Food Plots for Deer and Turkey: Ask Me Anything with Grant Woods and Keith Berns

0:00 All right. Well, thank you, Sophie, and thanks everybody for joining us, Grant. Great to see you again. It's always fun to be able to visit with you and to answer people's questions. It's a great opportunity for folks to just ask whatever question that they have, whether it's about managing habitat, food plots, the agronomy part of it, the physical part of getting it planted, getting it terminated, things like that.

0:26 So we're looking forward to having a good lively conversation here. We would encourage folks to go ahead and get your questions put in that Q&A box and we'll get going here. Grant, you were talking just a little bit here and you had sent that picture of the beautiful turkey that you were able to snag this morning. You want to talk just a little bit about how things are looking there at the proving grounds with the food plots?

0:56 Yeah, man. We're great. We're in that sweet spot. Not getting too much rain, but getting rain half inch a week or something, which doesn't happen often, it seems. So things are green. Matter of fact, the Tom I harvested this morning, I always checked the crop and had a fair amount of clover in there. It had come from one food plot that Keith thought was especially rocky when he was here. I can't tell the difference. They're all pretty rocky and was going up a ridge toward a larger food plot where a lot of turkeys tend to gather mid-morning, feed and chase each other around. So a little strategy on the placement of those plots. And that clover in that fall release, of course, is still shining on great right now. And turkeys love that clover.

1:41 Yep. It's if you catch a little bit of rain, things really perk up. We've gotten just the little bit here a few weeks ago. Hope there's a little bit in the forecast for later this week. So sure hoping so. I know it's dry across a lot of areas and I'm sure there's going to be some questions in here about drought and drought tolerance of some of these things. So we'll definitely be able to answer those. So let's just jump right in here. Tyler is asking he says, 'Hey, thanks for doing this again. We did this a few weeks ago and we had so many questions we didn't even get to. We thought, well, we better do it again because we don't want to leave some of these unanswered.' So he's saying he's returning some unplanted ground to food plots in southeast Kansas poor soils. Is he going to be better off to plant warm season soil builder or super summer release to improve soil for fall plantings and provide nutrition and forage for deer this summer? Also, when is the best time to fertilize new unplanted ground?

2:41 Yeah, you know, Keith, I don't think there's a wrong answer there, but if it's leaning more towards the wildlife side, I would go with the super summer release. Those species in there certainly are going to build the soil, do a lot of good things, feed microbes, but they're more oriented also to providing quality forage for critters than the soil builder.

3:04 Yeah. And you know one of the things that you'll get with the warm season soil builder, if you use our cattle builder mixes, those grazing mixes, you're going to get sorghum sudan in there that might get 8 feet tall, which if you're trying to just add carbon to your soil, that's going to be great, but if you want to see any wildlife you may not be very happy with that. So with the food plot ones, we keep that short milo in there and we don't have those big tall sorghum sudans. So that would be one difference, too. And then, you know, I've learned a lot hanging out with Grant and I know what these things will do for cattle palatability, but it's different with deer. And Grant, maybe just talk real briefly about how deer and cattle kind of differ in their preferences and what they like to consume.

3:55 Yeah, they're both ruminants or have one stomach with four chambers in it. But of course, cow gets much much larger. Think a thousand pounds versus big deer 200 lbs, give or take round numbers there. So that cow rumen is so much larger and hosts literally trillions and trillions more microbes. They can break down rougher forage and grass like big sorghums or whatever, has a substance called lignin in the cell walls, a little tougher, and deer just can't break that down. So they're both ruminants but they don't have all the same bacteria in their gut and the bacteria in a deer's gut, especially during the growing season, summer, are more oriented towards breaking down leaves like a forb. So soybeans are a forb, buckwheat's a forb. These things are going to be more palatable and more digestible to deer than some of the big grasses in the soil builder or grasses you see in general.

4:54 Yeah. And even that milo we have in there, they don't really eat the plant, but they'll eat that grain head later on, which is actually kind of nice because otherwise they'd wipe out everything. And then the

5:05 Weeds, which weeds are already struggling. I know we've got we'll have some questions about weeds. You know, having something else growing there is a great competitor to weeds. So that's why we like that Milo. So speaking of trying to control things, Dale is asking, 'What would you recommend when spraying to terminate saplings?' And I'm not sure what kind of saplings, but obviously some kind of young tree. How do you what's the best way to control those?

5:33 Dale, I don't know if the saplings are in your food plot. That could be, you know, you just cleared some timber and got a food plot and the root sprouts are coming back up. Glyphosate, generic Roundup will control some trees. But if it's got a big root system, again, you cleared a bunch of big oaks out and there's roots down in there somewhere. You probably have to go to something more designed to control those hardwood species. That might be a Mazziper, any of the Mazziper based chemistry or something called Tordon.

6:03 You would want to go to a more forestry oriented herbicide. If you're just talking 6 inch seedlings where a squirrel dug a hole and put an acorn or a maple, you know, seed or something like that. Yeah. Roundup probably take care of those young seedlings.

6:18 Yeah. And then I would recommend and again assuming you don't have, you know, this like proliferated across a huge area. Just spot spray those things because Tordon and some of those can have really long residuals and they'll really really ding your broad leaves that we, you know, those forbs that Grant talked about. You won't get many forbs growing if you spray Tordon across everything. So just try to spot spray as needed and not cover the whole thing.

