees.
Those deer, even if they can gain a foot or two down lower, that the vegetation is a little bit higher on them, it makes them feel a little more secluded. I remember when I was younger, I’d throw a tree stand up on the biggest doe path going to the trees, and I’ve seen a lot of does and a lot of little bucks. It wasn’t until I started noticing the bigger bucks are off the one side or the other that might be 60 yards, give or take. They’re traveling on narrow little paths through the trees or through the grass. They’re not on that beaten highway. Unless you’re during the rut, bucks like to be a little more secluded than the does. I look for little minute changes in topography inside their areas to tell me, if we got a ridge from that’s leading from this area over where their bedding area is, ending up coming out over here but the feeding area is to the south further. That’s still a game changer because we know where they’re travelling because of those elevated pieces of ground.
It’s one more piece of the puzzle. Is that the answer? No, it’s a lot more complicated than that, but it’s one of the things I look for, whether it’s on Google Earth, when I talk to a person or the place that we hunt. The elevation of the property.
The technology is huge in getting your homework done before you put boots on the ground and do your actual assessment. Share on XGoing back to it, I love satellite imagery, being in it. We’re going leaps and bounds in the agricultural side on resolution stuff and crop hills index stuff. Satellite imagery can tell you a lot in anomalies whether there’s a river, a pond or area where they’re going to go get water. There’s a stock tank. Stock tanks are huge. Some aerial imagery you could see the grass areas that bud up next to a river front that has been grazed down completely by cattle. That’s another thing that people don’t want to hear sometimes when they’re asked about land management. They also are a cattle operator, that sometimes you’ve got to leave some land that the cattle don’t get in because they do compete. You’ll see stuff like that on these aerial imageries.
We could plot points on an aerial imagery map that maybe Jason and I look at, and this may be a travel corridor. Let’s take a look at this. Here are a couple of different anomalies we don’t know what’s going on in elevation. We plot those points. Then we have our homework done. We’ve never been out there before, so we don’t know how to get from point A to point B without looking at the map. If we have those points GPS on our phone, we can get as close to three meters from where that point is that we want to look at. That technology is huge in getting your homework done before you go out there, so when you do put boots on the ground, you’re not wasting a lot of time doing what you probably should have done with aerial imagery.
Another thing that’s popped in my head too is the use of drones. A lot of guys when they call us, they might be mean because we’re dealing with people all over the US, there’s no way I’m going to make it out in New Jersey or Pennsylvania or anything like that. We have to rely on Google Earth and everything. There are these places where we can get or if the landowners got access to a drone. Getting a drone up above the area and being able to record some of it, that’s as close to real time as you can get. With today’s drones, so long as they’re licensed or whatever, they need to do to operate them in their state. There’s a lot of information that can be obtained using a drone.
Eric uses drones in his agronomy business all the time to map fields. It’s a game changer for him and it’s a timesaver for him versus walking all these fields. Same way with deer, with land management. You can get these drones out there and get a good lay of the land. It doesn’t have to be super detailed because ultimately, they’re going to have to go into the property to get a perfect lay of the land. That’s one of the things I’m going to throw out there. The use of drones I think is another good piece of the puzzle to use in assessing it.
Even when you get out to that piece of property, you have that at your disposal. Especially for what might be considered an inaccessible area. You can get over there and look down and look across that piece of ground and know, “I think this is where we could come in. This is where we could get equipment in. This is where we could do some work.” A lot of things too is when we talk to people about this stuff as much as we’re going out and look, we try to be as discreet as possible. We’re not out there yelling. We’re not out there getting sent all over the place. What we like to tell our guys, if they call us and it’s late September and they want us to go out there and do a bunch of assessments, if it’s that important we could, but we would definitely recommend waiting. If you are going to hunt out there, or you are having hunters out there or you lease your property out to somebody. Normally, we like to do this late April, May, into June before the grass gets tall and it’s hard to see stuff. We try to get the timeframe so it works best for everything and we try to do it in the off-season for deer anyway.
We’re on the ground, we got our points keyed in to the GPS and we’re ready to go. You come up, we meet, have a cup of coffee, now we’re on my ground. What should I expect?
What we like doing is definitely having the landowner or the person that called us there because a lot of times, nobody knows the ground better than the person that owns it. Especially if they’ve been on it, they’ve been farming it, they’re familiar. Maybe they’ve been hunting it since they were old enough to walk or carry a gun. They want some help. They don’t know a lot about whitetail deer or what I could do. We walk around with them. There are times where I first moved up to the area that I’m at now. There are some guys that knew every nook and cranny of this county. That’s what you want. You want that land owner to know, “This used to be over here. This used to be good. We used to have a stand over here, so we see bucks all the time.” Get that background information if you can.
Another thing to expect is, “Have you done any food plots? If you have, where were they? Could we take a look at them?” Sometimes, it’s just taking a stroll. Follow the landowner the first time and let him tell the story of that piece of property if he knows. I think that’s first and foremost.
