Most people highlight their land management success stories in the hopes of selling their products. Should you follow suit? John O’Brien of Grandpa Ray Outdoors opens our eyes on the pros and cons of land management and why you shouldn’t take social media so seriously. He discusses what to look for beyond just the standard food plots, its proper location, and how you can become your own insurance agent so you can prepare for the unexpected.
—
Listen to the podcast here:
Grandpa Ray Land Management Part 2 with John O’Brien
I’m with John O’Brion of Grandpa Ray Outdoors. We’re going to talk about the pros and cons of land management. Everybody’s telling me I got to do it and I need it. I need to get fresh eyes. It’s the opposite of that, the yin and the yang of your land. John, talk to us about the pros and cons of land management.
This has been something that I started doing at some seminars. The wildlife industry, we all hear about the great things, “If you do this, this is what’s going to happen,” but nobody talks about, “If you do this, this is the downside. This could be a negative.” In life, everything has a positive and has a negative. Any action, there’s a reaction. That’s something we discuss with people. Those are things that more people need to look at. You plant apple trees. What might happen? You plant switch grass. That could help divert deer. What’s the downside? Not everything has a con. You plant certain desirable species. What happens if you plan too much of a desirable species in too big an area? Harder to hunt.
That’s one thing that I want to emphasize. That’s where I like to look at in a property. Have a plan, dial it in, tell people why we’re doing certain things. I also will say to people, “We want to do better. We want to have better food plots. You’re going to have more growth. We have more growth, it mines more nutrients from the soil. That’s a negative. We mine more nutrients from the soil, we got to spend more money on fertilizer. If we do a better job at that acre of land, we maybe don’t need the plant that second acre of land. That could be a pro. It can be a cycle.”
Every action, there’s a reaction and there’s a response. Nature will respond to everything you do just as a buck will, and a doe. We said it last time and it ended up with this, you’ve got to start thinking. It’s not just, “We’ve done it this way and the point stand’s been there for fifteen years. We’ve taken fifteen bucks, why should we stop hunting them?” The only time we see bucks there is during the rifle season when they’re funneling down into this ravine and it works. Why? Because they’re being pressured. There’s an escape route. It goes down into nasty stuff and nobody’s going to go in there so the deer know they’re safe. All the deer do.
You think about that, so that stand probably isn’t going to go anyplace. There’s no food, it’s climax forest. It’s not going to change. That stand might be there for the topographical reasons that I talked about, but what about the other places that every once in a while you see the buck, every once in a while you shoot a doe? Why is that on-again, off-again stand site? You throw it all together and I can guarantee you the on-again, off-again stand site is because something changed and you didn’t look at it. Your thoughts on that, John?
In life, everything has a positive and a negative. For any action, there’s a reaction. Share on XMy background is from managed intensive grazing. I talk about Mother Nature all the time. There are guys that might love their certain types of forage beans. There are certain people that love oats. There are certain people for five years straight, they’ve loved their chicory and ladino plot. Maybe the weather’s been perfect. Maybe your deer numbers were a little lower. There are a lot of factors that come into play. What happens if we have a plot that’s a three-way clover plot and all of a sudden we get a drought? There’s stunted growth or no growth on your favorite plot that’s been very productive for a number of years. All of a sudden, it’s not productive. All of a sudden, the deer is gone. Why are they gone? Maybe your neighbor’s got alfalfa and chicory or some other more drought-tolerant species that are surviving from the stress that Mother Nature threw at us. The last couple of years in Wisconsin we’ve had, it seems like our seasons are getting a little longer. The first frost dates are getting pushed back more.
Guys all of a sudden, for a number of years, loved their brassica plots. They plant it in early August and the deer there all of a sudden are gone. Where have they gone? A lot of these brassicas mature in 60 days. Plant it in August 1st and that means in October 1st, they’re mature. Maybe we’ve still got another two to four weeks of growing season. Our forges are over mature. They’re bitter and not palatable. Maybe your neighbor planted two, three, four weeks later or planted some other species that mature a little slower. Five years straight, your food plots are great but because we got a late frost this last year, the deer are gone. Where are they? Maybe you got something else on the other end of the property. Maybe across the fence line, your neighbor’s got alfalfa. Maybe the neighbor’s got some brassicas that need 70 to 90 days to mature versus the standard grapes and turnips that needs 45 to 60. People don’t think about that.
Maybe you’ve got an excessive amount of rain. You loved oats and the deer loved oats. All of a sudden, they’re diseased, stressed because it’s been too wet. You’re like, “Why aren’t they eating it? They always ate my oats before.” Yeah, but it wasn’t this kind of rain. That’s why I’ve thrown this out there. We want to have biodiversity and species of food plots. We want to have diversity of bedding cover. We want to have diversity of fruit trees. We want to have diversity throughout your property to best handle the unknowns. What we’re doing is we’re becoming risk managers. We’re becoming like our own little insurance agent. We’re trying to assure that no matter what happens, the deer are going to stay. That’s one of the things that I want to emphasize and that’s where I focus when I do recommendations. We might have six, eight, ten different mixes on a property. Deer are eating 365 days a year, no matter what the weather is. Think about it.