6:47 So Tim is asking, he's from the Piedmont, North Carolina. He's got some green cover seed waiting to put in the drill and get going, but he knows he's heard you say, Grant, you know, to wait for a rain to come before you should seed. So he's asking about advice about how long should you wait before you put that seed in the ground and then just start praying for rain.

7:12 Yeah. Hey, man, I used to live over at Abbeville, South Carolina. Know Piedmont really well. Those hard place soils if you're dry now and a lot of my friends in South Carolina are not planting because it is dry. I would wait you know putting a living seed in the ground. It gets warm and maybe just enough moisture to germinate but there's not much moisture that seedling could die. So I would wait and plant before rain if you know if you see a good rain coming. I'm calling a good rain a half inch inch depend on how dry you are. And if you wait till right after rain on those clays, boy, it can be slick and muddy and that drill can actually cause compaction and make it really hard for those seedling roots to get in there and do much. So, in that case, I would prefer to drill right before rain. And if there's not moisture, your plants aren't going to grow. So, there's, you know, you can't speed that clock up. You're just at the mercy of the weather.

8:09 Yeah. And and you know whether you're farming huge amounts of acres or these small food plots, one of the hardest things to do is to wait to wait. But sometimes that's one of the most important things. You know, Grant, as far as what farmers would do, most farmers, there are times when you would plant into really dry soils and just wait for moisture to come. But that's generally in the fall.

8:36 Yes. When that dry period is through the winter because that plant's not really going to be active anyway because that soil is really cool. Things have slowed down and so it would not be uncommon for people to plant their wheat or their rye or you know in this case you could plant your fall release or something into dry soil if it got pretty late. Now I would wait for the tail end of kind of my ideal planting window before I did that. But if I was going to plant into dry and they you know they call it dusting it in. I would not do that in the spring. That would be kind of a fall type situation.

9:14 Um let's see. Shane is asking. He says he's used fall release blend on his food plots for a couple years now. Do you have a suggestion for crop rotation of that crop or do you need to rotate with that? And he is from up in Maine.

9:33 Shane, it you know, the diversity of our blends kind of is a bit of a rotation. If you're planting a monoculture, all alfalfa or, you know, all beans or whatever, a rotation can be very important to break up the pest that attack those crops and many other biological reasons. When you're planting a blend, that need to rotate is not very great. You think about a great prairie that has way more species in it than our blends. There's no rotation, right? It's there's places that's been on that prairie cycle for a long time. So, I have planted some form of fall release. Keith and I are always experimenting and let's add a little bit of this and take a little bit of that.

10:13 I'm getting a little bit more rotation than some people, but I've basically been on a fall release blend since I've known Keith a bunch of years and no soil issues whatsoever.

10:25 You can almost think of it as it's a rotation in a bag because of all that diversity. And the other thing is too, and anybody who's done this for very many years will be able to agree with this. I think it's going to look different every year. Same mix planted. You can plant at the same time every year and it's going to look different each year because your soil's different. Your weather conditions are different. There's just so many different environmental factors that sometimes the brassicas really express themselves. Sometimes the legumes do. Sometimes that grass just jumps out and takes off.

10:59 We see that with all these cover crops that we're selling to farmers all across the country and we don't know exactly why, but we know that it has to do with just different environmental conditions. And it could just be that your biology is going to be different this year than it was last year. And the biology really calls the shots on a lot of this. So Shane, as long as you're continuing to plant these diverse blends like this, I wouldn't worry about rotating either, because you're getting all the functional groups out there.

11:35 Just one other comment here. Shane mentions that he's a paraplegic hunter and sportsman. So Shane, thank you for overcoming that and being out there hunting and enjoying the outdoors. That's great.

11:50 Keith is in central Alabama. He's trying to build organic matter, which we're all trying to do. And he wants to, he's on a gas right-of-way, so probably not really great ground. So that gas right-of-way is crossing his property. Sandy subsoil. He's planted it for a couple years now. He's got fall release still standing, and he wants to broadcast summer release soon. He's thinking about adding sorghum sudan grass to it this year. Is that a good plan to build organic matter?

12:18 I think Keith addressed that a little earlier. That sorghum sudan can get pretty tall. You probably won't see a lot of critters out there just visually, right, because you can't see through like looking through a big corn field or something. But that sorghum sudan can have a big root system and certainly add a lot of organic matter. It wouldn't be my choice. I think there are better options. Milo being one, the shorter grain sorghums.

12:42 One of the best ways to build organic matter is that diversity of blend we're talking about because Keith says biology, that's all the microbes in the soil that are working with the plant literally going in and out of plant to bring nutrients to the plant and getting carbon from the plant. So I think a diverse blend in that area and one caution I have, a really good friend in quote unquote central Alabama, pretty sandy soil. He writes me almost every, can I plant today? Can I plant today? kind of going back, guys, if you're dry and you're looking west and there's no rain on the radar, please don't plant because those seeds are living organisms and it's getting more or less warmer each week and that heat can really stress those seeds in the soil.

