Eric Fitzgerald and Jason Obermiller of Rackology return to dive deeper into food plots. This time, they get into the details of choosing seeds, knowing the ratio, soil conditioning, and understanding bag tags so you can get past marketing garbles and know what you are really paying for. Doing food plots is never easy and sometimes, Mother Nature has her own plans, but if you educate yourself, the rewards will be great.
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Rackology Food Plot Part 2 with Eric Fitzgerald and Jason Obermiller
I’m here with Rackology, Eric Fitzgerald and Jason Obermiller. We’re sharing some ideas about land management and food plots. Why are we doing this? Because there’s a lot of misinformation out there. There are a lot of advertising and promotion out there. There are a lot of sponsors out there, people who are being sponsored by XYZ company and we go, “I’m going to buy some of that.” You have no earthly idea why you’re buying except that there’s a green field behind the person shooting this wonderful buck and say, “I use X.” That’s marketing. I get it but when you start drilling down into it, what are food plots? Food plots start with seed. Some seed has to come out of the ground so the deer are going to eat it. There’s a lot of prep work that goes into that. Let’s jump into it.
Looking at food plots, as the name implies, there are plots that you plant that bring wildlife there for mainly two reasons: food and cover. Some animals will use the same food plot for food that others use for cover. What you’re trying to do is centralize the wildlife on your property and also provide something that wasn’t there to increase your odds at harvesting a buck or a doe. It might be a turkey or pheasants and it’s also there if you’re just enjoying wildlife and want to give back a little bit. Habitat in the United States have shrunk immensely for wildlife, whether be urban development or what might be happening that any time. A little goes a long way when it comes to wildlife habitat and food plots. That’s what they are in a nutshell, their nutrition, cover and sanctuary for wildlife.
If you go out in nature and into the trees, wherever you’re hunting at, maybe grassland area like out in Western Nebraska, and you look at the quality of forage that’s available, not in Mother Nature per se, but the forage quality out there, the amount of nutrients that’s naturally available in nature doesn’t compare to what you can bring to them in a food plot. If a person can only afford to do just a little for your deer and you had to decide whether do I put out some feed or do I put out a food plot. The answer there is the food plot is where you’re going to get the most bang for your buck because you’ve got a growing time for spring that they can start eating through the fall months and into the winter months even on some of the perennials like we have.
Feeding minerals and feeds like that, is that beneficial? Of course. I’ve stated a few months ago in a podcast, a lot of people don’t realize that February, March and April are huge months for fawn and antler growth. The bucks are storing the minerals on their skeleton that they’re going to use to grow the antlers in the summer months. Those months are when there’s hardly any food available over the winter months. When you can put on a sizable food plot, even if you can’t afford to put out any mineral or any feed, if you got a sizable perennial food plot that these deer can continue to dig and get into, you’re just giving them that much more edge on storing those nutrients in the critical times and getting them through the winter, healing them up from the rut. Nutrition-wise, food plots are great compared to what’s out there in nature because we get into browsing on leaves off of trees and a lot of the grasses that are available to trees. The native grass is fairly decent in nutritional value, but he can have a food plot out there, whether you hunt or not. Your wildlife on your property is going to benefit from a food plot just because of nutritional value that you bring to it.
We like to pride ourselves on bringing in a high-quality plant species for the food plot. I’ve been born and raised on a farm. I’ve been around cattle. I sell a full wine of cattle feed as well and companion animal stuff. We always talk about sending samples in whether be it just alfalfa veils or anything like that that might come in and send them off relative value. What is that cow getting when it’s ingesting this hay? What’s the relative feed value? What’s the protein in it? The higher the relative feed value, the better you are. There are some things that grow well for tonnage for alfalfa and hay. That maybe they’re not the highest in relative feed value where different species of clover that we use in our mixes as well for Rackology, been proven to bring in higher relative feed value, which brings them better protein.
It helps mineralize what’s in the soil and bringing it out and getting it into that deer, whether it be a doe in gestation or she’s milking or she’s got a young fawn with. The better relative feed value, the better off you’re going to have the offspring start quicker and hit the ground running versus feeding on natural grasses which are as good protein in some of that. A small food plot, when they come in there and eat, same with supplementing feed, there’s a relative feed value going up and knowing what species that deer like to eat. First of all, knowing which ones on top of that are going to bring in high value of protein and basic stuff, but then also know what’s going to handle the amount of traffic. If you have a high deer density, what’s going to handle the traffic? What’s going to handle regrowth really well? What’s going to handle drought if you do get a dry spell?
