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Robbie is Arrow Seed food plot product manager. He develops and tests new mixes for wildlife, especially white-tailed deer.
Welcome to another episode of Whitetail Rendezvous. This is your host, Bruce Hutcheon, and we’re heading over to Nebraska today, and we’re going to talk to Robbie Johnson Arrow Seed Company. Now, Robbie is a versatile member of the Arrow Seed team there in Nebraska, and he’s a retail manager, but the thing he likes really to talk about, and that’s why he’s on the show, He develops and tests new mixes for wildlife, especially white-tailed deer. Robbie, welcome to the show.
Robbie: Well, thanks for having me, sir, and I appreciate the time and just the opportunity to sit down and talk with you for a little bit.
Bruce: Well, the first thing, I see a picture here of a pretty nice whitetail from Iowa. Why don’t we start the show right off, and talk to us about that buck.
Robbie: That deer is kind of a, how do you want to call it, a deer in the making, without even know it, in a sense. We got a big friend and dealer over there, and Buddy over there, he’s been working with us a for a few years now, and got his whole farm operation going into the food plot line, and getting a lot more diverse mixes with perennials and annuals that we offer. Last year he called me and said, “Hey, there’s three tags left if you want to get a muzzle with your tag.” At the time, I was busy doing our summer annual forage part of the summer, and I said, “Well, if there’s one still left at lunch, I will.” There was a reason that tag was available, and sure enough I went home and went through the whole operation, got the tag, and then from there we kept watching show gamer gamer pictures and seeing what he had, and every week it was pretty exciting.
That’s when you really get excited to look at pictures and campers, and when you’re hunting a totally new, different ground and never been there, but tell you what. After having…I’ve been on this particular farm, there was 25 acres of food plots then, so food wasn’t a problem, and that was a nice thing, because it was the end of December there, and was extremely cold last year. It was one of those things that if you had food, you had the deer, and that’s exactly what happened.
So that particular hunt, it was probably one of the coldest times I’ve been. Fortunately, had some blinds out of the wind, but still I think some, I don’t know if you remember last year, but some of those winds, they were 10, 15 below wind chill, and those deer, they were out at 2:30 in the afternoon. So it was a cold, long sit, but definitely a pretty cool hunt to even have that opportunity to experience an Iowa hunt like that.
Bruce: Well, our listeners can’t see the photo, but it’s a 10-point mature deer. How old was that deer?
Robbie: That was a four and a half year old deer, and we’ve actually got the sheds from him, that two and three. I don’t want to call this a management deer, but it was one of those deer that from two-, three-, and four-, even as three- and four-year-old sheds, they just didn’t do what he wanted to or what we would have liked to, but he’s about as pretty of a deer, and it was a pretty picturesque hunt, if you want to call it that, as far as the food plots and how everything happened. That farm’s definitely got a lot bigger deer, a lot more opportunity, but this particular deer, I was wanting to help him out with this herd rather than necessarily go in and steal out of the piggy bank, if you want to call it that.
But after seeing it and having the history with it having sheds for two years before that was pretty neat to do that. You get into Iowa, Kansas, even from Nebraska and Colorado, the whole Midwest, they’ve got their hot spots and their areas of managed properties, and they can definitely hold a lot, and good quality deer, which is nice.
Bruce: And that’s a great segue. There’s two things. Let’s talk about December hunting and what you had to do to prepare to sit out. I’m thinking you sat in the morning, sat in the afternoon. You didn’t sit all day, is that correct?
Robbie: No, we usually sat until typically about 10:30 to 11:00, and then we’d end up getting out to warm up a little bit and kind of see what else was moving, because during that time we were getting some snow flurries in the evenings. So they’d go check the fields and see how the activity was just for that morning. Then we didn’t hunt.
If there was a lot of tracks, that kind of gave us a sign with the trocamers [SP] too, though, where we needed to hunt .A lot of times we actually, driving by into some of the food plots, we were bumping deer at noon, because when it gets that cold, there’s pretty much one thing on their mind, and that’s survival. You need habitat and food, and that’s what you got to have. If you got it, you start drawing in a lot more deer than what your property normally would hold. That’s what we were seeing on this, is a lot more deer were moving onto there that no one’s ever seen because of the food sources that we had on the particular farms.
Bruce: Now, what kind of gear? Did you have heaters, the bodysuits? What did you use to stay warm? Even now, we’re out in sub-zero weather. It’s mighty cold.
Robbie: The friend of mine, buddy that I was with, he had a heater bodysuit, and here I’m from central Nebraska, and the way we normally hunt, it’s so open, it’s hard to sit still. So you typically got to kind of move up on a ridge and glass for 10, 15 minutes, and move again. So here in central Nebraska we don’t have sitting gear like he had, which I wish I had after the fact, because by not moving as much as we do here in central Nebraska and just sitting more of an on-stand in Iowa, yeah, it got a little chill, but the nice thing is, is we were seeing activity pretty early in the mornings and even in the evenings. I kind of have a tendency of getting overly excited, if you want to call it that, pretty easy, and I never really got the true cold hit until after I harvested that deer, and then I think the cold finally hit me at once, and I couldn’t keep still or keep from moving.