While we’re walking, he’s making the comments, “This might be a good idea here. This is a perfect location for this from what I can see and what I can gather.” Another thing is you just trail camera photos if they do have trail camera photos. If they have established corridors already or if they don’t know, I think setting up trail cameras on the property to start learning the paths and travel habits of deer is important. We might take a few trail cameras out there or if the landowner has them, we try to set them up in the areas that might tell us the best information. Just a good walkthrough, now granted there are some pieces of property that would take two days to walk through, there are some that you could be done in an hour. We see that and we try to focus on the aerial imagery and points we put out. This is where we’re going to focus on. Then we start putting options on the table and seeing if it’s feasible for the landowner to do and wants to do.
Basically, affirmation of what we talked about on the phone. We go over a lot on the phone with them. Once you’re actually there, “Here’s the areas we spoke of. What do you think about doing this or that?” The ideas we spoke of on the phone, that’s where we would start the ball rolling as far as, “Where would you want to do these things at?” This is, “These are our suggestions. Here’s what you’re saying.” A lot of times, I’ve looked at places in Google Earth and when I get there, they’re not the same. It’s not the way you thought it was. You have to start over once you get there. If it’s places, where it’s all by phone conversation where we never actually get to put boots on the ground. It’s not until the landowner gets out there and says, “Here’s what I’m dealing with. I’m here now and this is what we’re going to start doing. Here’s a little, possibly a hiccup. Maybe this is a positive thing. Here’s a good deal we found out when we got out there.” Each scenario is totally different.
Getting back to what we’re looking for also, one thing just popped in my head. When I’m looking at the edge of the tree line, I’m not one to put my stand as clear back into the heavy stuff right away. I stay out of that as long as I can, not always. I’m an edge hunter. Deer are edge-critters, they like to come out at dusk and at dawn. Name for that is crepuscular, coming out at those time of days. What I found is that anytime, there’s just a little slight bend in the trees or an armpit. Those are areas where I’m looking for, not only for stand placement but for food plots. That’s where a lot of times action is going to be. Those things stick out for me, whether it’s Google Earth or I’m just standing right there. You see it better from an aerial perspective.
Going along with what Jason said, on these days of tablets and phones, it’s easy to jot notes on phones. I still have your 8.5×11 notepad there and you’re writing everything down, because of some keywords of that landowner might say. He might say, “I don’t want something over here,” and he might forget it and when we’re starting doing the process, “Didn’t you hear me? I didn’t want something over there.” That notepad, I always carry with me if we do go out and we do have boots on the ground. The agronomist in me, first thing I’m grabbing is the soil sample bags and my soil probe.
We talk a lot about what’s above the ground, but when we get serious about placing food plots, pulling some samples, if we got five different areas we’re looking at, being able to put X on some of them and circles on some of them. There are times when the soil might not just be the most economical thing. You might not get a good food plot, whether it be pH or whether it be soil CC’s or maybe it just even the lack in nutrients. The shading isn’t right. You might catch sunlight too much. If you don’t have enough rain, you look for the lower pocket areas that can funnel some of the rainfall we get, down to those lower areas.
What I like doing is pulling the samples. The sample cost is minimum to what they could tell you. We’re out there, we’re pulling samples. That way we get results from the lab, “The field here is not only good geographically, we looked at it.” As far as soil health and for shading and catching sunlight when you need it. Here is a prime example, whether it be a quarter acre plot or a five-acre alfalfa, clover mixed plot. That’s something I always got in my back pocket is a soil sample.
Self-irrigated areas?
If you probe down on them in June and you still got moisture in that top two feet, that’s a good sign. That where it gets back to the guy or the gal that knows their ground and saying, “This soil is way too wet.” I’m hearing them out but notepad, good set of ears, tools at your disposal. You can try to get a probe in the ground and you can’t get into the ground two inches. You know you’ve got some hard gamble areas. That sets us up for the next thing, which should be putting a plan in action. That way we don’t have to do a contingency plan when the guy gets ready to put a food plot in, this just isn’t working here. We have that taken care of.
When you are serious about placing food plots, you've got to see what is below the ground and start taking samples. Share on XIf somebody is interested in getting in touch with you, what’s the best way to do that?
Just shoot us an email via [email protected] or get on our website Rackology.org and you can get ahold of us through there. Our phone numbers are on there. Email’s probably the best just because during the day, I teach science, he does agronomy. First thing to probably touch base is through email and answer questions that way and we can always get to phone conversation if need be. A lot of our questions that come in are fairly simple. They get answered through email and so forth.
A lot of them just go to the website and look at the products then that might answer the questions they might have. We’re also on social media but if you need something done, and need something answered, or some information in a timely manner, just email.
We get messages on our Instagram, on our Facebook, for some reason, as techy as I think I am, there are times when it’s two or three days late and all of a sudden, my phone decides to let me know that I have a message from the other day. Me being a teacher, I hate being tardy to getting back with people. Best way would be email.
There are times that social media gets lost in the shuffle and we don’t want that to happen. We could see when I’m emailed and we can get on our phones and if it’s something simple we could respond to that.
Thanks, Eric and Jason. We’re going to roll into the plan. We’ve come and formulated why land management, we’ve formulated looking at your land, seeing your site. Getting a lot of input, now we’re going into the output stage in the next segment. Rackology land management is coming up and it’ll be called “The Plan.”
IMPORTANT LINKS:
- Jason Obermiller
- [email protected]
- Rackology.org
- Rackology on Instagram
- Rackology on Facebook