We’ve done a lot of that homework where that is what a food plot is. There’s a lot on the market that they’d say that maybe throw stuff in the bag and call it a food plot and there’s a lot on the market that have done their homework. We’ve learned and stuck with maybe a little more expense, but this is what works and this would bring us more to the table. That’s what they are in my opinion. What they’re not is they’re not all created the same. That’s why I lead it to you before. Not everything is going to be easy. They are not low labor. You need to get out there and you need to do your homework, blood, sweat and tears into this but that’s going to turn around in payback whether just watching that food plot grow so you can throw camera pictures of that food plot behind or maybe be time lapse, maybe be time thing where you just see right there, prior to the sun rise and right before sundown, seeing all those deer out on the food plot. That tells you your density, what’s out there and stuff, but that reward is what rewards for the blood, sweat and tears that go into that. They’re not a magic thing you just go out there and some companies just all throw and grow but they don’t give you a lot of data to make that throw go successful. There’s just not a magic carpet you’re going to expect to go out there and rollover and go home and then come back. First, the weekend of archery season and expect it to look like a garden.
It doesn’t matter what you plant. If you don’t do it right, it’s not going to grow. Share on XI’m not only OCD, but everything else under the sun, I know there are days when I drive Eric nuts because I’m just always thinking and doing and whatever. That’s the yin and yang. It’s the thing that makes us work so awesome. Sometimes I get to prod him a little bit, then there are other times when he’s holding me back on the reigns, going off to what he said, “What it is and what’s not.” We’re talking about food plots in general so I’m not putting in a plug necessarily for Rackology, but I researched other feed and mineral companies when I started because I wasn’t even one to make something the best way to sell. I want the best for my deer so I researched stuff and I realized that ratios are huge when it comes to feed and what type of minerals that they can obtain base off the ratios.
Same thing goes for food plots. There are many times that I’ve planted other food plots and the bag says there’s stuff in it they get planted. The grasses that come up, some of them will grow on concrete and there’s the stuff that is supposed to be in that bag, it’s the higher feed value, the more expensive seed. There’s not that much in it. Your good seed brands you’re going to pay a little more for because they’ve got in the bag what they say is in the bag, number one. Number two, when we were developing the food plot side of things, I told Eric, “My ratios had to be right for my feed.” For him, it was the same way. He made sure the ratios are going to right in the bag. There are certain plants that will outcompete other plants. If you don’t know what you’re doing and get the wrong ratios on your ground, you just not even planted the one seed because it’s going to get outcompeted.
That’s another thing, there’s people that want to do their own food plot land. They go to a farm and ranch store and buy the mat seed because they read about it on a hunting website. People like to do your own and that’s great. I can’t blame people for doing it. I love doing that, but you have to be careful about what you plant because if the ratios aren’t right, if you plant them in areas that those plants aren’t going to do well, that’s where I tapped into Eric’s expertise on the food plot side of things, “Here’s what I want. What do you suggest? What plants should we be looking at where I can get the best for your money type of deal?” That’s another thing that people need to look at is what food plots are and what they aren’t. You can put a lot of work into a food plot. You don’t have hardly anything grow. It could be blamed on Mother Nature, but it could be blamed on wrong ratios, wrong type of seed versus go about it on educated standpoint. You can even take some lower value soil and still have a good food plot, but you got to start out doing it the right way. It might be getting the soil samples to find out.
I’m going to say this in a couple different ways. If you’re wanting to do something bigger or small, you need to do your homework, which doesn’t take a lot of work. Get a soil sample, get it sent off and get it read. It’s not a big deal. Then you know whether to start out. Do you need to line your soil? Are you low in pH? What you need to do before you even bother to plant a food plot, because not just Rackology, but other food plot companies out there and every one of us has defense. I’ve been on these websites and people are talking about food plot. This stuff is junk because I planted, nothing grew. This food plot you planted is a decent brand, it probably had to do with either what you did or nature didn’t do. It has nothing to do with the food plot. I’m sure everybody else you interview after us that’s in this business as experts are going to say the exact same thing. I’m not going to knock any other companies that are doing it right. We’re all going to agree. If you don’t do it right, it doesn’t matter what you plant. It’s not going to grow.
