When it comes to wildlife foraging options, you don’t necessarily need acres of food and crop fields in order to keep deer well-fed. More often than not, the tons of acres of native grasses for bedding could get costly and time-consuming. Adam Keith of Growing Deer TV offers a reliable alternative by offering security in smaller properties, aiming for more sunlight to hit the soil with the native forage approach. Does working with soybeans, clover, brassicas, and all other types of food plot blends stress you out? No worries! Adam Keith’s company will cut all the stuff, all the cedars, all the other junk trees and just let the sunlight hit.
Now that’s growing deer!
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We’re going to visit with Adam Keith. Adam works with Dr. Grant Woods, Matt Dye at Growing Deer TV. Every single week, they put up a new show on their website at GrowingDeer.com. This is an unbelievable story about how they put down a majestic buck, a buck they’ve been looking at on the hit list, got trail cameras and it finally all came together. It’s a great show and great lessons learned.
Listen to the podcast here:
Adam Keith Growing Deer
I’m happy to head down to the Ozark area and talk with Adam Keith. Adam works with Grant Woods and Matt Dye over there at Growing Deer TV. They do a lot of consulting. They’ve got a great show. Adam, welcome to Whitetail Rendezvous.
Great to be here, Bruce.
Something special happened to this young man. I can call him young man because I’m older than he is. Since I last talked to him, and it’s all over Facebook, I don’t know who’s got a bigger smile. It has to be you, but just a gorgeous deer. Let’s jump right into the show and talk about a Mr. Wonderful that you put down.
To give you a whole gist of the story, family farm just under 300 acres in Douglas County, Missouri, mostly timber country. The open ground is usually pesky passers of cattle country. I don’t hunt it a whole lot just because of work and traveling. The way I hunt is when it’s absolutely perfect. I know a front just moved through, the big deer on their feet, still during daylight hours and the winds right and I can get into a stand and not alert any deer. I like to treat small tracks of land, small properties as in number one thing I can offer, if I can offer tons of acres of food and crop fields and tens of acres of native grasses for bedding, I can offer them security. I stay out of it unless I can absolutely get in there and not alert the deer. I stayed out of it. The second time I hunted it this year, I had a nice southeast wind, the cold front just moved through high pressure bluebird day. I had one stand I could slip up in close to the bedding area because it was still a little warmer that day. I got in close to the bedding area and a four-and-a-half-year-old buck by the name of Sticker Eight stepped out and a 40-yard shot, he ran ten yards. The rest is history as they say. Out of all the hunts I’d been on, that’s definitely up there in the top five for sure.
His brow is six, seven inches long?
He had one brow that was about six inches. The other one was about four and a half. Then he had great G2s, ten and a half G2s and then had about seven, eight-inch T3s.
G2s are neat folks. When you’ll be listening to show, you could check the picture. I see a grunt call around your neck. Did you grunt them in at all?
Actually, I didn’t grunt at that deer. To give you a little bit more of the story, going back to small properties, trying to find ways to increase the amount of food on the property, I went in and hunted this area last year. I noticed a lot of cedar trees have taken over the area, growing up ten-foot tall. Thinking about where a deer lives, they live in zero to four-foot off the ground level. I need to increase the amount of cover and food at that level. My brother, Matt Dye, and myself went in this past winter in February and cut all these cedars down and a bunch of other trees that aren’t providing much benefit to the wildlife. We cut them down and we said we want more sunlight to hit the forest floor. Instead of trying to create a food plot there, we went with a native forage approach. Instead of making it a food plot of soybeans, clover or brassicas, all the other types of food plot blend, we decided to go with the native food plot, cut all the stuff, all these feeders, all the other junk trees and just let the sunlight hit. We stayed out of that area. We went back in there and there were all kinds of native growth, a lot of little lagoons and fords growing inside the timber. We opened up the canopy, let the sunlight shine down and that buck stood up. I assumed he was bedded close because he was walking almost in slow motion, stretching. He, at one point, reaches his head back and scratches his back with his antlers. When we saw him about 80 yards way, it took him about fifteen minutes to move to 40 yards, moving really slow feeding on the native vegetation that had grown up after all the cutting we had done last winter.
How did you get the stand set if you didn’t go in there?
We hung it last year when we went in and hunted.
