Why should you plant food plots for deer?  Two reasons. One is to provide feed and attract deer to your property. The other is to keep deer on your land by decreasing the size of a herd’s home range. If you hunt a 200-acre property, will planting a plot or two keep deer on it all the time? No. But food plots can help you go from 50/50 (deer on your property/off it) to maybe 70/30 or even 90/10. For the small landowner (or hunting club), decreasing the range of bucks is the biggest benefit of food plots. How many plots should you plant? That depends, depending on the size of your land and especially the deer density in an [...]

Last December 14 in central Indiana, I climbed into a box blind on a two-acre turnip plot, ready to smoke a buck with my muzzleloader. I was in the midst of a brutal 17-Day, three-state stretch during which time I had not seen a mature shooter buck, much less shoot one. I was ready to change my luck. At 4 p.m. does started filtering into the turnips, followed by several small bucks. For an hour I watched deer pull up and eat the brassicas, gnawing the roots as the wilted green leaf tops dangled comically from their mouths. A little after 5 p.m., two more does entered the plot from the west, followed by a 7-point, and then a stout [...]