Get the most bang for your fall food plot buck

STARKVILLE, Miss. -- August is upon us, and hunters and land managers have begun turning their attention toward planting deer food plots for the coming fall.

As a result, one of the questions I’m often asked this time of year is, “What should I plant in my food plots?” It’s a simple enough question, but the answer is a little more involved than just recommending “this” or “that.”  But, before we get too far down this row, let’s review a few items that will determine food plot success or failure, no matter what you plant.

Soil pH: Forages planted in soils with a pH below 6 are less productive. They are unable to adequately uptake nutrients, including fertilizers, and this results in less palatable forages with lower nutritional value.

Fertilization: Avoid the “triple -thirteen routine.” Apply fertilizers according to soil test results, which provide the necessary fertilizer application rates to address nutrient deficiencies based on specific forage types and soil conditions. Simply applying a few bags of 13-13-13 fertilizer on a food plot is not advisable and may even be counterproductive.

Pure live seed, or PLS: This is not critical with cereal grains (oats, rye, wheat), but it is when planting clovers. Most clover seeds, if not all, are pre-inoculated and have a coating material that typically consists of a clay and lime mixture. As a result, these coatings can account for almost half the weight of a bag of seed. So, you must account for this when calculating seeding rates. Otherwise, you will be planting only about half of the recommended amounts.

Lastly, don’t forget about good seed bed preparation, planting depths and coverage.

Now that we have covered the food plot basics, it’s back to the question at hand: What should you plant in your fall food plots? There’s no one answer to this question. Instead, we and our colleagues at the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks use a simple list of criteria we call the “4Ps.”

Production: The forage needs to produce a lot of biomass; hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds per acre.

Protein: This nutrient is a particularly key component of a deer’s diet and can be limited in the environment, especially if you’re not managing the habitat. Therefore, food plots of high protein forages are an excellent way to boost deer diet quality.

Palatability: A food plot forage must taste good to deer, or they will not eat it if something more preferred is available. It could be a very productive and high-protein forage, but if the deer will not eat it, none of that matters.

Price: We want things to be affordable, so look at a potential forage from the standpoint of pounds of production per acre per dollar. A forage must provide a good return on the investment in the cost of seed and managing for it.

There is no one “magic forage” for deer food plots, and over time you may find one or more forage types and varieties that provide the best results for you. Using the above criteria as a guide will inevitably help you get the most bang for your buck out of your food plot program.

More information on how to calculate PLS can be found in Mississippi State University Extension Publication 3604, “A Cost-Production Comparison of Common Food Plot Plantings for Deer” online at https://shorturl.at/sLBDT. The MSU Deer Lab produced a video demonstration, available at https://shorturl.at/7XSVf.