Why you should strip your food plots

The age old question about what food plot to put in your property is a fun discussion! It’s always something to talk about and people have different experiences.  It’s what makes Kentucky whitetail hunts challenging and not a shopping expedition. 

We all agree you should invest in lime.  It’s a cheap way to improve the plants ability to utilize the available nutrients out of the soil.  We all agree to diversifying the property to create a year-round reason for the Kentucky deer to visit your property regularly and consider it their home range.  It's also important to create food plots suitable for Kentucky turkey hunting as well.  These plots often compliment each other and the deer do get used to the Kentucky turkey keen eye site that help warn them of predators.  We also agree that every hunter and every property has it’s own unique situation and budget.  My solution for newer game managers and hunters would be to strip your foot plots.  By stripping, we mean to plan a few 30 foot sections of this and a few 30 foot sections of that, etc.  This is done for 2 reasons:

As your hunting and thinking about what you planted and why, you can see for yourself what the deer go to first and how long they are spending in each particular food plot.  It’s both a hands-on research situation and it probably allow you to make each deer hunt sitting more enjoyable and each Kentucky turkey hunt more successful.

 Creating year-round food is ideal.  The longer you can introduce new incoming plantlife during fresh growth stages, the more likely you will have deer visiting your property.

 Technically I could argue a 3rd reason.  The 3rd reason would be because you will probably end up overseeding your food plot.  Many people talk about overseeding, but that is really only relative if you do everything else perfect.  I mean to perfection.   All the mistakes you will make, the weather not being perfect, etc. will make proper seeding rates a mute point.  Also, this “over-seeding” language tends to come from farmers and manufactures of food plot product.  They need to maximize everything for production and for sales.  Putting a “Will plant 2 acres” on the side of their bag is more important when their competitor is selling the same seed, but it only plants 1 acre.  What do we care?  We aren’t in this for the money and we’re not farmers.  Over-seed is some good advice!  It will make up for the mistakes you often can’t help.