You were talking about food plots, diversity of seed, maturity and all that. When you look at your plot of land, you have to figure out where’s the best place for those food plots. The food plots don’t come first then you figure it out. You figure out the plan, land management, to take the best possible pieces of your land and maximize them. How do we do that, John?
The one thing that I want to bring up to make things easier to hunt, to have better backup stands to hold more deer is to have more food plots but smaller. Let’s just say if a guy’s got four acres of food plots they could plant because maybe that’s their budget, maybe how their property lays the amount of deer numbers, whatever factors come into play, I’d rather have a quarter-acre to a half-acre plots than one big field. Easier to hunt. One big field, the buck could stand on one end, grass it, not see a deer and another doe there and go to the neighbors. You’ve got a big field, you probably have less biodiversity.
Remember, I talked about we want to have a highway. A lot easier to keep bucks moving throughout your property when the buck is moving around and checking for does that maybe would come in the heat, to maybe try to run some other inferior bucks off the property by having multiple food plot locations. You can’t fool Mother Nature, but to handle whatever Mother Nature throws at us by having that diversity of not just species but a diversity of locations. That’s what we like to do. The more plots, smaller plots, same acreage. It could be easy just to plant one big field, but a lot harder to hunt and that’s what we want to be looking at to first setting up our plots. We want to have water, bedding cover nearby, and great quality plots.
Some people call them staging plots. Other people call them killing plots. Other people call them carder plots. They’re all ways of making deer comfortable as they’re going from here to there and setting up shops. My thinking in what we’re doing where I hunt is we’re putting up kill plots, but a bunch of them. The challenge we’re going to have is we have to put up wire because they’ll pound it before deer season. Don’t put up kill plots in August and expect them to be there during the rut in October because they won’t. If you have the right crops in there, they’ll be gone. You go, “What’s the point of that?” That’s exactly the point I bring up. You have to plan and get the area maps out, get all the things on maps before you start doing anything. You lay it all out with a guy like John or Eric or Jason or Matt or Adam simply because you want different eyes. I’m harping on this because I realize talking to people throughout the country as I do, people miss this. Why do they miss that, John? Why do people miss the planning aspect of their land?
That’s one of the downsides of the wildlife industry. The wildlife industry is a complicated industry, but then again so many people will ask the question, “What should I plant?” They get generic answers. It could be on social media. On social media, there are pros and cons. On social media, so many people give answers that are not sound answers. What works for you doesn’t work for you neighbor, doesn’t work for your third cousin, doesn’t work for your high school buddy. Every situation is different. What things cause failures? What issues do people overlook? Plenty of the wrong things in the wrong spot at the wrong time. Sounds simple, but that’s what happens with these canned answers. Plant Ladino clover and chicory, but what happens to this extreme shady area? What happens if it’s a river bottom that gets wet? What happens if you’ve got two acres of food plots, but you put an acre of that on your land? Do you still have 365-day nutrition? What happens if you have an extreme amount of deer?
You don’t get quite the ton you got of that kind of mix. You got some good quality. The deer hammered it to the ground. Then the grasses are re-growing. Your deer are in there in June. Early September, they’re gone. Where did they go? There’s nothing there to eat. That’s where working with people that understand that no matter what you plant, where you plant, what’s going to be the yield goal. That’s why I ask, “How many deer do you get on your property?” “Sometimes I see six to eight when I’m hunting.” On Grandpa Ray’s farm, there’s nothing for me to see 40, 50, 60 deer in front of me. Huge farm, huge challenge on many levels. There are different answers between the guy that’s got 30 deer versus the guy that’s got six deer. You’ve got 30 deer, you’re going to need more food plots. You need more tonnage.
Besides that, you think you got one food plot and if you got 30 deer, you think all 30 deer want to go wandering out in that one food plot. Do you think that old boss doe won’t care that there are 29 other deer out there competing with him in that one plot? He won’t like it. What about your young bucks versus that old dominant buck? You think you might want to have some extra different areas for those deer too? Do you think those fawns, small bucks, old bucks, they all wander out in that one food plot? Not happening. People don’t think about it at times. They should. That’s why we want to have more plots and how we set up our plots differently because of that simple factor, deer numbers.
