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What does food plotting look like in 15 years? 30 years? I can guarantee you one thing, based on the way modern food plotting has degraded our ecosystem and whitetail health, it will look drastically different or we will continue to be faced with difficult deer management decisions. Unless we change courses, we will continue to degrade our most valuable national resource and the foundation of giant whitetails: soil health. If we degrade the microbiome (immune system) of the soil, the health of our whitetails will continue to decline. As I work with clients all across the country, I gain valuable, optimistic glimpses into what the future holds for food plots and I’d like to paint a brief picture here so you can start future proofing your food plot plan now!

The future food plotter will first and foremost change how they “see” a food plot. The days of chemically intensive, synthetic-fertilizer-dependent, monoculture food plotting will fade because these practices degrade the ecosystem and fail to grow healthy whitetails. Many hunters inaccurately label the venison they eat as “organic” and “healthier than beef” when in fact researchers have proven that toxic agricultural and industrial chemicals are found in whitetails. While we can’t control what whitetails eat when they venture off our properties, we can present nutrient dense, toxin-free plants on the properties we hunt.

Regarding change, it has been said that if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at will change. The food plotter of the future will look at the soil as the foundation of whitetail health and once again realize that by nourishing the soil, healthy, mature bucks are a guaranteed byproduct. In fact, prior to the advent of chemical agriculture, this is how our founding fathers and farmers of the era looked at agriculture: the health of the soil is the foundation of all health on earth! Food plotters of the future will worry less about how their food plots look and more about managing their soil health for nutrient dense plantscapes.

We all need a “cookbook”, or a series of major steps and “ingredients” to follow or we will lose sight of the end goal. While there is no user’s manual for future proof food plotting (or farming), there are some basic principles that must be followed. If a user’s manual was available, it would be called “Food Plotting in Nature’s Image” and the tools and techniques would mirror the way Nature does things. Food plotting practices would be geared toward increased plant diversity, maintaining a year-round, living plant with healthy roots and above ground plant biomass that armors the soil from wind and water erosion. Future proof food plotters won’t concern themselves with using genetically modified plants so that toxic, man-made chemicals can be sprayed to eliminate hundreds of plants (AKA “weeds”) that whitetails use for nourishment and self-medication. Instead, older varieties that have not been bred for specific traits, such as the ancient and heritage grains, will become more popular. The fact is, many of the herbicides that food plotters commonly use are patented as antibiotics and while many doctors avoid overprescribing antibiotics to humans, more than 300 million pounds of one popular weed killer, that also works as an antibiotic, is sprayed on farms, parks, lawns and golf courses each year! This must stop.

The future proof farmer will have a better understand of which farming practices degrade soil and whitetail health and which practices promote and attract healthy whitetails. If we truly desire healthy whitetails, all of life killing chemicals must become a last resort. The truth is these chemicals disrupt physiological and biological systems and lead to disease. As many common herbicides and pesticides are banned or exposed for what they truly do to living organisms of all kinds, the future proof food plotter better learn how to farm without them!

Minimize the bad, maximize the good

Food plotting on the right side of history includes a better understanding of what whitetails lack in their supplemental diets. If we truly wish to turn around diseases like CWD, we must address the toxic and nutrient lacking agricultural and food plotting strategies we use. We are adding an excess of the bad and not enough of the beneficial! As a society, our agronomic practices have focused far too much on growing three main crops: corn, soybeans and wheat. While there are many reasons for this, food plotters will realize that whitetails have evolved to rely on hundreds of different plants for their nutritional and medicinal needs; not merely the big three.

Our nutrient density lacking human food supply has been the true underlying cause of most, if not all, of our diseases. The food plot industry once focused primarily on clover and one or two other small grains. Even today, with so many diverse cover crop species available, food plotters still ignore their enormous benefits to both soil health and whitetail health. The fact is, whitetails once had hundreds of plants to nourish and medicate their bodies. Just as the answer to addressing human disease and malnutrition will be through using our food as medicine, the future proof food plotter will use plants, and their powerful phytochemicals, to fight disease and optimize health and antler size.

Food plots for whitetails are written about extensively because they WORK! Anyone who has incorporated food plots into their whitetail management program knows that they are a game changer when it comes to maximizing deer utilization of a small piece of property and putting more antler décor on the wall (and delicious food in the freezer). Exactly what the future holds for food plotters excites me and if you want to remain on the cutting edge of food plotting, you better future proof your plots, and how you plant them, now!

