Ncwoodsman
A good 3 year old buck
Well I got all my plots in last weekend. I did a mix of ww/oats, crimson clover, a few late planted beans and radishes. I was curious if a top dressing of urea would help my growth or would it be a waste of time ?
Adding urea
- Thread starter Ncwoodsman
- Start date
yoderjac
5 year old buck +
Probably both. It would probably help growth but depending on your objectives, it would likely also be a waste of time and money. If you are planting the plot for fall attraction, fertilizing will have little impact. Why? The biggest driver in the attractiveness of a fall plot is its perceived risk. Hunting pressure is key and so is the relative locations and amounts of other foods, both native and planted. The particular crop you plant and whether you fertilize is at least a second order if not third order factor.
Thanks,
Jack
Bassattackr
5 year old buck +
I'd say palatability is a close second. Unless its a high N user like corn, milo - Adding fertilizer to most plots takes away from this aspect IMO. Numerous studies in human food prove this as well. More fertilizer, artificial growth depletes vitamin, mineral content.. Oranges nowadays have hardly any vitamin C left in them.
I never bother anymore, the deer come flooding in just fine
Ncwoodsman
A good 3 year old buck
Thanks guys I think this just saved me some time and money
Mortenson
5 year old buck +
Exactly. I see snow flying in various states. Days have been getting shorter for 2.5 months. Palatability and pressure only matter if there's anything there. I'd throw down some fertilizer and get plants out there, not scrawny little 2 inchers that disappear in a bite. I honestly didn't know oranges didn't have any vit C anymore. They still taste the same to me. Taste wise, deer are easy to please IMO.
Bassattackr
5 year old buck +
Grasses..? The brassicas will be the only thing that really benefit from N fertilizer. Wheat and Oats to some degree, but not a difference maker IMO.
Smallplot
5 year old buck +
And we can agree to disagree. But why is it that grasses grow so well in an established plot of clover? N is an vital part of most plants during the growing process. So if one wants to throw out some seeds and let nature take a course, so be it. Personally I like to give the best chance for success. Not that one should add 100 pounds of N just for this but an additional 20 pounds does not hurt. On top of that, most plotters add mixes like 13-13-13 and the extra P and K can be just as vital.
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Bassattackr
5 year old buck +
Don't disagree with this at all, my understanding was that he didn't want to grow grasses though..
Bassattackr
5 year old buck +
Cereal Grains but ok.. ;)
I don't see fertilizing cereal grains, especially with 46-0-0 to provide much value. They'll get leggy quick and lose their palatability IMO.. Just another opinion.
I don't see fertilizing cereal grains, especially with 46-0-0 to provide much value. They'll get leggy quick and lose their palatability IMO.. Just another opinion.
yoderjac
5 year old buck +
I think the only misunderstanding here is the definition of "success" and I tried to address that in my original post. If by success one means that the maximize the growth of their planted crop, by all means, commercial fertilizer is the way to go. Excess of P-N-K generally won't hurt anything and a lack of them or inability to access them (ph), will reduce crop growth. That, along with the fact that they remove these during harvest, is why farmers use commercial fertilizers.
Farmers are now recognizing they can reduce their use of commercial fertilizer (thus input costs), but smarter soil management (no-till, cover crops, rotations, etc.) but most still benefit from commercial fertilizer because they goal is generally profit which is yield per acre less input cost to produce that yield.
As deer managers or food plotters there is a difference. Yield on a per acre basis is generally not of much value. What "success" is for us varies. Folks with enough acreage to work at scale and do QDM typically have objectives that include feeding deer. Few if any deer managers have the resources to overcome the underlying limitation of soil fertility. During the course of the year, only a small portion of a deer's diet will come from food plots. Most will come from native foods. We may be able to improve soil fertility over a limited area like a food plot with commercial fertilizer, but we can't afford to fertilizer thousands of acres of native habitat. So, regardless of what we do in our food plots, folks in areas with rich fertile soils will always have better deer herds than folks on marginal soils. While we can't overcome the soils limitation, we can overcome the cyclical characteristic of nature. We do this with a strategic application of food plots. The idea here is to have plots producing quality foods during the times when nature is not providing a bounty of quality native foods. We are smoothing out the low points in the cycle. As long as yield is sufficient, it become unimportant. The way to measure sufficiency is whether their is quality food left in the plot when the stress period is over. If there is, that plot has achieved success. If not, more acreage is required for the plot, and perhaps, deer number need to be reduced.
For folks with small properties, QDM is not a realistic objective. For many of them, food plots are used for attraction to improve the huntability of their land. Here I agree with Bassattackr. I see fertilizing with N, especially with the OPs mix of little value. Yes, fertilized plants generally are more attractive, but we are talking about attraction during hunting season and I find other factors are driving deer at this time of year much more than the crop specifics. I'm certainly not saying there is never a case for fertilizing with N, but in general I don't see it.
To take this one step further, when it comes to fertilizer, because we don't harvest, we can think of food plots more like grazing land and deer as our "crop". Do farmers generally fertilize pasture? Not if they have plenty of acreage for the number of animals and can rotate animals so it is not abused. Since deer are browsers, not grazers, we can further think of food plots as temporary grazing reserves (during stress periods) and the entire habitat as the browsing land. We can improve the quality of the general habitat with timber management, controlled burns, etc. I still lime to adjust my pH, but since I've minimized tillage and selected crops that complement each other to build OM, I've improved nutrient cycling, I have not been using commercial fertilizer at all. I've also become much more weed tolerant.
