Food Plots 101

Home Hunting Training Links Archery & Tech Tips Members


Back 40 Outdoors And Maxi-Rack Seeds BringYou "Food Plots 101" A feature about creating a high quality food plot for whitetails (hopefully)!

To be honest, until this year, we have never really given much thought to putting in a food plot where we hunt whitetails. Whether it be in SW or NW Wisconsin, there has always been plenty of food for the deer, as we hunt mostly active farms, or on the borders of them. Recently, though, one of our properties has created a problem for us. It is a 300 acre farm, with about 200 acres of crops and 100 acres of woods. There is more food there than 500 whitetails could eat. Doesn't sound like a problem, right? Well the problem is, we cannot seem to pattern the deer on this farm. They seem to enter the fields wherever they want, creating no identifiable pattern. We hope to solve this problem with a couple well placed food-plots in areas we've cleared and planted with high quality seeds provided by Maxi-Rack. Here is our pictorial essay on how we created, and will maintain the plots. Keep checking back as we are just learning, so let our mistakes be yours!!

Plot #1-The Potato Patch

Above is what we started to work with. This is just an overgrown, old potato patch about 100 yards into the woods back from the main alfalfa and corn fields. We picked this spot because we had to do a minumum of tree cutting, but yet we could still get some decent equipment back there to do the work for us.

Again, another pic of the initial food plot before any work was done. You can see to the left of the picture some branches sticking out, look below for the owner of those branches.

This tree was a huge, knarly, old maple that had to go in order to make our food plot work. We didn't do the initial cutting, but Kevin and Ryan made firewood out of this puppy quickly with the help of a couple Stihl's and some honest sweat and hard work. Unfortunately, the stump had to stay, there was really no way to get it out!

Once the big maple was cut out, it was time to get clearing! The owner of the farm has a logging skidder, and he cleared this sucker out in record time, about two hours! He did it on a Friday, so we couldn't get a pic. Kevin went in the next Monday (three days later) and really disced it up well, and planted Maxi-Racks Ballistic, and also sowed it in with some oats to fill in the bare spots. You can see the brush piled up around the plot. We did this on purpose to create a "fence" effect. We left two spots where the deer can easily enter the plot, and when they do they enter at the optimum shot angle for the stand we have set up on the plot.

This pic is of our food plot when viewed from our stand site. The tree that we left standing is 22 yards from us. It is 47 yards to the far side of the plot, and 50 yards to any spot on the fence to the left of the picture. We set it up so if a deer walks into the plot, we can get a shot. We really concentrated the Maxi-Rack Ballistic around the area by the standing tree. It was only in the ground a week and look at how far it is shooting up! Deer were already visiting the plot, as there were tracks all over it. (Picture taken on 6/2/07)



This is a picture of the knarly, old maple tree we have our stand site in. If you look real hard you can see it up there! The background cover makes it almost impossible to see up into the tree, but that will change come about November! The reason we only have one stand is because it is for somebody to video out of. The shooter will be using a Green's Tree Saddle when hunting over the plot.

Here's a picture of the food plot on June 10, 2007. The oats and Maxi-Rack are coming up great! The oats are about 6" tall, and the Maxi-Rack Ballistic is about 3" tall. There were deer tracks all over the plot, and you could see where they were already eating it. Shown below are two pics also taken on the same day. One is a close-up of the Maxi-Rack Ballistic, and the other of a huge track in the food plot.

Here is Jerod standing in the food plot on June 17, 2007. We can see some spots that were missed when it was hand-seeded. Before the fall, we will retill these spots and replant them. The Maxi-Rack grew about 2 inches since last week, and we are also seeing some good activity around the plot in the form of tracks. It has been extremely hot for this time of year, but we've still been getting some decent rainfall.