There are things in the market now doing what we’re doing and I walk into somewhere and I see food plots. There are some out there, the infomercials have these big things on the bags for the last years, this grows and smells like chestnuts, some of these things that I just shake my head and look and smile to myself. It gets you to say, “Maybe I need that. I got fifteen different species of clover.” You’ll go crazy about this, it’s marketing. What we try to do is sometimes, two different varieties of clover are a lot better than fifteen different varieties.
You’re going to outcompete. By the time you get to the end of the year, the ones are going to outcompete the other ones, you’re going to be down to a two-clover plot. Not all chickaree is not chickaree, all turnips are not turnips, there’s different varieties and things that work well. I’ve been doing cover crops for a long time, and come across to the same thing, you try to cover the ground the best you can. That has a good job of covering, but what you need to do is figure out, it’s too much coverage. Plant species need sunlight, photosynthesis. They need to have moisture for root development and they also need to have oxygen for respiration. If you don’t have all that, if brassicas get too tall and the turnips get too tall, you got a big wildly brassica turnip shading out your clover and shading out some chickaree you have in there. You might as well not spend the money because chickaree is not cheap. Might as well not spend the money in buying a plot that’s too heavy for the others. We’ve done a lot of research knowing the different varieties you have in there and their growth potential. Also, what’s in there is not going to over compete. There’s going to be a symbiosis relationship between all the plant species out there.
You can plant annual rye on palm tree and that’s going to come up and it’s going to be green for a while. Some people just want to see a green field and you can plant rye cheap and it looks good. Deer will go out there and feed in it but they’re getting a lot of the value. You are bringing them and centralizing a little bit because that’s the only green thing out there in the fall sometimes is rye, but you’re not getting what you want out of there. We hone in on what we know about the plant species and give those in the Rackology blends. We do have a fool plot fertilizer. There are guys that already have the source of fertilizer, but we pride also in marrying our fertilizer with our plot blends as well as other ones on the market. It takes a lot of nutritional problems, fertility problems. It might be in that soil that helps things out and doing agronomy and fertilizer retail for a few years the importance of not just having map out there or just urea for nitrogen source and how important microbials are in the soil health and how alive your soil is to make that food plot.
We had calls from people in states that you can’t put out mineral. Can we make a fertilizer that we can supplement our deer through our food plot? That’s the thing that he got to work on next was something that is going to work from the ground up to the roots because that’s the other side of things. If you’re going to do a food plot, you need to make sure that you take care of it. You got an area that’s got awesome soil. Probably don’t need our stuff. It’s going to have the nutrients, the microbes and life is good, but on a lot of people’s soil, it’s not. That’s one of the things these people and these states for example. How can we legally supplement our deer? We can’t legally do it, what do you got? He went to work on the fertilizer side of things. It’s not just your normal NPK. There are the minerals that are added to it and they go into the soil. There are other components that allow us specifically.
The huge key thing is those soil microbes are super healthy and you got a lot of them. All of a sudden, they can begin to unlock all those trapped nutrients that’s in your soil. You don’t even know it’s there. It’s trapped because you don’t have enough microbes to break them down as fast as the plants can use them. There are other products in the market that fertilizes and that’s great. There are other products in the market that you spray on the supplement on your food plot that once it’s eaten, it’s gone. It’s not coming up from the root. Rain and dew wash things off. You have to educate yourself on the difference between marketing and what the real deal is. One other thing that I jotted down was talking about competition between plants. You’ve seen advertisements for brassicas that, “Look at these huge brassicas. Look at what we’re getting.” You talk a little bit about as far as why it looks awesome but why is that not what we’re wanting.
A guy grows yellow corn and he has this big ear of corn. He says, “Bigger is better.” In that regard it is. When it comes to turnips, if you get some that are size of volleyballs, that’s not doing much for you. What you want is a lot of little ones, about the size of a softball to a baseball. You don’t want purple top turnips or any other type of turnips to get super big because they get woody in the middle. They take up too much room in your soil. They compact your soil because they’re pushing out against your soil and people just don’t understand that that’s a lack of nitrogen. If you have more nitrogen, you can have smaller baseball sized to softball sized turnips. If I go out to a field that’s been planted and the guy says, “Come out, take a look at this,” you dig up a lot of smaller turnips, he says, “They’re just not real big,” I say, “This is perfect. Your soil, as far as nitrogen, is in good balance.” When you go and they say, “Look at this one,” they’re taking a picture of one looking like a basketball. It looks big but it’s not doing any good. It’s acting against what you’re trying to do in that food plot because it’s going to take forever for that to rot and to breakdown. You don’t get as much area as you want a lot of little ones versus few big ones.