13:30 I'll weigh in on this one a little bit. If your main goal is to just produce as much biomass and carbon as you can, sorghum sudan's not a bad choice, but you just know that whenever you choose something, you're kind of choosing against something else. So you're kind of choosing against being able to see the deer and they may not even come in there quite as much if this stuff is eight feet tall. But the other thing, if you're throwing it in with some of the summer release, which certainly would be okay, I would not do very much. I would limit that to two or three pounds, partly because there's already milo in there, which is a form of sorghum. But also, if you get that stuff too thick, it will shade out your other plants, and then you'll start the sorghum sudan will just take over. And you'll get a lot of biomass, but you won't get that biological diversity in the soil like you know you're really wanting to.

14:27 Like with most things, Grant, even good things when you overuse them, they're not good. So all things in moderation is a pretty good thing to live by.

14:39 Dan is saying on his northern Missouri farm, he's planting plots for the first time this spring. Congratulations, Dan. Three weeks ago, he drilled in some oats and rye just to get them green for turkey season. Will he need to kill this temporary cover prior to drilling the summer release?

14:58 You know, Dan, you may need to. Those oats and rye are going to mature quicker because of the time of year.

15:06 Year you planted them. I'm not sure they're going to mature in time to get your summer crop where you want it. Do you agree with that, Keith?

15:14 Yeah, we get this question a lot with people that have a cool season cereal crop and you can graze it into the ground. I mean, you can just throw a whole bunch of cattle out there. Your deer can just be hammering that plot and just pound it right into the ground and you think, 'All right, now I'm going to get my summer crop out there and we're going to be good to go.' But especially that cereal rye, it's got such a good root system. It's such a survivor.

15:44 It could work. It could work, but my guess is that stuff would come back and it's not going to completely prevent your summer stuff from growing, but it's going to slow it down because when it comes to limited resources, the plant that has the deepest root system or the most established root system is always going to win. And you know that rye and that oats is going to have a bigger root system than these new seedlings that you're just planting and trying to get going.

16:16 My suggestion would be to do something to terminate it whether it's just a real light tillage, a little bit of herbicide. Certainly isn't going to get big enough to roller crimp, you know, planted that late. So that's not going to be an option really. I have had people plant their summer mix and then, you know, as that cool season grows back, they can go out there and you can mow it a time or two. Keep your mower high enough to where you're not clipping that new summer growth. That could potentially work, but you might have to mow it a couple times. And boy, you'll have to be timely because if you miss that window by a day or two, it's going to hurt that summer crop. So it's possible, but it's going to be difficult.

17:04 And I don't know, I'm sorry, Keith. I don't know if Cobe can. We just released a little video last fall addressing this. We established a yard at our new house with fescue. I'm in the Ozarks, you know. I just I'm not a yard guy. I just want something kind of green out there that keeps the rocks from showing. And cereal rye is our nurse crop or cover crop. Well, this spring I have mowed that Sarai because it's shading out the fescue three times. I've mowed it short with the riding lawnmower three times and I'm going to need to mow it again later this week. So be careful with that because still rye, man, I call it the work truck of food plot crops, man. It just takes a lick and keeps on going.

17:48 Yeah. Yeah, it does. Which is great when you want it to do that. But if you don't want it to do that, it makes it difficult. So it could be done, but you'd have to really be careful about that. Okay, going back to North Carolina again, Caleb, Eastern North Carolina, they're going through a moderate severe drought as many of us are. Chance of rain coming the following week. Would you recommend that we drill before the rain or wait until a little moisture is in the ground? He does have some moisture in the ground due to being in the third cycle of the release process. So he's got pretty good soils. He's holding some moisture there, but again, same question. How soon can we go?

18:34 I have a good friend in Eastern North Carolina named Caleb. If this is you, hey man, thanks for reaching out. Timing seems about right when he started the release process and congratulations on doing that. There's all these trade-offs. I'm going to default to Keith. A little moisture. How much moisture?

18:52 Man, there's a lot of variables here. How much is it going to rain? Is it going to rain a quarter inch? I'd be a little scared if you're kind of dry. Is it going to rain a half inch or more? Yeah, I'd probably go for it. Also, look at your soil temperature. Something we haven't talked about tonight. These warm season seeds, man, they do best when that soil is 60 degrees at about two inches deep at 9:00 a.m. So they get warm, moist, and just blow out of ground. You don't want them sitting there kind of cold. I don't think I'm going to wake up and go. So make sure that soil temperature is appropriate. And if you got a half inch or more rain coming and maybe more rain in the future, you know, the drought index doesn't show there's no rain in three months coming your way, you're probably good to go.

19:37 All right, let's drop down to South Carolina. Chris is asking and this is a great question because it kind of you know what Caleb was talking about there. He's in his third cycle there, but Chris is just saying, 'Hey, once you start the release process, how long does it take to start seeing improvements? What did you see?' And you've had two shots at it now, Grant, because you know, you had stuff really cooking and then you kind of started over.

20:05 You love a challenge and so I know that's been fun for you. So you've had a couple of shots to look at this. How soon do you start seeing improvements and what are kind of the first improvements that you see?

20:16 Yeah. So if your crops are growing, deer are not browsing them off like a pool table every year. You know, you're getting some growth, roots are developing, you've got a diverse blend out there. I've seen people I've had a lot of people tell me, 'I think I see a smell a little difference. The first year it's not going to be great. Year two, definitely a difference. Year three, you're going, 'Oh, man. This really works, man. This baby's going.' You're not there yet. I don't think any of us are there yet. But by year three, you should be seeing pretty significant changes. Maybe a difference in the color of the soil and you pull up a big root ball or use a shovel or the texture dirt should be sticking to the plant roots, excuse me, by year three. You're not shaking it off real easy. Probably starting to see more earthworms by year three. Keith, you add on to that.

