Know your neighbors land!

[FarmerDan]

Let's kick this off! My first post!

No doubt you know the habitat and food sources on the land you call your own. But, just maybe, you should -- and can -- consider the situation on adjacent land, not all of which you can easily determine.

I'm in the middle of some good Virginia ag country. Great hunting! I have 10 acres for food plots, 30 tillable acres leased to a real farmer (I've given up), 250 acres of early succession forest, and about a hundred acres of good duck and goose marsh.

Here's the problem. There's easily another 5,000 acres of habitat adjacent. Something over a thousand acres is planted in row crops with the rest in swamp marsh.

One of my objectives is to keep deer on my place with strategic plantings. For example, not long ago (I guess the price of corn had something to do with it) "my" 30 acres was in corn and nearly all the other farms around me were in corn. Around here corn is harvested by the middle of August. The price differential is sometime a dollar high than in the midwest. It's unusal for us becasue we don't really have the climate to grow corn competitevly.

Other than gleaning, there was no ag crop during the prime part of our hunting seasons. Wheat, if it does get planted, isn't in the ground until early to mid November.

Maybe you're starting to get the picture. To cut it short, what gets planted around me has more impact on deer movement than what I have at home. That year, the 10 acres was wall-to-wall rye, oats, & clover. Normally, the crops are soybeans-wheat and that presents a differnt food plot opportunity. I can't see all the crops my neighbors plant. And if your in the same boat as me, here's a resource that might help you gain understanding of the bigger picture should you need it.

I'm a map guy. Sometimes you need to work hard to understand a map. Even for me, this one's difficult. I've run on way too long, so let me just say, if you want to see cropping in your area, check this out:

https://nassgeodata.gmu.edu/CropScape/

The Natioanl Agricultural Statistics Service is a USDA agency. This map shows what crops are planted where with uncanny detail and accuracy.

Have a look. Struggle with it a little. There's a serach feature on the toolbar at the top. You'll need to hover your cursor over each button until you find it. If you do, you can type in almost any geographic search term to find your area.

Good luck!

 

[bwoods11]

Do you leave corn??

 

[FarmerDan]

Do you leave corn??

I wish. Here's the problem. We have to plant corn ASAP in the spring to have some likely possibility of sufficient rain for growth and pollination. It's mature and ready to harvest by mid-August. What little corn I plant in the food plots (10 acres) is destroyed by all type of critters long before its even mature. Corn is not high on my list since it doesn't fit my schemes well. The land it's on is better used for succulent summer annuals followed by rye, oats, and clover planted mid to late August. I really get more bang for the buck by staying away from corn. it's an expensive crop! That's just how it breaks for me.

 

[Bill]

I'm with you. I gave up corn a few years back. My neighbors have hundreds of acres of it and it's just to expensive for me as a plotter.

Soybeans with Lickcreek's trick of broadcasting rye into them when they start to yellow is a mainstay. Our deer numbers aren't crazy so those plots offer protein until the spring green up.

 

[j-bird]

Dan, I do a similar thing as you about knowing my neighbors land but in an opposite manner. I am absolutely surrounded by ag.....corn and soybeans everywhere! So once I figured out a better way I used that knowledge to my advantage. First of all - all the ag leaves very little cover and thus a fairly small resident deer population and as such far more food than the deer can ever eat. So with that in mind I quit trying to feed deer year round. I actually use the neighboring ag to my advantage. I plant about a week or two later than the farmers in my area. This pulls the deer to other properties and thus lets my smaller plots thrive without a concentration of deer around. It's spring and summer so who cares if the deer are not on my place. Now the other trick is I plant corn and beans as well. That may seem odd, but there is a reason for it. Come September the combines fire up and the harvest starts. Modern equipment in this flat area I live in are very efficient. They can reduce a soybean field full of food to a vacant lot with the food potential of a wal-mart parking lot! As harvest progresses the cover of the standing corn and the food sources dwindle quickly - pushing the deer back into the woods and what little cover there is. That is when my now corn and bean plots come in....I essentially have the only standing large grain crop of ANY size. I also tend to top sew brassica and cereal grains as well into these plots simply fr diversity. So as the rut progresses and those does shift to my plots.....guess who comes looking for food and for girls? Yep - that's when I'm in some connecting cover, block of timber or sitting on the edge of a field waiting.

Knowing how your property fits into the surrounding area and what you can offer and what you can and can not compete with can be a very valuable weapon in your hunting and habitat work.

I posted numbers in my area of cover vs ag ground on another thread....I think here....and the cover is like 20% of the available land with ag being 75%. Planting food to hold deer was silly - not only was I never going to do it....but why? Hunters can;t kill deer in spring and summer, so I'm not too concerned about it.