When we talk about the importance of fertilizer in general, there are times where people will tear up native grass, sod, those grassy type of the species there prior. All land, no matter how good the soil is, goes through what I call land shock. When you take something out of a system that it’s used to, they till or cross the ground and when you take that out, it changes the soil structure for a while. For about six months through a year period, that goes through a land shock. When we say what food plots aren’t, if you go out there and you till up a grass that have been native grass for a long time in a tree growth, you don’t do the proper way of spraying it and killing it and letting it decay and then tilling it, you’re going to go into a land shock. First of all, it’s going to be hard to grow anything in the thatch that’s in there. It’s going to go through a period of land shock where not a lot’s going to grow very well, very fast. People look at that and say, “I planted, it didn’t do worth a dang. Must be the seed.”
When you’re pointing a finger usually, there’s four pointing back at you. I’ve been doing agronomy a long time and there are times where I’ve been pressured to get a food plot in or a cover crop in. It might not be the best date and we just try to pressure our self into it, then it doesn’t happen. When I see it, I say, “I know exactly why this wasn’t successful.” A lot of people, maybe they aren’t trained or know what’s happened and they might not know and the first thing they do is blame the seed or something that wasn’t right on our part or on whoever seed they’re using. There are some things that are important when it comes to what food plots are and a lot of that is what’s underneath the soil and the right ratios of plants. The ratios that the wildlife are going to like and that whether they’re going to do what they’re supposed to.
Did you just touch on reading the tag?
I believe I touched on that. Jason, I do that a lot whether it’s feed or if we’re in the store, we see something and at times I look at tag and say, “That’s pretty darn good stuff.” I now look at it and I can’t believe they’re selling it for this much. It’s very important to look at the tag. A lot of companies will put the description on the back and they’ll put planting days because we all live all over the world in the US and what’s perfect planting days for here and Central Nebraska in Sherman County versus even five counties south of us is completely different. With the tag, planting dates are very important and you need to look at those dates. You need to look at what area versus land, longitude, latitude and planting dates for a specific variety. If it’s not on the bag or on the tag, it’s usually on the website which is very good if you go in there and take a look.
Square feet, quarter acre, yards - know the difference visually so you know what you are getting versus what the advertisements are saying. Share on XI’m in Arkansas and I’m calling Nebraska to say, “When should I plant this?” Jason and I will know. We can guide them to the right dates, but they should look in the website, look on the back of the bag. Another thing we touched on before is looking to breakdown. They should have what type of clover it is, what type of brassica it is and the percentage of what’s in there. They should have a tag on everything. A lot of times, I was worried way back when. When we first started this, I didn’t want to divulge our secrets. This is a great mix and you don’t want everybody in the world to have it, but you have to be transparent knowing exactly what’s in there and the quality of it.
Everything there should have a testing date, and we pride ourselves. We have to get in a refrigerator, we’re looking at jug of milk that’s expired and probably a beer. Unless we’re desperate to drink that milk or that beer, we probably won’t drink if that born-on-date is expired. Same things go with seeds. Seed could be viable and it loses germination naturally every year. The worse thing on seed is it could be exposed to heat. The cold weather doesn’t have any effect. That’s why we store a lot of our feed bank in Antarctica and in the northern regions where it stays cold because cold weather preserves seed viability. Hot weather ruins it. If it’s stored in a warehouse that’s not temperature controlled, and it’s there for two years and it gets hot, more likely your germination’s going down. The born-on date will tell you, “This is a two-year-old seed. This is seed was tested a month ago.” That’s on every one of our bags and that’s something to look at, see how old that seed is. If there’s not a born-on date on there, you could be buying seed that’s five years old, that’s been sitting on the shelf of store for five years and you just grab it. It looks new but you get out there and plant it and you don’t have the best results.
He’s super anal about stuff like that. I am with the feeds side. There have been times where we literally didn’t have enough bags filled to go to a store because he wanted to make sure that it was as fresh as possible. I love that about how he is with seed because I didn’t realize that in-depth about the germination and the specificity of what he does to those seeds and the timeframe. That’s the other thing, you need to look at the freshness of those seeds and I wanted to talk about what PLS is.
A lot of people will still look at the bag and they’ll say, “It’s $19.99 for a quarter acre. This other one is $10.99 for a quarter acre.” When we go in, we decide how many plant species has to be in a quarter acre. You’re looking at pure live seed, looking at the PLS, which should be on everyone. It should show our pure live seed and it should show your inert matter which is everything but what you want. When you bag something, you are going to have some format whether be seed coating, seed holes that might have got in there, weed seed, anything you like and stuff you don’t want. That’s all legally supposed to be on there. Pure live seed, you want the highest percentages, as high as 100% as possible.
