A food plot is the best place for a deer to feed, hence, that would be the best place to hunt. Having a better food plot for a deer will result in a healthy balance of nutrients. These nutrients not only help in growing a healthy deer herd but greatly impact a buck’s antler growth. In this episode, Eric Fitzgerald and Jason Obermiller from Rackology provide knowledge and methods on how to effectively hunt 365 days with the use of food plots. They also talk about better techniques on how to plant food plots and how to grow a healthy fawn.
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#500 Rackology Food Plot Part 3
This is a special edition with Rackology. We’re heading up to Eric and Jason’s shop in Loup City, Nebraska and this is the final segment of food plots. We’re going to talk about planting 365. That encompasses everything we talked about with these guys. We started off with the land management and looking at the land, getting hard eyes on it with a fresh set of glasses, and then figure out where we’re going to do things. We talked about the food plots and seed, what they are, what they’re not and what they can’t do now. We’re going to wrap it all up into a 365-day planting and growing session.
Let’s bring forth some knowledge and share. We had talked about the doe is stressed. The doe is bred in November 10th, she goes through December, January, February, March. Sometime in the springtime, she’s going to have the fawn. The better you can help them carry that fawn, the better deer herd you have. That’s what this is all about, is helping deer become healthy deer, liking your place to live on and living there 365. Guys, take it away.
The first key in planting a year-round program, whether it be feeding or food plots, when we talked about land management, we go year-over-year. We don’t just do this year and we’re done and we’ll see you next year and we’ll start a new game plan. Knowing the life cycle of what you’re hunting or what you want out there is important. Jason has taught me so much with his knowledge of not only biology but specific with deer herd development and health. I’ve learned by soaking in like a sponge next to him hearing him talk to people and asking questions. Of anybody, he knows well that life cycle of a doe, the life cycle of a buck, and where you’re going to be able to take the stress off of those animals. There’s more of a visual key to understand and see the stresses that these wild animals go through on a given year. Every year is not the same, on a dry year versus a wet year versus a cold winter year where you’ve got twenty snowfalls and 40 inches of snow. Those deer are out there, they don’t get to go inside to relax, refresh and regroup for the next day like we do.
No matter how little you think you are doing; you are doing a lot. Share on XKnowing that life cycle of the animal is huge when it comes to planting 365 year-round stuff. A lot of people will see deer out there and not know how much stress that they’ve got on them. They might say, “They’re all eating out there. They’re walking around and enjoying themselves. They’re fine. I don’t need to do anything.” Looking at trail camera pictures from closer than 50 to 100 yards, Jason showed me some things to key in on. What we don’t know about the deer, a lot of times they have twins and triplets. That’s a lot of vitamins, minerals and proteins that doe has got to do to get to that fawn, whether it be a fawn that’s a doe or a fawn that’s a buck. If you want the bucks to develop and to be their genetic potential, they need to hit the ground running. They need to be efficient.
A lot of times with food plots, the ones you have on your land and water are areas that they could go in and drink on a daily basis. On the feed side of it, it’s important to know what’s out there naturally and what you could supplement them with. That’s a huge part of it. Going into planning, like my grandpa always said, “Measure twice and cut once,” or, “You need to have a good młotek and ołówek and a good garage key.” I asked him, “What’s a młotek?” “That’s a hammer.” “What’s an ołówek?” “That’s a pencil. It’s Polish for that.” I said, “What’s a garage key?” He goes, “That’s what you open the garage with.” I said, “Now I know.”
You’ve got one time do the planting. I tell the farmers around here. They want to plant too early and they’re looking at a calendar. When it comes to planting seeds in the ground, we could throw the calendar away. We need to know what our soil temperatures are because you only have one time to do it. If you do it a second time, it gets more expensive and less productive. You do it a third time and it’s probably not going to be productive at all and a lot more expensive. You have one time to make this food plot shine. Do your homework or call us and say, “When should I plant this?” “What are your soil temperatures?” “I don’t know.” You can go get a thermometer at Walmart for a dollar. You could stick it in the ground at where you’re going to plant that seed, an inch to two inches to know exactly. Give it five minutes, read it. They make digital ones. It’s something simple that will help you. If you till the ground, measure your soil temperature after you till it. Don’t do it before you till it because it’s going to warm it up when the sunlight hits it.
