The Ultimate Year-Round Food Plot for Deer
The Difference Between Deer Management and Baiting
 Editor’s Note: If you understand the Y design of green field planting, you not only can see and take more bucks, but you'll have a hunting site for both bow and gun season. The Y-shaped green field enables the hunter to provide a smorgasbord of highly-nutritious, very-palatable food for the deer all year. You need to see and understand the components that make the Y-shaped green field the best design with the best plantings for hunting deer during bow and gun season s.
To understand the power of the Y-shaped green field, you must first know the difference between deer management and baiting for deer. Some hunters believe if they plant a green field that provides food for their deer only during hunting season, then they're managing their deer herd. However, look at these two definitions to learn how just planting green fields for hunting season doesn't mean you're managing deer but may fall under the banner of baiting deer. When you bait for deer, you put out a food source - either a green field, a spin feeder, sugar beets, corn or some other attractant - that draws deer to within gun range of the hunter during the season. But, if you manage for deer, you supply an abundant amount of high-quality nutritious food all year that grows more, bigger and healthier deer and helps the bucks to reach their maximum body weights and antler potential. Too, you provide habitat that will hold the deer on your property and allow them to grow into the older-age classes.
Let's look at the five basic methods of maintaining high-quality food year-round for more deer through using the Y design.
* Fertilizing naturally-occurring trees and shrubs , the least-expensive form of deer management, definitely will increase the nutritional value of those trees and shrubs and cause them to put on more tonnage of deer food than they normally will.
* Clearing land and planting green fields that yield food for deer will give you an even better deer-management program.
* Rotating the crops in those green fields to have annual and semi-annual crops for deer creates a higher-quality management plan.
* Planting fruit and nut trees can furnish permanent deer food for a long time. These trees will increase the amount and the diversity of the food that the deer on your property have to eat as well as provide places for harvesting deer.
* Supplying sanctuary for the deer also means quality deer management. If you don't protect the bucks on the lands you hunt until they reach the older-age classes, then all the planting and fertilizing that you possibly can do on your hunting lease won't produce big bucks. The deer may come to your property and feed on the food only after dark, if you don't have daytime sanctuary for them. The Y design of green field planting will produce the most big bucks in the shortest time because it incorporates all these elements.
Tomorrow: Defining the Y-Shaped Green Field
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