In the August issue I’ll explain how many cutting edge food plotters are looking to regenerative wildlife agriculture to attract and nourish whitetails. We’ll look at some of the strategies that will dominate the play book of the future proof food plotter. I’ll also layout how you can get started in your own soil health/regenerative food plotting journey, no matter how large or small your food plot plan is, so you too will end up on the right side of food plotting history!

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We have extensive evidence that native Americans managed the land with intentional fire and vegetation management practices to enhance and attract wildlife populations. I’m sure it’s hard for you to imagine that they did all of this in the absence of how-to YouTube videos. In 1933, the father of game management, Aldo Leopold, noted that “The central thesis of game management is this: game can be restored by the creative use of the same tools which have heretofore destroyed it – axe, plow, cow, fire and gun.” Of course, we prefer to swap the gun out for the stick and string. Nowhere did he mention large diesel tractors with air-conditioned cabs and yield monitors or even ATVs with all of the implements. Let’s once again bring in the KISS principle and apply it to customizing our own desirable whitetail habitats. No shiny bags needed.

Edge, Diversity and Early Successional Habitats

As a student of wildlife management in college I instantly became a better bowhunter as I studied the attraction that habitat edges have on whitetails. Edges can be obvious (think field edges) or extremely subtle and only noticeable to the critters that rely on them (think woodlots that change species composition within the woodlot). The more complex you can make your property with edges of all kinds and in different successional stages, the more time whitetails will spend on your property. Bowhunter-manager made edges are the best kinds of signatures you can apply to your whitetail property. To do this, I would grab the axe or chainsaw and incorporate timber stand improvement project throughout your hunting property.

Whitetails prefer extremely diverse habitats, well dispersed throughout their home range. It’s often helpful to imagine all of the desirable habitat components of a whitetail property (forage, security/thermal cover and water) to be well balanced on a scale. Once you tip the property in favor of one or more of these components you are taking away from the other component(s). Depending on the existing structure of your property, this may or may not be a problem. As the land manager, your role will be to balance your habitat management projects accordingly. As your signature on the landscape fades over time, it will be necessary to readdress the results of succession and reapply your management activities in the required frequency and scale.

Sticking with Leopold’s theme of applying your signature to your whitetail woods with axe (chainsaws) and fire, keep in mind that just as putting your autograph on paper fades over time, so do your management actions. Woodlot management techniques such as hack and squirt, half-cutting or timber stand improvement will eventually lead to the successional replacement of woody brush, saplings and pole timber, thanks to the sun’s energy. As the vegetation naturally progresses from open grassy meadows to mature timber, the successional value to whitetails declines dramatically. Since whitetails thrive in early successional habitats, deer managers are constantly fighting vegetative succession by reapplying their signature.

Ideally, vegetative succession of fawning cover would be maintained at or near your waist line. Equally, your intentional decision not to take action by leaving a particular species standing scribes a similar signature on the landscape. Whitetail managers often accelerate succession by planting year-round, high quality food plots. This strategy offers plant diversity by way of including more forbs, legumes, cereal grains, and brassicas to the existing seed bank that often fills in when the soil of the earth is disturbed. A successful manager must never forget that habitats continually change and mature until a form of disturbance is applied by man or nature. Whitetails thrive after habitat disturbances, such as hurricanes, tornados, and timber cuts, so if you want to maintain high daylight observations from your stand, you better sharpen your saw!

An often-overlooked aspect of land management for whitetails is to maximize all usable space on a parcel by identifying sections of your property that whitetails avoid. Developing these areas into desirable habitat features where whitetails can seek food, thermal/escape cover, water or a winning combination of these key elements will have a huge positive impact on your hunting success. As I’ve noted in past columns, fawn recruitment drives a properties productivity. As a result, it oftentimes makes sense to develop these unused areas into fawning cover that leads to increased recruitment rates. In much of the whitetail’s range fawns are dropping (or will be soon) as you read this. One technique we use to evaluate your fawning cover is to conduct the basketball toss test. Take a basketball to your managed fawning habitat and toss it backwards over your head. If you can turn around and see it, you better grab a chainsaw and get more sunlight to the forest floor!

Aldo Leopold was the first to liken man-induced conservation activities such as habitat creation to “Writing his signature on the face of his land.” I would encourage you, as a deer hunter-manager, to observe which desirable habitat components your property lacks the most and build a better habitat for your whitetails by signing your own John Hancock to the land. Nature is extremely dynamic so your signature must be reapplied once it begins to fade. When it comes to the basics of managing your land for better whitetail hunting you must never forget my favorite spin on a popular political statement of the 1990’s: “It’s the habitat, stupid!” Now, keep it simple and sign at the dotted line.