21:07 Yeah, I you know, you will see some things right away and I think the biggest one is erosion prevention because if you keep that soil covered, you're going to protect it. You're going to keep it from washing away. If you're in areas like we are here on the planes, you'll keep it from blowing away. And that's really important because you can't go to all this work of building up your soils just to have it wash away if you get, you know, a big golly washer. So really that happens immediately. Now it keeps getting better. Your infiltration rates will start getting better right away, but again it's it's cumulative. It's compounding and cascading benefits for all of these things. And a lot of it is biologically driven. So, you know, that soil microbiome and it has to kind of build populations up in order to get to the level where it can start replacing a lot of the synthetic inputs that maybe you've used in the past or, you know, maybe you're still using it. It takes a little while to kind of get weaned off that system.

22:14 And this is not just for food plots, you know, where you know, the year one, year two, year three thing, you see it. I was in California last year. We have a lot of customers in California that are doing cover crops in between rows of almond trees, pistachios, grape vineyards, and you know, so permanent crops, they have these alleyways and it was amazing and I saw this in multiple places, you know, where they had because sometimes they just start with a little bit, you know, because, you know, farmers are skeptical. So they start with a little patch and then they kind of start with you know some more and then the you know by the third year they're kind of going more. Well I was at this one particular orchard and it was all kind of in the same block and they said okay well right over there on the edge that's where we started. We just did a few rows that first year because we weren't sure and it looked amazing because now it was the third year for that and then you know this half of the field we did all of this. This is the second year for it and it definitely looked better and then the place where we're standing the other half of the field they said this is the first year that we've done it here and it looked okay wasn't great it looked okay but they said this is what those other ones looked like the first year and so don't don't expect that you're going to have what you see you know in Grant's videos year one because he didn't have that in year one either and so it it is a process. That's why I love the name release process because it has to, you know, have multiple things happen and it keeps getting better.

23:54 Yeah. And for all the people listening, if you got a half acre food plot in the middle of 5,000 acres of pine trees, your process going to be pretty slow again because the deer consuming, you know, and when you're when the plant only gets to a quarter of its height of its normal height, then the root system's not as big. You know, it's not feeding itself and the process is going to be slow. You want, that's why we tell Keith and I tell everyone, please use a utilization cage in every plot. Let's get that in there tonight. Every plot, so you can see, well, my plants grew this tall where the deer aren't browsing and only this tall where they are browsing.

24:32 Yeah. So important. One of the easiest, cheapest things that you can do. And it it tells you a lot. Tells you a lot. I know last time, Grant, you talked just a little bit about, you know, how big this should be, what some of the materials you can build them out of. There's no, it's nothing fancy. You can just get some what, some chicken wire.

24:51 Yeah, we don't, we like stuff that's not too heavily coated, galvanized, because that leeches out zinc and can actually make the plants inside the cage smaller than the plants outside. Zinc toxicity. But, we like something three or four feet in circumference. So 10 12 feet of a webbed wire that a deer can't get

25:09 Their head in. And we like it that size because an adult deer will have a tongue 10, 11 inches long. So if you're 18 inches around like a tomato cage or that, they're hungry, they're going all the way around there and pull those plants out and eat them. So three or four feet, take it down with a post or something solid because again if they're hungry, they're headbutt that thing out of the way to get to the food. So just something like wire, hog wire, you know, concrete frame wire, whatever it is.

25:38 All right. We're going to go to Bobby. Bobby said he drilled some summer release before the rain last week. So good job, Bobby, for listening and waiting for the rain. Sprayed glyphosate and he flattened the fall release. So he's got that knocked down. Mornings have been 38 degrees with rain expected next Saturday. Should I be okay since the seeds haven't germinated yet on or under the last crop?

26:02 I'm assuming he's talking about from the cold weather. I'll jump in on this one first. Yeah, you know, if those things haven't sprouted, even if they had sprouted, if it's not freezing, you're going to be okay. Now they're going to be really slow. And I would suspect that your warm season things, you know, like the cow peas, the sorghum, you know, you're really going to need 60 degree soil temperatures to see those pop. You'll see the buckwheat come out of the ground at 45. Buckwheat's a fast goer. Sunflowers will get up and going much more quickly. The soybeans will germinate in colder soils than what the cow peas and the lab lab will. So you'll see some things start coming, but yeah, you're not really going to see much of the sorghum or your cow peas, the lab lab, until you hit 60 degrees. And I don't know, the weather is so bipolar this year. It seems like you might be 60 degrees one day and 40 degrees the next. It's just, and that's why you should really take your soil temperatures a couple inches deep because that doesn't change nearly as fast. And I know Grant, that's kind of what you recommend, right?

27:11 Yeah. Soil temperature is a big thing for me. Soil temperature is kind of my first checkpoint. I got to get there stable and then moisture. If you have a bunch of moisture but it's cold, it's not good. So soil temperature is my first, okay, I've hit that checkpoint and then moisture.

27:32 Yeah. And we've certainly had summers, you know, like that where soil temperature was good, we planted, and then you just it just sets in and it gets cold for a couple of weeks. It's probably not going to kill things, but it's just it's really going to slow things down. And sometimes that creates a situation where some of the weeds don't slow down because they do better in the cool weather and that's when they can kind of get ahead of you and that's when things become more of a problem when they have those temperature swings like that.