What we’ve told people is that there all those who say, “What’s a ten-pound bag for $19.99 and a ten-pound bag for $29.99? I’m going to buy the $10.99 because it’s still ten pounds.” The biggest misconception people could do is buying on a dollar-per-pound basis. They need to go off a dollar-per-pure-live-seed basis. Even though it’s ten pounds, there could be 5% that don’t matter in there and then the germination can be low. All of a sudden, you’re spending more money for that because you’re not getting near what you paid for. When it comes to that bag tag, the breakdown of the species, this is all in there, the planting dates, the born-on-date or the tested date and the pure live seed are important to look at. If you’re not doing that and you’re basing on the almighty dollar sign, you’re doing yourself an injustice and that’s why every year you can go back and say, “I know this has been a quality product.” That’s where we’ve had good luck because people always come back to us. Maybe three, four, five or ten years and try to plant food plots. In one year they do good, then one year they don’t do good. In three years they don’t do good, then they come to us in the last three years. They’ve been happy with what they’re getting in that bag and the performance we’re getting.
There are some species of seeds that need to be coated because no matter where you’re at, you’re down in southeast United States and there’s a lot of humidity, wet soils. You’re going to have a lot of disease and fungal problems when that seed is most vulnerable when it’s germination and sprouting out the soil surface and before it gets in that infancy stage. What the coating does is help that seed fight off those diseases until it gets big enough to fend it off itself. If you don’t have some of those treated, that specie is not going to survive in different times of years. That’s important to look at because the coating is inert matter, but if you see an inert matter that’s high, then you look and say, “Some of this is coated, that’s why.” It’s not just weed seed or junk that’s in there, we don’t want this because it takes up room in that bag and that coating does protect. You want to look that pure live seed, how many seeds per acre you’re getting and not just go off quarter acre bag or a ten-pound bag or all the flashy symbols that you see on a bag, it might throw you off. I wish everything was created equal and then everybody just has their bag tag on the front of the bag. That’s what people look and judge you by. A lot of people will turn that bag around, they’ll just look at the front and say, “This person is on it. They do this and I’ve seen them on TV. I’m going to buy it.”
One thing too is redoing our new bags, our store bags. One thing I said we need to do, the smoking mirrors of other bags on the shelf, one of them might say square feet.
How many people know it x amount of square feet, that don’t mean crap to a lot of people. For me, I’m a bow hunter. You tell me how many yards it is and I can visualize that. Some people, they can visualize acres. One thing to clear that up, I said, “I want everything on the bag. I want to know, is this a quarter acre? How many square feet it is?” Anybody can look at the bag and say, “I can visualize a quarter acre. I can visualize how many square feet is an acre.” That’s the other thing. You’re looking at it, make sure you’re getting what you think you’re getting versus what the advertisements are saying.
When you talk about seeds, what they are and what they’re not, in the end it’s your dollar. It’s your time, it’s your labor, you’re going to spend x amount of money anyway so you might as well give yourself the best possible advantage that stands out of the crop. It’s a process and for people who’d say, “I don’t know a lot about it,” do some reading, watch videos, call guys like Rackology and don’t be afraid to say, “I don’t know.” When you go in the bar, you go to work, “How’s your food plot coming?” “It’s coming good. Look at the pictures.” All you do is spray nitrogen on this field and it’s all greened up and it looks great, but comes the fall, there’s no benefit to the deer. Pictures were great. Unfortunately, in the world of marketing, that’s what we see. Sometimes big bucks picture are great.
One thing I’d like to say too is what’s important is on the bag tag. What you said reminded me, you always want to look at the origin of the seed. You want to see what state that one comes from because a lot of the good seed and stuff that’s tested well comes from the northwestern part of the United States. You want to make sure to see that origin where that seed originates at, where it’s grown and where it’s harvested. Research if you want to get online and look at what’s the difference between seed grown in Oregon versus seed grown here. The seed from northwest is a little better because it’s grown in a more temperature-controlled environment. It’s very important to look at that.
With that, we’re going to wrap up section of food plots, what they are, what they’re aren’t with Rackology with Eric and Jason and we’re going to take a little break here. Tune in for planting 365, the last section from Rackology on food plots.