Thanks,
Jack
Mortenson
5 year old buck +
If a guy is looking for more food out there, I'd fertilize. He also said he has beans and brassicas. He probably wants to attract deer this fall, or at least have a nice food plot to look at instead of a baseball infield. Only he can decide how critical an abundant plot is to his game plan. I would disagree with Yod about pastures not getting fertilized. I'd also disagree that deer don't sometimes graze. Or whatever you wanna call it. I see them stand in the same field eating for a long time, sometimes.
yoderjac
5 year old buck +
That does not make them graziing animals. The are browsing animals. Absolutely, they will stand in the same field for a long time and feed. If having a "nice food plot to look at" is the definition of success, then by all means fertilize. Pastures do get fertilized, but that is to allow them to support more animals than they can carry. I said they don't get fertilized when there is sufficient acreage per animal. Think out west where public lands are grazed. It is the balance between animal use and plants that contribute the the nutrient cycling along with the microbiome.
yoderjac
5 year old buck +
Mortenson,
Here is an interesting article on the digestion between browsers like deer and grazers like cattle: https://nature.berkeley.edu/classes/espm-186/Unit_II_(cont)_files/grazer v. browser.pdf
Just because deer are browsers does not mean they won't eat low growing foods which is why we find them in our ag fields and food plots. It means that these foods are a supplement to their overall diet. For grazing animals like cattle, these low growing grasses and foods are their primary diet.
The analogy I'm making between food plots and pasture land is a loose one. The primary similarity is that the plants are not harvested and nutrients removed from the field. Instead they are consumed by animals and recycled back into the soil through defecation.
Thanks,
Jack
Here is an interesting article on the digestion between browsers like deer and grazers like cattle: https://nature.berkeley.edu/classes/espm-186/Unit_II_(cont)_files/grazer v. browser.pdf
Just because deer are browsers does not mean they won't eat low growing foods which is why we find them in our ag fields and food plots. It means that these foods are a supplement to their overall diet. For grazing animals like cattle, these low growing grasses and foods are their primary diet.
The analogy I'm making between food plots and pasture land is a loose one. The primary similarity is that the plants are not harvested and nutrients removed from the field. Instead they are consumed by animals and recycled back into the soil through defecation.
Thanks,
Jack
Bassattackr
5 year old buck +
FWIW - My comments were based on what the OP asked which was top dressing with urea (46-0-0). Since nitrogen is mainly valuable to the brassicas (a small percentage of the overall plot), I wouldn't bother. WW and Oats will consume, utilize respectively but not enough to warrant dumping urea and diminish palatability of the cereal grains in addition to opening up a nice blossom of weeds over. Just my $.02..
Mortenson
5 year old buck +
The answer lies in the middle. The plot won't likely be all or nothing. The OP knows best what his dirt will do for him in NC in the middle of Sept. I think he should fertilize half the plot with triple something and the other half leave alone and give us all an update! Put a trail cam down the center of split. I appreciate the education, Jack, but the fact they're browsers I just think is irrelevant to this matter. Massive numbers of deer get dropped in food plots every day of the season. If it's the rut, and you think bucks have different agendas, well they're still interested in the 8 does standing in the plot stuffing their faces for half an hour. Let those 8 browse off in a different direction, then 6 new ones will show up. When our plots are down to bare dirt, we stop hunting over them. If our plots are still bursting of food, we hunt over them. I honestly think the OP will best see for himself if he splits it up. Then he can possibly decide to never fertilize. Won't know til ya try. My plots do pretty well w/o added fertilizer. Perhaps it's the droppings as Jack mentioned. Our timber soils here are possibly still richer than in other areas. We used to run cattle. Maybe it's the years of manure. I've been meaning to pull some samples, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
yoderjac
5 year old buck +
When plots are browsed down to dirt they are telling you there is a problem. Either you need to plant more acreage or get deer numbers under control. Sure, one can l make a poor choice in crops that don't match soils and won't grow without fertilizer. Or one can plant a mix like the OP that will do fine without added N. Adding fertilizer can't make up for insufficient acreage for the deer density. Splitting the plot will only tell you that fertilizer makes the plants grow faster. It won't tell you if deer would not be attracted to the plot if no fertilizer was used.
It all goes back to objectives. The real question becomes this: Will the plot achieve the OPs objective without added N, and will it achieve the objective if N is added. In my experience, hunting pressure is the primary driver of day time use by deer. If deer feel secure using a plot during daytime hours, they will use it. If they feel insecure daytime use will be significantly less and fertilizer won't fix that.
The relevance of deer being browsers is not directly related to the OPs use of N. I mentioned it for the those with sufficient scale to succeed at QDM. The point was that fertilizing food plots doesn't compensate for underlying infertility of the soils in the general area. Because most of their diet will not come from the food plot, it is much more important to have quality food in the plot during stress periods.
Don't get me wrong. There is absolutely nothing wrong with using commercial fertilizers when they contribute to your objective. I used them for many years before I got nutrient cycling working well enough to stop, and I'll use them again, if I find the need. My objective here is not to say not to use fertilizer. It is to say, we are not farmers and because of that, our objectives and approaches are different. While we can and do borrow a lot from the farming community, those practices should be adjusted to account for the differences between food plotting and farming. Exactly how to adjust them depends largely on the individual situation.
Thanks,
Jack
Smallplot
5 year old buck +
Here is the problem. Nutrient cycling takes a long time to do and those without necessary equipment are left behind depending on choices and methods for planting. Even at that most food plotters can’t believe what natural things need to happen to reach that end game. Most may tell you they have dirt but know nothing about what their CEC is which effects how much nutrient storage their soils are capable of. So it is far deeper than just the kind of plants selected. As far as grass crops like cereals getting rank, well that can be over planting what is necessary.
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