28:05 Let's see. Tom is asking a herbicide question here. He said, 'What's the expected shelf life of a glyphosate and water 50/50 mix?' And also Dr. Hopper's Arsenal mixture. What's your opinion on planting red oyster dogwood for browse in damper areas around field edges and fence rows? And he is from Illinois.

28:30 I'll jump on Craig's recipe and you can address the glyphosate issue. So arsenal, you know, stored well. That's Garlon 3A and Arsenal and water for those that don't know Craig's recipe, Dr. Harper. For those of you that don't know, Dr. Harper and I both went to Clemson, our same professor. I graduated one year quicker than Craig. So we've been working together for decades, folks. You know, I think Arsenal says two years or so, two or three years. I wouldn't find it on sale and buy 10 years worth. I would try to roll through it every year or two. And don't store it out in your container where it freezes and gets 150 degrees, you know? Store it in a normal temperature place if you can. Keith, you can talk about the life. Red oyster dogwood, I'm if you've got moist places with nothing else working, that's fine. And we talked about this in the past. I don't want my deer eating woody browse, man. I don't want them eating twigs. I want them eating something better. But if you've got areas where that's the most productive thing you can do, that's a great option. I would not take up great soil with that planting.

29:41 Yeah. Good question. You know, the glyphosate and water mix, I mean, glyphosate will store in a jug for I don't know, whatever the label says, but probably a couple years, you know, like Arsenal and likely longer than that if stored under the right conditions. If it's watered down, I don't know that that would really affect the efficacy of it a lot. But with that being said, don't mix up more than what you're going to need, you know, for the very near future. Now, if you're out spraying, you get rained out, and you come back, you know, four days, five days later, that's not a problem.

30:20 Don't mix up the blend that you're going to use for the entire year. Kind of mix as you go. That's just good practice regardless of what you're doing there.

30:34 All right, let's see. Colobby is asking, says James from YouTube is going to be mixing chufa for turkey in with the food plot. Will that be a benefit or a waste of time?

30:48 Is it chufa or chuffa? It's chufa. We hunters call it chufa anyway.

30:56 I'm not a huge fan of chufa. It's of course it makes a nutlet and boy done right turkeys can really go for it. But other critters don't eat the vegetation, right? It's not a turkey deer plot. It's a turkey plot that takes a long time and weed control and it's kind of expensive seed. When turkeys, like the one I harvested this morning, love clover, man. If you've got fall release or something else and you've got those annual clovers are going strong right now, they're planted last fall, turkeys are going to be going there and many other critters are going there, too. And you're getting way more improvement to the soil. Chufa almost always requires a tillage or discing practice which always hurts soil health, and sometimes it's only tool in the bag, whatever, but we don't want to till any more than we have to. Chufa necessitates that. So if you're in really sandy soil down south and chufa is a good fit and you just love turkey hunting, you're willing to sacrifice everything else and yeah, chufa is a good fit for you. If you're like a lot of us, a deer turkey guy kind of working towards improving soil health, there's probably better options for you that turkeys are still going to come to.

32:06 Is that an annual or a perennial plant? Annual, almost a holdover annual.

32:15 Here's a fun one. Sean from up in Minnesota is asking, 'What are your recommendations for bear food plots in northern Minnesota?' John, I'm certainly not a bear biologist, but I thought it was a trash can full of donuts and, you know, used restaurant grease or something like that. Bears love carbohydrates. So a standing corn crop, if you can get it to bear season, you have to use electric fence. A lot of people up north do that. They love clovers. Bears will get in alfalfa and clovers. And some people actually, Keith, apply for crop damage permits because of bears. And I have some really good friends if you're listening. Hey, in New York, great family up there. We've done some ministry work with them. And they their family grows, you know, smaller 10, 20 acre patches of corn in the valleys in the Catskill Mountains in New York. And bears are a huge issue for a commercial crop. And bears are a huge issue. They just get in there in the wallow and roll and just kind of lay down and pull it to them like I do ice cream. I mean, man, they can really destroy a crop. So corn, if you can grow corn, will certainly attract bears.

33:27 Yeah. I remember a few years ago, one of our seed partners up in Montana, they both grow seed and sell seed in partnership with us. Mark shot the state record biggest black bear ever shot in Montana. And he shot it when he got done harvesting this corn field because he saw it in there. You know how you're harvesting it just kind of moves over. It kind of moves over. Well, when he finally got the field finished, it ran up this tree and it was Yeah, it was a cornfed bear. And so it had just been living out there and yeah, they can do a lot of damage.

34:08 A lot of damage. We don't have to worry about that in Nebraska. We have every place has their problems. Bears are not one of ours.

34:20 Okay, Shane is saying that okay, Chris from Massachusetts. What do you think about pokeweed? And these are coming from the YouTube channel. So welcome everybody who is watching this live on the YouTube channel and we're pushing these back through. Thank you, Colobby, for doing that. What do you think about pokeweed? I had the biggest deer in my farm absolutely hammer the young pokeweed last year in a recent clearcut. Is it worth letting it grow out again?