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Our modern landscape, hyper-focused on yield or tonnage produced by planting merely a handful of forages & crops, has been stripped of plant variety and quality. In effort to grow many of these “monoculture” (think corn, soybeans & wheat) or low diversity mixes (think clover & chicory), the use of chemical herbicides has increased at an alarming rate. Make no mistake about it, the science clearly illustrates that the ‘cides”: herbicides, insecticides, fungicides cause biological dysfunction in whitetails and other wildlife (not to mention humans!). Unfortunately, most of this research never makes it to main stream media outlets.

The result of this mono-culture-focused agricultural system has led to an increase in the prevalence of chronic whitetail diseases that state agencies and deer biologists can’t seem to get a handle on. Researchers in Minnesota are finding that up to 94% of deer spleens tested are positive for toxic insecticides known as neonicotinoids (neonics). Once touted as a safe and revolutionary insecticide to protect row crops from insect damage by applying the insecticide directly to the seed, multiple studies are showing that neonics lead to organ damage, birth defects, lethargy and mortality in whitetails, pets and humans. If this isn’t enough to concern you, the most commonly used herbicide, Glyphosate, and its antibiotic activity on the gut microbiome, has been linked to depression, anxiety, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, autism, and yes, chronic wasting disease. With nearly 300 million pounds of Glyphosate applied in the U.S. alone, you should be alarmed. These two toxins are just the tip of the ice berg and you should expect to hear more about it in mainstream media outlets in the years to come.

Enough doom and gloom. For several years now, on my podcast, I’ve been talking about the regenerative agriculture and soil health movement as it relates to wildlife food plots and property management. While traveling the whitetail’s range to work with clients to improve their soil health by removing the toxins and adding more of the “the good”, I’ve been blown away by the results. How are these forward-thinking food plotters (and bowhunters) changing the way they grow nutrient dense whitetail food plots and putting healthier venison in the freezer?

The first objective of food plotting in Nature’s image is to maintain living plants in your food plots on a year-round basis. Farmers refer to this as cover cropping. Many food plotters only think about growing plants in the fall/winter during the hunting season, leaving the soil uncovered and soil life unfed, creating favorable conditions for soil erosion, carbon loss and undesirable plant growth (aka “weeds”). If you want to provide nutrient-dense forages in the fall you must maintain living roots in the ground and living plants on the soil surface year-round. Why? Plants, through photosynthesis, feed the beneficial microbes in the soil, via liquid sugars that leak from their roots, and these microbes offer the organic fertilizer to your food plots through various complex pathways. This symbiotic relationship has existed since the beginning of time! We’ve simply disrupted it and must get back to facilitating it. There are no voids in nature; therefore, if you don’t put a plant that you want there, Mother Nature will do it for you and you may not like what she grows (many times the deer don’t mind!).

If you ever observe the plants growing in a field that has not been sprayed with herbicides, you will notice various grasses, legumes and forbs; a diverse plantscapes. This is because the soils thrive on diversity from all of the major plant functional groups. Your food plots are seeking the same level of diversity and every time you spray a herbicide, you disrupt this desired balance and nature works to repair your mismanagement: an expensive never-ending battle. Successful regenerative wildlife food plotters who I work with maintain grasses, legumes, brassicas and forbs in their food plots because they know that improved soil health equates to improved whitetail health!

No till planting has gained in popularity in recent years because soil health advocates realize that tillage of all kinds disrupts the biology in the system (imagine a plow going through your house!), resulting in an unnatural, nutrient deprived system that relies heavily on spoon fed synthetic herbicides and pesticides. While the use of a no-till drill makes the job much simpler and results in planting precision, many food plotters have done very well without a drill by broadcasting their fall food plots into a standing warm season crop just ahead of a rain. While these plots may result in “ugly plots” the deer most definitely approve! Regenerative food plotting requires you to work WITH nature and sometimes that means using your brain and changing the way you look at things.

