4 wheeler damage to Brassica?

NATHAN

Yearling... With promise
I will be spraying a micro-nutrient onto the foliage of my food plots. Does anybody know if the 4 wheeler tires will damage the brassicas? Thanks.
 
How old are the brassicas /size ? If your P &K and boron are good, you prob don’t need to add the micro-nutrients. I have done it before with granular before planting so I can’t say I haven’t. I also took a soil sample which listed them.
 
How big is the plot? Backpack sprayer would probably be your best bet.
 
Small flexible plants can take some driving. When the stalks are big enough to snap is a problem.
 
Small flexible plants can take some driving. When the stalks are big enough to snap is a problem.
THANKS
 
Step on them, if they push down and dont snap, you are good, if they snap, crunch, well then youre not so good.
 
How wide of an area can your sprayer cover?


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I will be spraying a micro-nutrient onto the foliage of my food plots. Does anybody know if the 4 wheeler tires will damage the brassicas? Thanks.
Why?
 
Probably the same reason a guy last year asked about adding some fertilizer and you more or less told him not to, but I said if you want a more thriving plot then go ahead. My main plot had some uan applied (not something I usually do however) and it did such a good job feeding deer in the winter that my kids and I found over 20 sheds in the immediate area. Yeah maybe it's a materialistic thing and not in accordance with Qdm bylaws but sometimes what's fun is fun.
 
Probably the same reason a guy last year asked about adding some fertilizer and you more or less told him not to, but I said if you want a more thriving plot then go ahead. My main plot had some uan applied (not something I usually do however) and it did such a good job feeding deer in the winter that my kids and I found over 20 sheds in the immediate area. Yeah maybe it's a materialistic thing and not in accordance with Qdm bylaws but sometimes what's fun is fun.
That is a bit of an overstatement. I haven't told anyone not to use fertilizer. I used commercial fertilizer for many years and won't hesitate to use it again if needed. I'm sure I described my evolution and how with good soil health practices, I've evolved toward mixes of complementary mix and rotation of crops and good nutrient cycling that reduced and, for the last few years, eliminated my use of commercial fertilizer. That does not mean that commercial fertilizer is never needed in any situation. I try to educate based on what I've learned over the years and present alternatives to consider.

The reason I ask the question here is that foliar applications of fertilizer is usually done in a commercial farming environment to save a crop failure and reduce a loss. It is probably the most expensive way to apply fertilizer (NPK or micro). It would be unusual for it to be a go-to method in a food plot situation. Not that there aren't TV shows out there hocking the stuff as magic beans for food plotters.

I think the more we ask ourselves why we are doing what we are doing and discuss it, the better long-term decisions we make.

Thanks,

Jack
 
I wouldn't worry about breaking leaves or stems, seems like a silly concern.
 
Unless your coverage width per pass is really narrow you aren't going to loose that much.
 
Thank you every body. The plots are a little more than I want to do by hand. My sprayer can cover about 12'. The why, is because I have it and I want to see if it matters. I too believe in soil testing and improving the soil naturally as I go.
 
Thank you every body. The plots are a little more than I want to do by hand. My sprayer can cover about 12'. The why, is because I have it and I want to see if it matters. I too believe in soil testing and improving the soil naturally as I go.
If you want to see if it matters, at least leave an unsprayed area. Even better if you could put an exclusion cage in the sprayed and unsprayed areas.
 
When plants young and pliable my atv pulling a cyclone spreader did not affect them much. What you gain in vibrant increased biomass negates any small if measurable loss.
 
The question becomes how do we measure success and the cost to achieve it, and that depends on our objectives. For a farmer, it is largely profit and loss. How much crop can he extract from the land and sell for the highest price vs. his cost to grow it. When the short-term boost from of foliar fertilizer keeps a crop alive long enough for soil amendments to provide nutrients, it can make the difference between a smaller profit and a big loss of a failed crop.