34:51 Yeah, pokeweed at a certain growth stage deer love and it's full of nutrients. Pokeweed scientific name is phytolacca. If you notice at the right time you break off stem, you know some white stuff will come out. That's the phytolacca. So yeah at my place too right now pokeweed, you know where we've burned or disturbed it somehow, it's a foot, foot and a half tall and deer aren't really touching it. But here in a few weeks, they will munch it down and remove all the leaves. And there's a time when that plant is transferring the nutrients deer seek at that time of year, which is true for a lot of plants. You know, sometimes people keep plants see something in our

40:33 Once your nighttime temperatures stop dropping down into the 50s, warm season stuff is not going to grow a lot. Versus if you have rye and oats and you're in May and you didn't kill it, that stuff is loving that warm weather. It doesn't like the hot weather, but anything up to 85 degrees, it'll take that all day long and it will really grow fast and aggressive. So you've got things working the opposite way in the spring, but in the fall you've got things working to your advantage with the weather. That's where you can plant one crop into a standing crop without spraying it, without tilling it, without even crimping it, but you would want to knock some of it down.

41:22 Matt is saying he sprayed fescue fields after the last meeting. They're brown. He's going to disc it and spray it again for any new germination and hopefully plant summer release with future rain events and warmer soil temperatures. So sounds like he's trying to get rid of fescue, which is not an easy thing to do. Fescue is a very tough plant and the endophyte in that fescue makes it really tough, but it's not really a very palatable plant. If you've got it brown, could you use prescribed fire instead of discing to ease that duff off? The viable fescue seeds will germinate. A lot of people spray, burn, and spray again or plant around the prey crop, and have a really high success rate at controlling fescue. Fire is not an answer for everything, folks. But in this terminating fescue case, sometimes it's a good tool to have in your tool bag.

42:31 Dan is asking about minimum soil temperature. I'm assuming maybe he's talking about the summer mixes, summer release. What do you shoot for when you're looking at soil temperature? I really like to hold for 60 degrees at two inches deep at 9:00 am. 9 a.m. is kind of the coldest time of day for soil down there. There are a lot of websites that show this. You don't have to out there probing your soil in the soil every day. Some people go down to 55 or even 50. I like 60 degrees because we can get in a weed issue quickly if we're not careful. So I want my summer crop to blow out of the ground. I want the conditions right for it to be aggressive and out-compete weeds. So I like it at 60 degrees and not a cold front coming.

43:17 If your mix was all corn or all beans or all sunflowers or all buckwheat, you'd be okay at 50 or 55. But there's the milo, there's the cow peas, there's the lab, there's a lot of other things in there. Grant's right. If you've got to give your food plot every advantage that you can to get ahead of the weeds because it's pretty good at holding back weeds if it can get off to a head start. If the weeds get out ahead of it, you're going to be fighting them the whole season. That's one way to do that—wait for warmer temperatures.

43:57 Matt's got a good question. He says, 'Are there any green cover seed hubs in the Tennessee, Georgia, or Alabama area?' Well, Matt, the answer is no. This is a great question and our model has never been a traditional dealer, traditional retail type model because of what we do with having such diverse blends. What we're doing for food plots is exactly what we're doing with hundreds of thousands of acres for farmers and ranchers all across the country. We sell to all 50 states, but we design these custom blends and that's very difficult to do in lots of locations because you've got to carry huge amounts of inventory. You've got to have 55 people working for us and all these forklifts, and it's a very large capital expense to be able to do it. Could we ship a whole bunch of seed out and have it at a hub for people to come pick it up? Yes. But the problem there becomes what happens to the seed that doesn't sell? Are they taking care of it? Who's going to take the returns? So the short answer is no, we don't have that. We have a location here in Nebraska. We have one in southeast Kansas. We ship all over the country. Shipping can be pretty brutal, but what we told people last time and I'll tell people next time too is that the best way to combat that is to get enough seed to where we can ship it on a pallet and not have to ship it in boxes. That might mean you need to order your summer and your fall seed at the same time. It might mean trying to find some buddies and getting together with them.

45:54 Pounds of seed, well now you're up to 500 or you find a few more friends and pretty soon you got, you know, a 1,000 or 1,500 on a pallet. When you can do that, the freight per pound goes way way down and it becomes, you know, pretty affordable. But yes, if we're just having to ship a 50 lb bag here and there, it can get pretty brutal.

46:19 Okay, we got another YouTube question. YouTube listener from Pennsylvania here. He says, 'What is a good first time food plot choice and what's the best time of year to plant?'

46:30 Boy, first time summers can have more weed issues for sure than fall. The fall release is tried and true. I know a lot of buddies of Pennsylvania use it. And if you're, you know, again, if it's especially a small plot and got have a lot of browse pressure, I'd probably wait and start in that, you know, when I say fall, you're going to be planting, depending on where you are in Pennsylvania, late July, early August, something like that, and get off to a great start, start getting that soil in the right place. You're going to attract deer. And falls are easier and I believe the species we put in a fall blend just a little bit more durable in general than summer crop. Do you agree with that, Keith?

47:11 I would and also, you know, it can certainly be dry in the fall, but dry and cool is way better than dry and hot. And so you typically there's just a little bit more forgiveness with weather condition wise in the fall as well. Plus, I mean, that's when you're hunting. That's when you really want the attraction. So, yeah, I do agree that's I think a good time to get started, but I would definitely start with a mix. Start with these blends because you don't know what the chemistry of your soil is, what the biology of your soil is. And so, there's no way that you could guess which is the right species to put out there. So, that's why we do these diverse blends so that your soil can kind of figure out what it needs. And that's I say it'll look different every year because your soil is different every year. So start with a blend, start in the fall, and then go from there.