Last year when you hunted, you noticed some improvement opportunities, went in there last winter and improved it, left your stand right there. One growing season, all of a sudden Mr. Wonderful shows up and he’s munching and he walked towards you and you shot him.
You draw the plan up in your head and you’re just like, “That’s the plan,” but usually there’s probably going to be a plan B and a plan C somewhere along, but no, he ran. He read plan A and he did it perfectly.
He followed his lines. You had a very docile deer, not nervous at all, just hanging out and you snuck in there. How did you sneak in there without him hearing because he was that close?
He was that close for sure. It’s a small elevator ridge that feeds up to another big ridge that’s got a big food plot on it. We can park 200 yards away and there’s a little cut or a little drainage ditch that goes up the side of this elevated ridge. We got down in that and just slipped up. The stand is basically at the top of the cut, a little ditch, and we just find our stands that way when losing our face the whole time.
Listeners take a lot of notes of what Adam was saying. Take notes because one, he realized we needed to do some improvement, did the improvement, opened up the canopy, forbs and other forage popped up, the deer was there. His stand, he didn’t do anything, never set the stand before this hunt, went and done and used the typography to basically stealth into a stand, got up there. The buck was probably the whole time 200 yards away, 100 yards away?
I don’t think it was any farther than 150 yards away when we got to the stand.
Here you have a four-and-a-half-year-old gorgeous buck that’s within 150 yards, they slipped in there. Did you film it?
Yes. It’ll be on the show in a couple of weeks.
They filmed it and then they put it. The deer just ambled up, not a worry in the world and all of a sudden, the lights go out. As you were saying, plan A, you can’t script it any better. He knew exactly what he was supposed to do.
I would account all that for security. When you were looking at ways why all that unfolded, I would account it for security. We stayed out of that area and not only did we cut the trees down to let the natives grow and clear up the canopy and let some sunlight down, but those trees falling over are now laying one to four-foot off the ground, which is now serving as cover as well as the other stuff growing around it. It’s cover with food. That’s why he was so comfortable being in there and why he was on his feet so early in the afternoon. We’ve been seeing most of the movement generally in the last 30 minutes around here, especially on days with warmer temperatures. That beer was on a speed an hour before dark.
Another lesson, guys. He didn’t clean up his mess. It wasn’t a mess, they were cutting stuff out. They just left it and let it naturally decay. It provided cover for the deer. Nobody had been in there. He’s all by himself, so one-time sit and it’s done. The other thing that I want to talk about is the cold front. If you’re not hunting cold fronts either before or after, you’re missing out. Let’s talk about that, Adam.
Our approach and what we do for trying to increase the security on a property, when a cold front is coming, we’re going to hunt right before the cold front. A lot of times that’ll get the deer on their feet earlier in the afternoon or keep them moving throughout the morning. We’re hunting right before the cold front, the cold front moves through, just after the cold front. It’s the periods in between the cold fronts where a lot of people can mess up their properties, especially smaller properties like the family farm. If the temperatures are really warm and there’s no wind, you’ve got to think about a deer. This time of year, they already have their winter coat on. If you get the warmer temperatures, he can’t take that coat off like you and I can. He’s got to figure out when he can move and still stay cool, and that’s at dark usually. Staying out of those areas and not hunting those areas, those prime areas, when it’s not a cold front, when the conditions aren’t favorable, is probably one of the biggest factors in hunting small properties as well as bigger properties like proving grounds.
When a cold front is coming, we’re going to hunt right before the cold front. Share on XEverybody, a lot of things came together: the cold front, temperature, security, habitat improvement. That’s what growing deer is all about and what you guys do there. Let’s talk a little bit about your consulting business and how you can help other people have similar results as you guys are.
We offer the services of consulting. People hire us to come see their property. We take a tour of it and look it over, see what’s in the neighborhood, food cover, water, security, and how that all mixes around, not just on that property but in the neighborhood, and the hunting pressure, figuring out what their goals and objectives are. If they want to see a lot of deer, if they want to shoot three-and-a-half-year-olds and older, or if they want a strictly focus on mature deer, we’ll assist them in that as well as laying out the appropriate food plots, stand locations, bedding areas, and overall just how to hunt their properties.
Do you send proposals out to somebody? How would they get in touch with you to connect and say, “I want you guys to take a look at my property?”
They can contact us at [email protected] or just check us out at GrowingDeer.com.
How far will you travel to see a client?