Food plotters have different objectives. One is QDM which is benefitting the health of the local deer herd. On the other end of the spectrum you have attracting deer improving the huntability of the property. Of course, many folks have some combination of these two. The first requires significant scale, the latter does not.

So how do we measure success? Deer eat mostly native foods and these each have their own nutritional value which differs as they go through the natural life cycle. Those native foods, along with the deer herd that consumes them, is limited by the fertility of the soil in the general area as an upper limit. In most places, the herd is further limited by the climate. With the natural cycle, thee are times of bounty and quite lean times. These lean times when quality native foods are scarce is where we can raise that lower limit of herd health closer to the upper limit by filling these gaps with food plots with quality food. This is where food plots apply to the the QDM objective. To have a measurable impact on herd health, you need to turn 1% - 3% of a deer's home range from poor to high quality food during these gaps. So the key for QDM is the timing of quality food production to match the dips in nature in your region year round.

For those that don't have such scale, making their land more huntable by influencing deer movement is where food plots come in. For this objective, rather than looking at year-round, you are looking for attraction during a specific time period, hunting season. It could be even a smaller period that you focus on like archery season, but in general it is hunting season. Here, the location of the food plots relative to the rest of the habitat and hunting pressure is probably the driving factor. At this point, depending on location, you may be competing with quality native foods. No matter what I plant and how attractive it is, when we get a heavy acorn crop, deer become very pressure sensitive. They still use our food plot, but the do it after dark. During shooting hours, they can just lay down in acorn flats or ridges. When hungry, they stand up and walk 20 yards sucking up acorns and then lay back down. They are getting quality food with very little risk. In mast crop failure years, they will tolerate a lot of pressure of guys hunting the food plots themselves, not just the travel corridors and staging areas.

In both cases, QDM and huntability, non-food plot habitat improvement can be even more important than food plots in achieving your objectives.

Commercialization of the food plot industry has really distracted many of us from defining success in terms of meeting our objectives. We look at a nice green farm like weed free monoculture and think "WOW! What a wonderfully successful food plot" We watch deer feeding in it before hunting pressure begins and are even more convinced of success.

I love the OPs rational for using a foliar fertilizer. "I have it and I want to experiment with it" (paraphrase) . Experimenting and learning is fun and informative. But, judging success is more than looking at what a food plot looks like.

Thanks,

Jack
 
How do i as a hunter/food plotter measure success? If my plots come out good( my measure) . I’m going to hunt regardless and when I see my plots come out good it’s a success to me. I shot a 150 inch buck three years ago which is tough for Connecticut although there are good deer here. In the midwest, a 150 isn’t nothing great. People measure success by different ways. Some do it by hunting , whether they harvest their targeted deer , some measure it by their plots and some measure it by if they had a good time with their son/daughter, regardless if they harvested a deer or not. Everyone’s measure is different and if we all had fun at the end of the season, you can’t call it a failure .
 
How do i as a hunter/food plotter measure success? If my plots come out good( my measure) . I’m going to hunt regardless and when I see my plots come out good it’s a success to me. I shot a 150 inch buck three years ago which is tough for Connecticut although there are good deer here. In the midwest, a 150 isn’t nothing great. People measure success by different ways. Some do it by hunting , whether they harvest their targeted deer , some measure it by their plots and some measure it by if they had a good time with their son/daughter, regardless if they harvested a deer or not. Everyone’s measure is different and if we all had fun at the end of the season, you can’t call it a failure .
BIngo! We all have competing objectives. I've given up nice bucks in favor of introducing kids to the sport and giving them an opportunity to shoot a spike. I don't miss those bucks on the wall at all! And you are spot on when it comes to passing the tradition. Having kids help with food plots and habitat is worth more to me even if what they do ends up doing more harm that good!

Great postQ
 
Not that there aren't TV shows out there hocking the stuff as magic beans for food plotters.

Hawking.

To hock means to pawn.
 
Hawking.

To hock means to pawn.

And the figure of speech “To pawn off on” means what again?


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