One of the greatest tools for a regenerative food plotter is a roller crimper or similar implement. The roller crimper allows the food plotter to crimp-terminate certain (not all) plants ahead of planting the next crop. Perhaps the greatest benefit is rolling down massive amounts of plant residue that armors the soil, reduces moisture loss when its needed most, reduces wind and water erosion of the soil and builds soil organic matter over time as that plant residue decomposes. I have seen growers use lawn rollers, tractor buckets, ATV’s and even a Honda Civic to roll down a previous crop! Roller crimpers allow a regenerative food plotter to eliminate the use of toxic herbicides while detoxing the soil.

Full disclaimer: Anything worth doing requires hard work, determination and patience. I don’t want to lead anyone to believe that regen food plotting is easy. In fact, after 150 years of chemical agriculture, the transition can be painful and mentally taxing. However, the alternative of venison laced with toxins and whitetails that continue to experience increased chronic illness is will not be inexpensive or easy to deal with. I’m here to tell you that soil health and regenerative food plotting works anywhere the sun shines and the rain falls.

Herbivores possess the ability to self-medicate and manage parasite loads by consuming diverse plants and plant parts rich in phytochemicals. Unfortunately, we’re not making these options available. After two decades of private wildlife consulting, I have never been as excited about an advancement as I am about regenerative wildlife agriculture. If you don’t want to be left behind, NOW is the time to learn more about regenerative wildlife agriculture!

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Modern food plotting began in the 1930’s, coinciding with restocking efforts of white-tailed deer and turkeys, when state game managers planted wildlife openings on public hunting tracts in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. These openings were primarily dominated by monoculture stands of clover. One could argue, from a herbivore’s perspective, that the commercial side of food plotting really hasn’t evolved much since these early trials of low species diversity.

Food plots are extremely popular amongst sportsmen. The commercialization of food plot products has resulted in a narrowly focused race for “improved” varieties while sacrificing plant species diversity and nutrient density. The shift from high species diversity to large scale monocultures and low diversity food plot systems has resulted in plant landscapes that lack a broad selection of primary and secondary compounds. Like modern agriculture, modern food plotting relies too heavily on soil disturbance (including tillage), heavy herbicide and synthetic fertilizer use, and monoculture cropping systems with simple rotations. Deer and other wildlife thrive on diversity, yet we’ve eliminated it from their habitats.

Many food plot products produced in bulk consist of fewer than 7 different species/plant types and are developed in the absence of a calculated species selection approach. Products on the shelves of box stores fail to incorporate major complementary plant types and synergistic species combinations. The answer lies in planting diverse cocktail mixes in well-thought-out blends that seek species complementariness and offer maximum soil and animal health. This diversity of plant compounds, when available, offers wildlife a complex nutritional profile with nutritive, antioxidant and medicinal values. Biochemically diverse foodscapes are necessary in order for wildlife to reproduce and fend off disease, parasites and predation.

Diverse cocktails should include the right species and proportions of legumes, grasses, forbs, brassicas and other broadleaf plants that tighten in-field nutrient cycles and allow “food plotters” to rely less on the heavy use of synthetic fertilizers.

The momentous paradigm shift in recent years surrounding soil health, food production, and agriculture has offered a promising outlook for all wildlife species; from honey bees to white-tailed deer. All terrestrial and aquatic wild life, from sub-aquatic micro-organisms to large, free-range herbivores, proliferate in the wake of farming in nature’s image.

Herbivores possess the ability to self-medicate and manage parasite loads by consuming diverse plants and plant parts rich in phytochemicals. Unfortunately, we’re not making these options available. Monoculture systems that lack species diversity are void of medicinal and anti-parasitic benefits, resulting in low productivity and even disease. Novel plants that are sold as “cover crops” for agricultural systems offer the diversity needed in wildlife food plots. For optimal nutrient utilization in growth and reproduction, deer demand a broad selection of plants that are readily available. Cover crops and native plants clearly offer beneficial synergies that allow them to complement one another.

When free range animals are presented with diverse cocktail blends to complement native plants, they appear to possess the ability to optimize their dietswith nutritional wisdom. This foraging option affords deer the opportunity to balance potential toxicities in their diets, ultimately leading to higher reproductive rates, larger antlers at maturity and healthier populations, overall.

After two decades of private wildlife consulting, I have never been as excited about an advancement as I am about regenerative wildlife agriculture (RWA). Diverse plantscapes resulting from the establishment of cocktail blends no longer force animals to disperse in search of needed concentrations of vitamins, minerals, energy, and protein as well as primary and secondary plant compounds. As I write this in February of 2017, I predict (and hope) that regenerative food plotting practices that focus on soil health and farming in Nature’s image become the norm!

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