What works for you doesn’t work for everyone. Share on XSome people drop food plots because they want food and the deer will come. Yes, they will from the reasons you talked about. Food plots serve a myriad of things. One, food and also cover, especially if they have screening cover around it. If you really think about it, if you do it strategically, you can have many food plots around every single one of your stands in the woods, in a staging area not just on that quarter-acre, one-acre place. All you want to do is that buck to stop, that doe to stop to take a munch with the right angle already set up, playing the wind. If you’ve got a piece of property, you go north, south, east, west. You figure out where the wind is coming from and your stand’s locations. Not in the traditional overlooking the field, but you’re hunting where the deer are going to be coming from bedding to the major food source. Many people miss that.
They got this magnificent crop of beans. They’re on a string and it’s like clockwork. Trail cameras are going off. We’re all salivating because you get ten deer on your hit list from that one field. We know what’s going to happen. They’re going to go away, but you’ve got to give them alternatives, giving good planning, land management. To me, land management is planning to hunt your deer or you want to see deer. We haven’t even talked about this. Let’s jump into this because that’s a good thought right there. People that love to take their grandkids out, as I do, and they see critters. I love to take my grandkids to a park, 10,000 feet, slip in there and all of a sudden out walks a cow, a bull, a calf. Your grandkids are amazed. We’ve got no weapon. It’s not even hunting season but you’re seeing wildlife. Let’s talk about that aspect with land management. Are you going to plan for that with your client?
That’s something that I do a lot more of than people think about. Part of this is because I do as much as I can to try to encourage people to get their kids involved. There’s a lot of people I work with where their wives are involved. Warm season, native grass is what this industry is about. Just use switch grass. We want to have diversity of bedding species. We sell a fair amount of habitat of pollen air mixes. You have some tall grasses, short grasses but we also have wildflowers which will look attractive and is also good for bees, butterflies, hummingbirds and a lot of other species out there. It’s environmentally sound. My deer and bird mix has things like sunflowers. Everybody loves looking at sunflowers including some other sorghums, buckwheats and some other species.
A lot of times, we’ll do some of the habitat, the kind of mixes closer to where these cottages and houses are where even if they’re not out hunting, they’re just sitting there drinking a cup of coffee or their favorite beverage looking out over the landscape, they’re seeing the wildflowers. They’re seeing the native grasses. They’re seeing some of these big clover mixes. That adds to the experience. That adds to the long-term sustainability of the property. In some cases, like with the native grasses, that adds to the habitat. I was at a property, doing a tour with the father, son and wife. I had some occasions where, “This is my wife’s stand.” We have a little different philosophy, especially when the women are out there. They want things to look a little prettier than probably like a Bruce Hutcheon in us. Those are some areas where maybe we’ll throw some of the sunflower mix out there.
Maybe we’ll hang out an extra mix or two with a little more diversity. When they’re out there and maybe they’re a little bored or waiting for that nice deer to come through, get some opportunity to snap some pictures and feel that they’re part of the landscape and environment versus, “We’re planting cover and food plots.” We’re doing more. Women think more about that. Men should think more about that. That’s one thing that any property I work with, we do or I strongly encourage to have diversity not just the food plots, but habitat. Many people think about deer, but it’s like bees. We want to have more deer. You want better food plots. We need to have bees. We need to have birds. That’s been my focus moving forward in the is trying to educate people on habitat beyond the standard food plot mixes.
Forest to me is not a good forest, but when there are chickadees, squirrels and hawk. I remember one time a hawk flew right over my head and nailed that squirrel on the ground. Think about those things. The woods are alive, that’s what I’m trying to say. When the woods are alive, that means there are deer around you. You’re sitting there, you got a little clover, not clover mix. You got some sunflowers or you got some other seed factors. The squirrels are scampering and you’re going, “Here he comes.” It’s just another squirrel. You have a lot of activity. You have a lot of noise in the forest. That’s a good forest. One way to do that is to enhance your habitat. Not a noisy forest, but an alive and active forest is a good forest.
Yeah, especially when it’s checking camera pictures in the area. This is something that I was observing. If you got turkeys out there with deer, some people say, “If you got turkeys, you don’t have deer. If you have deer, you don’t have turkeys.” Not true. I got a lot of pictures and I continue to get pictures with turkeys and deer on it. If you’re a deer, if a turkey’s out there eating in an area, the deer might feel more comfortable walking out in that area because the turkey is not nervous. Same way with other species, they can complement each other. You get a lot of activity. There could be benefits with getting in and out of deer stands. There could be benefits like that with our deer feeling comfortable if there are squirrels, birds, turkeys, buzzing, whatever’s out there. If they’re not feeling threatened, the deer won’t feel as threatened. If there’s no deer, if there’s not many other species, there’s probably an imbalance on your own property. I agree with you, it’s a complimentary thing.
With that, we’re going to wrap up the pros and cons of land management with John O’Brion from Grandpa Ray Outdoors. John, how does somebody get a hold of you please?
Get a hold of me by emailing me at [email protected] or call me at (608) 235-0628 Monday through Friday. I appreciate anybody that wants to reach out to me to try to dial in your program just a little bit better.