If deer get proper nutrition before, throughout, and after the rut, you’re going to have healthier deer. Share on XThere are a lot of things that go into planting. Soil temperature. What you want for food plots normally, unless you’re frost seeding or doing something that there are some species that you could plant in the middle of winter and they’re fine, they’re viable until the temperature reaches 50 degrees, and then they start growing. Not all plants can do that. Normally, you want a 55-degree temperature on your ground, 50, 55, with a good ten-day forecast. You don’t want to sit there and go into soil, “It’s 50 degrees,” and then you plant. You look at the ten-day forecast and they’re calling for snow or for cold, wet rain. You’re going to dry that soil temperature right back down pretty quickly. It takes a lot less time to cool the soil off than it does to raise the temperature. You usually want that about 55 degrees and a good ten-day forecast to start planting.
A lot of people pick a date on the calendar like, “I’m going to go and plant my food plot on April 15th.” April 15th, I’ve seen snow that’s a foot and a half on the ground. Every year is different. I’ve seen Aprils where it’s been 80 degrees on the 15th and perfect condition. You want to time it right and don’t feel like you’re going to get rushed in, “I’ve only got this weekend to do it.” It might be worth it to try to bust your butt. If it’s going to be the following weekend, that’s going to be the better scenario to go into, do it that following weekend. Do what you can to do that.
Getting back to what you started talking about with the does and the bucks, if you’re trying to grow healthy deer, you can’t think about, “What am I going to feed them in this small timeframe?” It goes into not only planting 365 but planning 365. Let’s say the rut, for example. I’ve seen this in how many years game camera pictures of watching the deer that have been using our Rackology products. One thing I can say is if the deer are getting the proper nutrition, if the bucks and does are healthy when they’re breeding, the sperm and the egg are at its prime. If the sperm and the egg are the healthiest possible when conception takes place, that fawn is going to be much better off. Genetics are going to be maximized that much more versus the fawn that maybe mom and dad didn’t have a good start, they didn’t have the proper nutrition.
We have the same sperm and egg, but in a weaker capacity because of the lack of nutrition. We could birth those on the same date, theoretically, if we could do this, this fawn that was conceived with proper nutrition is going to be much better off than the fawn that wasn’t. We see this in humans. As a teacher, I see this with the different students. When we talk about students that have learning disabilities, students that are all gamuts, sadly enough a lot of times it goes down to what their parents did before they were conceived. A lot of that goes into the health of the child. Deer are no different. If they got proper nutrition before, throughout and after the rut, it’s a no-brainer, you’re going to have healthier deer.
With planting these food plots, do it right with the proper amount that you can do. It can be the amount of acres that’s an inhibiting factor for you or it’s the dollar amount. If you do the best you can do for those deer with your plots, you’re going to notice the returns on it. That’s plain and simple. I mentioned this in the last segment when you want to find out about your soil health. Soil sampling, if you can do it, is awesome as far as figuring out what you’re starting off with the base. My question for him, because maybe some of the readers are going to be wanting to know this is, “What is pH? What pH am I looking for? Once my pH is right, what are some other things that I’m going to look at before I even want to put seed in the ground and put fertilizer down? What is soil? What am I doing?”
A lot of people don’t know what is soil health, “Is it just a thing that tells me it’s good or bad?” It takes a trained eye to look at the soil sample results and know what might be going on. I’ve been using Ward Laboratories. It just has all the breakdowns. If you have a low pH, which is something under 6.5, then you’re going to have to add some lye and get that pH level back up. There are soluble salts, organic matter and carried over nitrogen. There are all your nutrients, your macros and micros with phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, aluminum, manganese, zinc, iron, and copper. There’s just a whole gamut that you could learn. When I get samples back, depending on what crop is going in there, I go on the internet and I dive into it and figure out where the optimum levels should be for what they want. What the optimum levels are going to be for corn is not going to be the same optimum levels for a food plot.
