OT - Food plots

I came across this article while looking at something else and remembered that a number of the members here talk about putting in food plots and the tractors and equipment needed to do it. According to this you are probably wasting your time and resources: http://www.realtree.com/food-plots-and-land-management/articles/are-you-wasting-money-on-food-plots

Good observation, but tell us something we don't know, they do need habitat, and of course you won't likely see or have any opportunity to take a decent one if they are pressured.

There are areas not that far from here that are heavily hunted, poachers are abundant etc. I've seen the deer herded up and on the run in the middle of the day during the season, they know where the quiet areas are, one is a friends farm that we try to keep the perimeters clear of other hunters. Not as abundant opportunities as here, but you be able to fill your tags if you have the time and are cognizant of not pressuring them.

On this farm, years ago, it was all fence lines and fields, both pasture and crops, no deer at all, no ticks either. All of the surrounding areas were like that too. We planted huge patches of tomatoes with no worry about nuisance deer or even wood chucks, there was no habitat, though the pheasant had enough to get by. So in those days you could have planted acres of imperial whitetail clover or whatever you like and it probably would make no difference. I was 14 when I saw the first whitetail deer on this land, I grew up here, in all those years not one deer or any track, they just were not here.

Fast forward to now, its overgrown, young forest, with all kinds of thick vegetative cover, abundant browse, and my plots surrounded by same, yet they show no reservation about coming out into the fields that are open and taken care of just the same They will just about graze on anything that I plant and is palatable to them. There are late season plants you can grow, plant mid summer etc., though they may start to browse more after some frosts, their patterns are unchanged here until winter really sets in.

What he stated is common knowledge or should be if you know anything about whitetail deer, its nothing new, its just how it is and has been long before any of us.

I'll disagree with him. Food plots work great. It's just that most people make them too small. Mine tend to be 15 to 50 acres. I'd like to call it farming but from the yields I get on some of them when the deer get through, I might as well just call them food plots. My fields are surrounded by large wooded areas and during the spring and summer I can spend days on the fields and not see anyone else.

Like everything else it all depends...
I hunt on 17 acres of mostly woods with an old mined out gravel pit in it - surrounded by hundreds of acres of woods and swamps.
There used to be a lot of small dairy farms in that area but those are all gone.
I doubt there is still an active farm of any sort within 6 or 8 miles of me.
Many of the tillable fields have turned or are turning back to forest. Not even much hay is made any more.
So I keep three plots going.
All three only total about 2 acres and are in open areas where I can get a plow into the ground and there is still some top soil left after the mining.
There is plenty of water in a couple of deep sloughs that never go dry.
My plots do not sustain the deer population. All they do is give them a few tasty morsels to go along with their usual browse.
You should see how heavily they are tramped and grazed as deer pass through from woods to water to cover.
In greater Minnesota only about 35% of the hunters bag a deer in any given year and we always used to fit into that number.
In the 9 years we have been plotting my hunting buddy and I have just about doubled those odds of us bagging a deer.
For us, deer plots work.