Anywhere there are whitetails. We’ve covered from Florida to New York all the way out west where there’s still whitetails.
If you’re wondering about best practices, at least have a conversation with Grant or Adam or Matt and see if they can help you build a balanced herd. As Adam and I were talking earlier at the farm I’ve been hunting for a long time, over 50 years, one of the young kids, he’s 28 now, but he’s still young, took a 180 gross popping young whitetail this opening day. It was a Sunday opening day in Wisconsin. Garrett has reported back to me that they’re seeing larger deer than ever before in the trail cameras. We have a bigger system of trail cameras, so it’s seeing more deer. The recent mild winters and good management both on the deer and the ground has increased our deer herd over the last ten years. It hasn’t been overnight. What are some of the things people can do to get an impact within, let’s say, five years of more mature deer?
First rule and simplest rule of the whole mix is, remember that dead deer don’t grow. If your target animal is mature deer, you’re going to have to stop shooting the young deer. Not shooting the young deer is objective number one. Then you’ve got to figure out ways to keep those younger deer on your property so your neighbors aren’t shooting them, if your neighbors aren’t following the same goals as you. Account for food, cover water, and security, keeping those on your property. That way the deer stay on your property. They have everything they need. As long as you’re not shooting them at the young age, then you’re allowing them to mature so you can harvest them later.
What about food plots? How important are food plots in the farm we hunt? The farm I’m talking about, we’ve got beans, alfalfa, corn because they farm it and they’re dairy farmers. Part of the farm is in crops and they feed it to the cows. How would a person in that situation put supplemental food out there so we can attract them and keep them? We know once the harvest comes, there’s some leftover but the food’s basically gone.
If we break this down in crop country versus timber country, so timber country, there’s native stuff throughout the year but when fall hits, we’re dropping a lot of acorns. There’s food basically everywhere. If we look at crop country like you’re referring to, there’s food everywhere throughout growing season, throughout the summer and early fall. The deer have all the food they ever need. With the modern combine, most of that food is getting harvested up and there’s not a whole lot of spilled grain like there was 30 years ago. You can approach it in different ways, but one way you can do that is by understanding and learning more about cover crops and how important cover crops can be in farming. Basically, a cover crop is a crop you’re going plant after harvest. That may be cereal, rye, wheat, a whole blend of radishes. There are all kinds of different blends out there but planning that after the crops are harvested or you can aerial treat it and so it’s growing even while the crops are maturing. Even after harvest, they just continue to grow. That’s one way of doing it, or you can use the approach that I use on the family farm. I want to increase the native vegetation and that’s all about trying to get a more open canopy and letting more sunlight reach the forest floor.
I’m thinking of the farm. There are some places where we can put logging roads because it has been logged so we get super covered. The logging roads go in there and put least some grasses. Would you even think of putting some other type of forage on the logging road?
In shady areas, clover is probably going to do a better job than most of your soybeans or any other crop. You’re going to have great success with clover in there. If it’s a smaller area, clover takes ground pressure a lot better than a lot of the other crops out there.
We’ve got a couple of miles of logging road.
I’m going to go back one second. You mentioned that the farm was with log. How long ago with the log?
It’s got to be ten years.
There’s still a lot of open canopy probably where there’s a lot of underbrush growing?
In some places, there’s probably a 40-acre section, you can’t get in there with the briars and the vines. It’s an absolute jungle. We know where the deer go when the pressure happens. Every year, if we just send the young kids in there and drive it, you’ve got to have MOs and Carhartts or something because it just shreds your clothes. If you go regular jeans, it will just shred them.
I would account some of your large deer in your neighborhood, probably the battle for that timber harvests years ago.
Security. Coyotes even have a hard time getting through.
You’re not only increasing the amount of cover in those woods, but you also increase the amount of native vegetation that’s growing up for the deer to browse on that.
A tremendous amount of forage is there. The deer on the farm got crops all through the summer, more to eat. When those crops go away, then they have natural forage and we got water. It’s a good place to hunt and since we haven’t been killing small deer. I’m looking at a picture of the first year I ever hunted there. We’ve got five basket bucks, really small basket bucks and that was in 1966. Since that time, we don’t shoot them anymore. If there’s a kid out there who never shot a deer, you can shoot whatever you want, whatever license you’ve got, have at it. The rest of us, we’re cutting back. It’s interesting and I hope listeners, just as I’m sitting here listening to Adam talk, you start thinking about your property and saying, “How can I change that up? Where’s that super stand that if I sit there, I always know I’m going to get a buck but only hunt it in the perfect time?” just like Adam did. He picked the perfect time, perfect wind. Everything was right and he killed a gorgeous white tail.