What does low pH do to a plant?
When you’re planning your food plots, your soil will tell you a lot if you’re going to be successful or not. Share on XWhen you look at pH, anything between 5.5 to 6.0 will take your overall performance or production of a crop down by 10%. If you get between 5.0 to 5.5, you’re down 20% production. You can’t expect to go plant something on a low pH like 4.5 to 5.0 and expect to have good luck. The optimum pH you want your soil is 6.7 to 7.0. That’s where you’re going to have 100% tangible production, whether it be corn, food plot or anything like that. There are some species that do just fine on more of a wide range of pHs but you want to try to get that result as possible.
Does low soil pH, is it because it inhibits nutrient update?
Yes. Low pH ties up some of your macros and micros. It doesn’t let the soil metabolize and break them down as fast. Something that goes to all of pHs is your soil CECs, which is your cations, that transfer a little particle of nitrogen from one point to another. It looks like a long way but in the soil’s eyes, it’s small. If I put a little droplet, whether it’ll be liquid or a granule of dried nitrogen, how does it get from there to my soil roots? That goes with your soil CECs, how it can transfer the broken-down nitrogen from that root or where the root intercepts it and takes it in. When you’re planning your food plots, your soil will tell you a lot if you’re being successful or not.
A lot of times I’ll go out and we’ll pick seven different spots. The guys got a quarter ground and I’m thinking this is where we pick on our planning, discovery phase, the whole thing. We pull samples there and we send them to the lab. Two weeks later, I call them back. They say, “You might as well put up a big X on plot one and plot five. The other three, we could do some work with and you’re going to be more economical.” A lot of times on pH, you could tell by the color of the soil if you’re going to have a problem or not. You’ve got light, like a piece of paper, color of soil and you’ve got dark soil, those two are not good. Everybody said, “The darker the soil the better.”
Do your due diligence and do the soil test before you go ripping up a piece of ground. Share on XYou want right in the mix in between, brownish to blackish soil. If it’s too dark black, it’s going to have high organic matter and peat moss. The pH is going to be acidic. The light clay looking soil is going to be alkaline. It’s going to be high in pH, which in effect is just like low pH. If you go upwards of 8 to 8.5, it’s going to hinder yourself too. On the planning phase, it’s $13 for one sample to send in. It’s worth it. If you’re going to spend $80 or $150 on seed, why not spend $13 on a soil sample? It goes along with knowing where you should plant it that when you put the soil test with a geographical area, where you’re catching the right amount of sunlight and you’re going some soil irrigation where you got some good holding capacity of water in your sample. That’s just as important.
That’s where it ties back in to the first section of our third of our series, Land Management. You paid somebody to walk your land, get eyes on your land and do all of those, every place you’re considering putting in a food plot, spend that $13. You’re already in, you might as well go all in. It eliminates any questions. You can say, “This place right here, I can come in the backside. The wind’s here. I can slip in. It’s a great place for a stand. That’s where I want the food plot.” You’re trying to grow on dolomite. It’s not going to work.
I’ve come to the reasoning that the plants you want to grow and thrive in that area that you don’t do your homework on won’t thrive, but weeds will. If you don’t do a soil sample on area, you till it up, you plant it and nothing comes up. Something is going to have come up, unless it’s barren soil that maybe has a much deeper issue going on. When you till that up, take all the coverage off and the pH or soil fertility is wrong, it doesn’t come up it all. When midsummer comes, you’ve got weeds galore. Some weeds are beneficial for some species but you’ve got the weeds that you don’t want. You end up having to spray it or till it again. Do your due diligence and do the soil test before you go ripping up a piece of ground.
It takes a fawn to come about 200 in one day, you can count it out. All through that carrying time, that’s the most critical time for that fawn. That’s why planting 365 is becoming more important. No matter how little you think you’re doing, you’re doing a lot.