Bruce: Now, let’s talk about food source. We’re talking late season. Why don’t you walk me through the hunting season and what a guy should have on the ground to keep the deer coming in our tree season, late August, early September, early October, then we’d switch into the rut, and frost hits the ground. In your case, you were lucky, or fortunate to hunt in late December in Iowa when it’s mighty cold. So let’s talk about the different crops that need to be or should be considered to be on the ground during those seasons.
Robbie: Looking at it, even if you don’t necessarily hunt the cold season range, say from September through December, on a particular farm, it’s still good to have a food source that’s going to be there through the whole season, even if you’re not hunting. We’ve got like our perennial mixes, like our trophy banquet, which is a diverse mix of legumes, grasses, and broad-leafs in there. And then we also have our full potential, which is just the alfalfa and clover mix. Typically, the perennial mixes like that will get hit earlier in the season, especially in the fall as they’re really growing. The cool season, the cool weather really makes them a lot more palatable. They’re kind of gone too pretty early.
The problem with perennials is you don’t get the height out of them, and you can grow a lot more tonnage with an annual plot. So that’s where we started getting into having perennials with annuals. Like our Deer Delight mix, it’s a mixture of the grain sorghums, it’s got some summer peas, beans, and turnips in there. So the grain sorghums, you start getting a big grain head on it, similar to corn. So if you happen to get a lot of snow, that grain head’s sticking up out of there. Plus it works really good to catch a lot of snow if you haven’t mixed through the perennial plot.
Then also like Brassica Plus, which is a mixture of brassica. You get turnips and the radishes and the hybrid. Those become extremely sought after typically after a good cold killing freeze. So typically in the Midwest you’re looking mid-November through December you really start getting those hit. And then we’ve also got our frost line, which is designed for winter for your winter months.
You start getting into the winter annual products, then also the brassicas too. It’s good to have a combination. It’s kind of like going through a buffet line. If you had just meat and potatoes, you’d get tired after a while. So if you can have a little bit of everything goes through there, and you put a little bit of this and a little bit of that out there, and before you know it, you’ve got a full season or a full opportunity to hold deer there a whole lot longer.
And I think that’s what, when you start getting archery season in September in certain states, or like right now, the ewe season is going on in a lot of states. Those earlier perennials are really sought after, really drawn to. Then you get into November, December, and even October. Some of the states in the Midwest, or you get into Minnesota, Wisconsin, they get some of those early freezes. A lot of those brassicas start becoming a little more drawn to the further north you go. So I can never say enough about not planting more diverse mixes or more diverse options on your property to keep that feed a lot longer for you.
Bruce: Let’s switch it back to the tradition of hunting. Where’d that come from? And I wanted to bring this out that you just shared with me that Arrow Seed had a radio show, and you were talking about the youth. So let’s talk about the tradition of hunting, and then youth and hunting.
Robbie: We have that. We do a radio show, we’ve got a retail store here in Broken Bow. We create all the food plots. Pretty much everything we do is everything besides corn and soybeans. So we do a lot with native pastures: introduce grasses, cover crops. And a few years ago our store, we started carrying a lot of the processing stuff, like the high-mountain LEM, because we’re about 85 miles from the nearest town that has anything.
By doing that we’ve seen a lot of people taking their kids hunting
By doing that we’ve seen a lot of people taking their kids hunting, and all of a sudden they shoot a deer and process it, or needing to process it, so we have a lot of other stuff available here in our retail store here in Broken Bow. So it’s kind of a full cycle, but when you talk about how to [inaudible 00:12:25] kids in or how I got in, it’s one of those things back in the day you start watching hunting shows on TV, and December and January, and something just clicked. First I got into turkey hunting really hard, and one thing led to another, and then with where my career led me with Cabela’s and Bass Pro and Shield’s [SP]. I moved around with those stores and opened those stores, and I’d move and open another store. It was kind of my thing. So I was very fortunate, even through the growing up, even before the career really started, to see a lot of different states.
I was able to hunt IN South Dakota. We hunted whitetails up there. I moved to Kansas with Cabela’s down there at the time. I was able to hunt Kansas. Moved back to Eastern Nebraska. So it was really nice to be able to do that, because then you get a first-hand in the experience of doing that. I really can’t tell you enough about the Midwest, because I got out of it for a little bit. The tradition in the Midwest that I had seen was just incredible as far as how much activity parents really do with their kids. That’s one of those things, like we’ve talked before this, Bruce, is we have to, in a sense, pass it along if we want this to keep going. That’s what it’s all about with our food plots. That’s kind of how we got into it was just to get the whole family involved in it and get the kids out there. A lot of times the kids are actually who gets some of the parents involved anymore, it seems like, because as lives get busy or you got to take time to get it done and go out and spend time with family. I guess that’s how our family likes to do it, and I’m very fortunate to have kids who enjoy the outdoors so far, knock on wood anyway.