Another thing that goes into there is a lot of people run cameras close to where tree stand location is. They’re putting pressure on the deer just by going to check their cameras. I had a camera out and I knew that buck was in the area, but it wasn’t anywhere close to that. It was about 250 yards from where that stand is. I knew he was on. He was on the camera multiple times in the past couple of weeks, but all at night. I had a hunch that he was bedded just on the edge of the property in a big bedding area that we cleared out and cut a bunch of stuff just like I have front of the stand. I knew he was probably bedded there and he was spending a lot of time up in the food plot at night. I played the hunch that he was using that elevator ridge back and forth, and it and it worked out.
There are a lot of pieces of the puzzle. You just heard Adam used topography. Figure out, there’s a big bedding area here, but there’s a transitional zone that he’s going to use his corridor that happens to have some good food and good cover. When you think about it, it’s a puzzle that you pulled together. You put the last piece in and you shot a wonderful deer. Share with the people now about the proving grounds and how that’s important to everything you do at Growing Deer.
The proving grounds are our home base, you might say, 2,200 acres near Branson, Missouri. We plant food plots, do timber harvests, prescribed fire. Basically, it’s where we experiment with new techniques, different techniques that we can use across the nation for habitat management. We film there every week, make a new episode 52 weeks out of the year, no repeats. The proving ground is our laboratory. That’s where we pick and choose what techniques to use, which ones aren’t really working that won’t work for anybody else, and what techniques work for us there. It’s really rough. It’s the Ozark Mountains. There are a lot of rocks. We figured that if it works there, it will work anywhere. That’s why we call it proving grounds.
How many stands do you have set up on the proving grounds?
We’re somewhere right around 50.
I guess it would be all over. I’m thinking food plots, pinch points, funnels, and ridges. How do you decide which one to hunt or to film at?
I’ll step back and say it’s 2,200 acres, but there’s only 65 acres of food plots. That gives you an idea of how rough the terrain is because we’re planning every ridge top and every inch of bottom ground that can be planted. Most of it is side-sloped, even though there are a lot of ridges, but a lot of side slopes. We do a lot of bedding areas. We’ve cleared off what we call blades down here, but they’re basically just the side of the slope that’s been all the feeders have been cutoff. There’s very shallow soil, but there’s a lot of native grasses and legumes growing on it. When we’re trying to pick our standard location, since there are so many elevation changes and ridges, we have to account for thermals. Just like people talk about thermals out West Elk County, we know the thermals basically in the evenings, the cold air starts to fall and starts to go into the bottom. It’s pulling your scent into the bottom. In the mornings, as the air starts to warm up, it starts climbing the ridges. We have to account for thermals as well as wind direction and our approach and all the other things that you have to consider when you’re trying to pick a stand. Trying to pick the stand on proving grounds is a lot more difficult for us. When we go to Kansas, the winds out of the West, we’re going there. At proving grounds, some bottlenecks, even though it looks like a west wind set that’s great, it has to be a southwest wind just because of the way the wind wraps around and blows through the ridges and the saddles.
The last time we talked, you talked about you moved one stand was it 50 yards, 75 yards, and you had the opportunity at the buck. Share that story please.
The stand’s called 50-acre east, and actually Matt Dye harvested a mature buck about five years ago out of it. As we went back in there, we hung the scent and hunted at one time before Matt killed his deer on Halloween Day. We kept trying to hunt the remainder of that season and the wind kept swirling on us. Even though all the leaves were off, the wind was still swirling. We knew it was a great area, it just wasn’t the right tree. We looked around. We’re on the end of a big ridge basically on the far east end of the ridge. We were trying to figure out how we could get more consistent winds and still be in that kind of bottleneck on the eastern end of that ridge. We decided to move the stand 75 yards up the ridge. When we did that, we got more on the northeast portion of the ridge so we could see more skyline off to the north and northwest. That told us that just seeing that, there’s a less chance of the wind swirling around the ridge. We’re seeing more skyline. The wind was out northwest, more consistent on the same trail. We’re only 75 yards away, but we punted it a lot in the past couple of years and killed a lot of deer out of there and the wind never switches. It’s always straight and consistent.