I originally started up with these projects for ourselves. The one thing I looked at was not so much as how big of a buck that I grow. Granted, we all want to possibly shoot a nice buck. A lot of hunters look at the antlers. For me as a biologist, we want to maximize the genetic potential of the bucks and does. By creating a year-round plausibility for feeding, the deciding factor of the antlers is throughout the winter months to the end of the spring months. The deciding factor on how healthy the fawns are going to be when they’re born is those winter months, what they’ve got to eat, what type of cover they’ve got.
We’ve got a bedding cover that we’ve got on our website. Places where people don’t have bedding on their ground, they can provide that for the deer. It gives them a place to take shelter, especially if you can get it someplace next to where you’ve got water. There are some food sources in that plot as well with some of the other plants we got in there. If you couple that with a good healthy plot and either A) Make it big enough that it’s going to last into the winter months, or B) You take down the fence so it’s optimum for hunting. You might put it back up to salvage what remains so they’ve got something to graze on over the winter months. It depends on how much ground you have, how much you’re able to plant.
There are other things that go into planting. If you go into a little area into the trees, you think this is a nice place for a plot and in order to plan it, figure out your directions a little bit of the trees to think about where the sun is. Those that put out game cameras realize after not too long that you don’t point your game cameras east and you don’t point your game cameras west unless you have a shaded spot. Otherwise, the sun will flash. Same way with the food plot, when you’re in there, you know where the sun is coming up and going down. If the plot’s in the trees where it’s too dark, you might have to cut some trees back even further than where your plot sits. You have to open up.
Mine was an eight-acre plot. I probably had ten to twenty yards of open outside the plot before it got to the first trees to make sure I had excellent amount of daylight hitting it. Not only that, we did go and cut up some of those trees. Think about what you’re doing when you cut them. You can hinge cut them or cut them and drag them into certain areas. The one place where we’re hunting at, there are many ways that these deer come through the trees to the plot. You can help funnel them through an area to your plots. Not only are you thinking about the deer’s health when they’re doing these plots, but you’re also thinking about strategics as far as where these deer are coming from.
Deer need different nutritional requirements throughout the year. Share on XBack to the health aspect, those fawns in the spring and summer months when they’re needing milk, they’re needing nutrition. Those bucks that are growing their antlers, the antlers may have been decided back in February, March, April but they still need to replace on their skeleton when they’re pulling off. Those does need to replace the nutrients and minerals that are taken out of their body to put in the milk for those fawns. They need that in the summertime.
It’s not just, “Let’s plan it a little bit here. It’s a one and done then we forget about it.” Those deer need different nutritional requirements throughout the year. If you plant a monoculture, one type of plant like all corn or all soybeans, those plants are good at a certain time in the year. If you’re planting plots that have got a number of different varieties, it’s like they can go to the store and they can choose, “This week I like this plant. This week I like those plants.” The nutritional value is different depending on the time of the year with those plants.
Can you get by filling up an eight-acre plot? We’ve got guys that want to throw out our brassica mix. They don’t do the soil sample. Could you get away with that? Sure, you can. Not everybody’s going to go out and buy the soil sample because they might think it’s too small to do it. In the long run, is it going to be better? Of course, because anything that you want to do and can afford to do for a plot is not going to be for naught in the future. It’s going to boil down to what you want to see on that ground in a year or two or five years.
Rackology can be reach by how?
Our email is the best way to get a hold of us because we’re both at work during the day and whatnot. It’s [email protected] or Instagram and Facebook. The guys that follow us, they often message us through there. The problem with messaging through there is notifications don’t always go through. There have been times where it’s a few days later that I notice messages on Instagram and I apologize. Our email is probably the best. Our website, you can contact through there but I’d say email is the best. We can always follow up with a phone call. Our website is Rackology.org.
Eric and Jason, thank you for coming on Whitetail Rendezvous and bringing this information to our readers. We’ve got to get smarter with one, our dollar, two, with our time and consider being 365 hunters. All throughout the year, we’re helping our deer herd grow. That’s what I want to help all you readers to do. On behalf of thousands of readers across North America, thanks for being part of this special series on Land Management and Food Plots.
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