48:15 Ed is asking about liquid lime. What's your opinion on liquid lime? Ed, I got some land in Florida somewhere I want to sell you. I should have said that. I'm sorry. So, lime is basically, you know, a calcium or something basic and it's heavy. Minerals are heavy. And I'm not aware, Keith may know. I'm not aware of any magic two gallon jug of something that replaces a ton of lime. I mean, you could put enough liquid lime out or you could do perfect timing. There's a lot of ways to ease it along, but to really make a major adjustment in pH usually is measured in tons and not gallons.

49:02 Yeah, I would agree. I don't know that anybody could or should afford enough liquid lime, you know, to really do that. Now, you know, it depends on how low your pH is, how high you want to try to bring them up. For many years we farmed a lot of ground that was 5.3, 5.4, 5.5. Was it ideal? No. But we were still growing pretty good crops on it. And here's the thing, the more carbon you have in your soil, which you know is measured in organic matter. And food plotters have a unique ability to build organic matter levels much faster than rowcrop farmers because rowcrop farmers are hauling so much carbon off when you're trucking out the corn or trucking out the soybeans or the hay bales. Food plotters aren't doing that. You're leaving so much more in the soil. So you can build your soil organic matters much more quickly. I've seen that at Grant's place. When you have more carbon in your soil, the pH matters less because carbon is a great buffer and the high pH, the low pH matters less when you have higher organic matter soils. Now, if your soil is 1% organic matter and 4.9 pH, well, yeah, you got a problem and it needs to be addressed. But I'll bet it's not that way. And so, yeah, I wouldn't spend the money on the liquid lime. Do a reasonable program and don't let them talk you into saying you spread this lime, you have to incorporate it in order to get the benefit out of the lime. That is not true. If you have biological activity, that lime will work its way down and you'll be just fine. You do not need to till it in.

51:02 Randy says he does not have access to a drill. You've spoken about broadcasting. He has access to a crop seeder, not to be confused with a spreader. So, I'm not sure what the difference between a crop seeder and a spreader is. Would this be better than broadcasting?

51:22 I'm glad it's your turn, Keith. Well, maybe we'll wait for Randy to yeah, I'm not exactly sure what a crop seeder is if it's not a drill and it's not a broadcaster. I wonder if it's a Brillant or something. Is it like a Brillant Randy? Maybe you could tell us real quick. Is it like a Brillant seeder? Something that's just dropping the seed and then there's like

51:45 A cutter packer running behind it or something like that.

51:48 Could be. Well, I'll make this comment while he maybe gives us a little more information. Anything you can do to get seed to soil contact is going to greatly benefit your stand establishment. And so if you're going to broadcast, run a tine harrow or something through that plot first. Rough it up, score it up, make some scratches, make some grooves, then broadcast your seed, and then go back with a kind of a smooth harrow, smooth it all back down. Because what you're doing is you're getting that seed down into the soil. And so if your cedar is doing something like that, then yeah, that's absolutely going to be better than just broadcasting on top the ground.

52:33 All right. Let's see. Jacob is saying he is in southeast Arkansas. He's just getting started with the Buffalo method this year for his plots. He drilled last weekend. He sprayed before rain. Mostly soybeans, some sunflowers, and millet. His soils are 50 to 53. So kind of on that low pH that we were talking about there. Some of them are in the 5.9. He prefers to avoid chemicals and lime if possible. So with all that context, what would you recommend for this fall and next year? And how long does it typically take to reach optimal soil?

53:12 Well, Keith and I both have seen, not just believe, that blends heal soils faster than any single species. There is no one magic bean. So, I would go with the blend this fall and plant it 45 to 60 days before the average first frost date at your location. And when there's moisture in the forecast or ample soil moisture, something like that. And otherwise it sounds great. But yeah, blends always. This has been proven many times over in research that blends do more for the soil's health than any single species. So, and the fall usually weed pressure so much less. The falls are just great times to use a blend and let them mature as long as you can. There's research that shows every day that good fall blend grows while you're waiting for that soil to get to 60 degrees, whatever, it's pumping more carbon into the soil. You don't want to terminate too early. So, I think that would be where I would go with the information provided.

54:16 Yeah. And as far as the pH question, Jacob, you know, your 59 stuff, I would not worry about putting lime on that. You're fine right there. Your 5, that that could be limiting some nutrients. It could be limiting some of your biological activity. So that that one you may want to address with sublime application. But you have to understand the reason that many of these soils are low in pH is because it's been the overapplication of nitrogen fertilizer over the years. So if you spend all the money putting lime out there to correct that, you really need to figure out how to be very limited on how much nitrogen fertilizer you're putting out there. Otherwise, you're going to go right back into that same cycle. Because it's, you know, there's a whole chemistry explanation why that's happening with all of the hydrogen molecules and all that. But needless to say, if you aren't applying a lot of nitrogen, then you're not going to be continually lowering your pH. And most soils have plenty of calcium that's leeched down lower. And if you can get some deep rooted forbs out there, and the broad leaves especially are really good at pulling some of that calcium up and then when it's in that plant and then that plant dies, it's depositing that calcium back on top the ground and you will start to see small incremental changes in your pH. So, the combination of that and not using a lot of nitrogen fertilizer to continually lower your pH will really be a big help in that, too.