Do you have topo maps or your stand setup or you just use maps on your smartphone to say, “Here’s the GPS coordinate, and that’s where the XYZ stand is.”
We use topo maps a little bit, but for the most part now that we’ve spent so much time on the property, we know where the shelves are. We use Google earth probably the most out of anything, just the aerial images of the property.
Let’s talk about defining the core area.
When we’re thinking about a deer’s home range, there’s this home range where he spends his life and then you have this core area and that’s where he’s going to spend the most amount of time. That’s probably where he feels the most comfortable. The core area is where he’s going to spend more time during daylight hours. Finding that core area can be very difficult sometimes. When it comes to core area, you’ve got to think about a deer is going to chase a receptive doe. You might think he chased it off your property and he’s completely left his home range, but they don’t usually ever leave their home range because they don’t know outside of their home range. It’s scary to them so they’re going to stay inside their home range and they might chase that receptive though out of their core area. For the most part, they’re going to spend the majority of their life in their core area. That’s where they’re going to have food, cover, water, security. Everything they need. What will take them out of that core area is hunting pressure or receptive does.
What about you’re in the core area and all of a sudden, a community scrape pops up. I’ve seen some big community scrapes, 110×10, just huge. Is that where core areas or home ranges intersect? Help me understand that.
Each deer has a different home range and a different core area. A community scrape doesn’t necessarily, in my opinion, have to deal with core areas, more of activity in that area. Where I found community scrapes is where a lot of deer spend a lot of time. It could be a bottleneck or a transitionary, but it seems like where community’s scrapes are located is where a lot of deer highways intersect. Scrapes aren’t territorial with their communication posts. The deer go to that area to see who else has been in the area.
Each deer has a different home range and a different core area. Share on XIt’s communication. A doe pees there and they’re licking branches, and she leaves a scent and then the buck picks that up and they’ll, “There’s a fresh dose someplace around here in breeding mode.” How else other than the doe’s leaving their scent are the scrapes used?
Basically, we look at scrapes as almost like Facebook statuses. You go in there, “I’m in the area. Where are you at?” Pee on it, maybe work it and then on about their business. The next deer comes along, “There’s a doe in the area,” and try to pick her trail and go that way. We don’t look at them as anything outside of that.
Communities scrapes means there are a lot of deer?
There are more deer using it on a more consistent basis.
If you ever see one it’s like, “Did a couple of cows get in a fight here or something?”
I found one a couple weeks ago in Kentucky. When I showed it to the landowner, the first look at it, he goes, “We don’t have hogs here.” I’m like, “That’s not hogs, my friend. That’s the community scrapes.”
That’s funny that a lot of people have never seen them. Once you see them, you go, “Holy pray.” What I’ve done in the past is I back-trailed, I picked a direction north, south, east or west, and go to where that trail first starts intersecting with the others and try to set up on the wind angles. Unfortunately, the one I found most of the time was at night. It was in a suburban area. There were houses 200 yards away and cornfields and creek bottoms. It was a perfect place, but it just funneled all the deer. They had to go through here or they go through somebody’s backyard.
That sounds like a great place for a community scrape to be.
That’s why it was there. Over the years that I hunted there, I saw a lot of bucks. I’d never killed a big buck so I didn’t kill any bucks off that, but I definitely saw a lot of deer there. Why don’t you take a minute or two and give a shout out to whomever and then tell people again how to get a hold of you guys that Growing Deer, and we’ll call it a show.
I’ll first shout out to my wonderful wife who supports me through the whole hunting season. I’m gone a lot this time of year and she never complains. A shout out to her and a shout out to my parents and my brother who supported me through my entire life and through the whole process of going into the hunting industry. Then a big shout out to Matt Dye for tagging along and tagging Sticker Eight. Shout out to all those guys. If they want to learn more or contact us, they can go to GrowingDeer.com where you can check us out on Facebook or on Instagram and Twitter, @GrowingDeer.
On behalf of all our thousands of listeners across North America, Adam Keith of GrowingDeer.com, thank you so much for sharing. We threw a lot at our folks, I hope they take notes. I can’t wait until you see his deer because there’s, as we say out here, one proud cowboy. I don’t know what they call you in the Ozarks, but there’s one proud guy, so congrats.
I appreciate it, Bruce.
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