55:56 Yeah. And I just want to mention real quickly for those that weren't bogged down in soil chemistry in school somewhere, pH is what we call a base 10 or logarithmic scale. So the difference in round numbers between five and six is tenfold. Not just one up the scale, tenfold. And difference between five and seven is a hundredfold. So it's a big difference.

56:23 Well, Grant, an hour goes by pretty darn quickly.

56:28 I looked at my phone. I can't believe it's went by.

56:31 Yeah, it's we've run through an hour here. I want to do one more. We'll go back to Chris again here because he's got a really good question here with soil testing because there's always a lot of questions about, you know, should I test my soil? Do I need to test it every year? What's your thoughts on soil testing? Is that good for a guy to get that test? you know, as kind of a baseline. Do you need to be doing that every year? What's kind of your philosophy on that?

56:58 The research biologist in me wants to test about every two days to track everything and see what's going on.

57:05 The practitioner in me, to be honest, I haven't tested my plots in a couple years, and I don't really plan to. My test is with a shovel or pulling up a big clump of seal rye and really looking at the root structure and the dirt and smelling it and looking at the color and the quantity of earthworms at the right time of year. Don't go out there on a 90 degree day and expect to see a lot of earthworms. But so soil tests are not as important to me as they used to be traditional university, you know, NPK and pH soil test because there's so much more as we've learned going on to biology. If I was going to test once every three years, I might step up to the plate and do a Haney test or one of these more advanced tests that are measuring the biology, these microbes we've been talking about in the soil. That's going to give you so much more information than just a standard NPK and pH soil test. I haven't done a standard quote unquote soil test in several years now.

58:07 Yeah. Because when you do a Haney test, you're getting that base information plus all this other stuff, too. So, it's not like you don't know what that is. But, yeah, if you're not planning on using a lot of fertility inputs anyway, then that's standard soil test doesn't really do you a lot of good anyway. So, it's probably not a bad idea if you just took over a new piece of ground. It's good to get a baseline. Good to know where you started. Good to know what your soil organic matter is. You should know what your pH is because yeah, if it's five, then you probably need to address something, but if it's 5.9, I wouldn't worry about that at all. So, but you got to know. So, do one to start with, get your good baseline, and then yeah, maybe every three or four years and you know, play around with a test that give you biological indications like the Haney test. So that's.

59:01 Yeah and there's others and Keith I want to add if you're going to do a soil test by all means do it right. Don't just take one spade or you know soil probe full at one place. You need to really subsample the field a lot. Put it in a clean bucket, not one full of rust or something, and stir it up really good, and then take a subsample that, send it to the lab. Because I've seen some soil tests, not the lab's fault, but the sampling person's problem get really misleading results because, oh boy, that crop's taller over there. I'm going to go take my soil from over there. You want a really good representation of the field you're going to address.

59:39 Yeah, that's right. And you know, there's a lot of good labs. Whatever lab you're using, they probably have a video on their YouTube channel or on their website showing you how to do that. It's not difficult, but you just you want to make sure you do it right. So, well, Grant, as we kind of close here, you have any last closing words of wisdom, pieces of advice for people as we kind of roll, you know, from spring, we're going to be rolling into summer here pretty soon. Hunting season is, you know, turkey season is on us. It's, you know, it's the season to grow deer right now and then, you know, harvest in the fall. But any advice for people?

1:00:16 Well, I think there's a little checklist to be a successful food plot farmer. Let's have a utilization cage. I like to put them out like the day I plant so I'm not biased again by it's a little greener over here, not so good over there. Um, let's think about weeds. You can't plant in the weeds. Inspect that little seed to out compete a plant that already has an established root system. Keith hit that appropriately. Uh, let's make sure there's ample moisture on the way or there. And the things I'm saying are just giving the plants a good opportunity to express their full potential. Last two things, let's have realistic expectations. I love hidey-ho or small plots and a little eighth acre tucked in the woods, great bow hunting spots, but I'm not going to produce a giant crop when I've got an eighth acre and four old nanny does in there every afternoon feeding, right? You're going to you're going to mow down pretty good.

1:01:12 And if you're in that situation, what I do is I plant heavier. I know the plants aren't going to express their full potential, so I need more small plants to out compete the weeds. And lastly, folks enjoy it, guys. It can get so nerve-wracking. It's not raining. It's dry. And realize truly that God's got a plan for our life literally all the way down to our food plots. And it's good. And there are lessons to learn. And we all go through droughts just like in our life. We go through valleys and mountain tops. And that is part of growing. And don't miss those messages the creator has for you in each season of your life.

1:01:54 Yeah. Love that. Love that. And I love how you close all your episodes. You know, get out and enjoy creation, but spend time with a creator when you're doing it as well. So, I need to go do that. My wife's just over here going, 'Hey, do you want to go kayaking?' So, I need to sign off so I can go kayaking and enjoy creation with my wife. How's that sound?

1:02:15 All right.

1:02:16 Thanks everybody for joining us. We will be posting this to our YouTube channel. Uh, Growing Deer will make it available as well. So, if you have a buddy that needs to watch this, please send him to one of those channels. And thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time as we answer everybody's questions. Good night.