Food Plots?

[Buckmaster7600]

4 acres should last me thru the end of Southern Zone late ML season, if I can control the coons.  They will wipe out small plots in a hurry, but fortunately are about the easiest fur-bearer there is to trap. I am going to start digging holes as soon as the corn starts to tassle (NY state DEC requires burying or burning the carcasses of crop-damaging coons taken before trapping season opens).   4 acres made it that far for me last year, even with the record drought we had last summer.     

So how much do you have in you're 4 acre corn bait/cover field?


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[Doc]

6 hours ago, wolc123 said:

I consider food plotting to be better than baiting for many reasons.  The most important one is that it is legal in NY state.   A close second, is that it is a very cost-effective way of putting meat in the freezer and that is always my biggest concern.   Also important, is the fact that corn-fed venison tastes great and is very good for you.  I can grow corn cheaper than I can buy it, so why would I ever want to bait ? 

Our family raised beef on our farm for many generations, starting before the Civil war.   That was hard work and seldom profitable.  There was some fun involved though, and food-plotting for deer maintains all of that, but gets rid of the bad stuff.  Ain't it wonderful, that the deer harvest the crops and care for themselves year round.  No more rushing to get hay in before the rain, dealing with stuck tractors and combines during wet fall harvests, frozen water in the winter, vets, etc..  

Do I consider food plotting baiting?  Definitely not, because it is legal and cheaper.  I do wonder why anyone would want to bait. It  must be some combination of lazyness and stupidity.   Heck, I don't even use bait for fish.   That is also expensive.             

I wonder if anyone enters the costs of tilling equipment (even a cheap old 8N isn't cheap anymore....lol), or fuel, or their time, or soil amendments, seed, equipment maintenance, or any of the other assorted costs of putting in food plots. Want a shock..... just honestly figure up what that food plot is really costing you and add that into your venison costs. I think you will find it far more efficient to go to the supermarket and buy the most expensive cuts of some damn tasty beef. I guess I have never heard anyone try to justify food plots on a financial basis before. Actually, when you add up all the costs of hunting equipment and your time, you can't justify hunting on a financial basis. We may try, but if we are honest, hunting is simply another recreational expense. And food-plotting is simply more cost on the expense side of the ledger (big-time).

[LET EM GROW]

I think bait is a great tool for managing, you can pick and chose what you want to show and exactly where a little more easily. like as stated earlier in over populated areas to control a herd and not alter existing rules and regulations. introduce bait for a period of time. but to even compare myself to someone who baits deer then brags about it. is a total joke imo. Yea you still have to play wind, consider entry and exit routes etcc.. Maybe if your bait pile was spread across a 1/2 acre lol. I wouldn't mind seeing minerals or supplemental feeding be legal, up until deer season or shortly before, but that would be in my practices used for health and nutrition purposes (antler growing, body mass, does lactating, fawns..), possibly inventory check as well.  

I guess its just me but i dont think i can harvest an animal over bought, and poured out bait site. Even though its basically the same as deer scents during the rut...

[wolc123]

15 hours ago, Doc said:

I wonder if anyone enters the costs of tilling equipment (even a cheap old 8N isn't cheap anymore....lol), or fuel, or their time, or soil amendments, seed, equipment maintenance, or any of the other assorted costs of putting in food plots. Want a shock..... just honestly figure up what that food plot is really costing you and add that into your venison costs. I think you will find it far more efficient to go to the supermarket and buy the most expensive cuts of some damn tasty beef. I guess I have never heard anyone try to justify food plots on a financial basis before. Actually, when you add up all the costs of hunting equipment and your time, you can't justify hunting on a financial basis. We may try, but if we are honest, hunting is simply another recreational expense. And food-plotting is simply more cost on the expense side of the ledger (big-time).

The costs really start to favor the venison, when you factor in the additional open heart surgeries, and medications required to support a heavy beef diet.  Old farm equipment is cheap compared to medical expenses these days.   What price can you put on getting to spend a few more healthy years hanging out with your grandchildren ?

My input costs (not including tractors and equipment) was less than $100 for 4 acres of corn last year and this year, including fuel (aprox $50), fertilizer ($40) and herbicide ($5).   Last year's 4 acres yielded (6) deer including (2) 2-1/2 year old bucks, one 1-1/2, (2) mature does and (1) button buck.  My neighbor to the east killed the 1-1/2 buck (which he kept), right after it stepped out of my smaller corn plot and our neighbor to the west shot a 2-1/2 buck (which he kept) and a doe (which he gave to us) on the other edge of my larger corn plot (both expired inside of it).  

I am not sure how much the neighbor's put in their freezers (the 1-1/2 buck was tiny - only slightly larger than the button buck that I kept), but we ended up with well over 100 pounds in our freezer from the (4) that we kept from home.  When added to a doe and a buck, from up in the Northern zone, that made for a record year.  Even including ammunition and licence fees, our venison came in at well under $1.00 per pound last year.  

You are correct that food plot equipment could greatly increase that cost.  I bought a one-owner 8n for $1200 about 30 years ago and still use that for lots of food plot work.   I also paid more than I did for our house on a new 4wd diesel tractor that came in very handy getting the corn in on this muddy spring.  I don't include the cost of that stuff in my venison cost calculations because it is needed for property maintenance anyhow.   

 

   

          

Edited July 26, 2017 by wolc123

[Doc]

9 hours ago, wolc123 said:

 

You are correct that food plot equipment could greatly increase that cost.  I bought a one-owner 8n for $1200 about 30 years ago and still use that for lots of food plot work.   I also paid more than I did for our house on a new 4wd diesel tractor that came in very handy getting the corn in on this muddy spring.  I don't include the cost of that stuff in my venison cost calculations because it is needed for property maintenance anyhow.          

In the real world, some of that equipment cost has to be amortized into the costs of the meat. Also, I am guessing that you don't value your time as being worth anything. But if it is worth anything at all, the time on the tractor and at the butcher table has to be added in.

Are you into farming as a supplement to your income? I should have excluded farmers from my comments. Their plotting expenses do kind of get swallowed up in the rest of their operation to some extent.

As far as additional "open heart surgeries" and the like, you may be engaging in a bit of dramatic over-generalization there unless you absolutely believe that eating venison is the cure for heart ailments....lol.

[YFKI1983]

Legal baiting

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[mattypotpie8S]

Not sure how to do a link - http://www.fieldandstream.com/blogs/whitetail-365/2012/01/why-food-plots-are-better-bait-deer-hunting

[DirtTime]

As mentioned you are putting a food source in that doesn't normally grow there. So to me it's baiting deer. But, it's legal baiting so have at it.
As for legalizing feeders or just dropping bait out I am against that being legal unless you can only do it on private land. Why? You give people the right/privilege to use bait and some will plaster the woods with it and get pzd off if someone else hunted it.

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[DirtTime]

Sorry on phone no edit button. In the last part of my comment I was referring to public land.

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[wolc123]

On 7/25/2017 at 9:26 PM, Buckmaster7600 said:

Bull Sh-!t a bag of corn feed corn cost 10$, used properly you should be able to fill your tags with no more than 2 bags. you have 10$ in fuel to till your fields for corn.


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What do you suppose it cost the farmer to produce that $10 bushel of corn?   Not including equipment costs, my input cost works out to about 25 cents per bushel. I am saving some money on seed, but he has a big advantage of scale with 12 row equipment compared to my two-row stuff.  If it were not for government regulations forcing the use of so much corn to burn as ethanol, then he could make that corn a lot cheaper, and you could probably buy it for $ 5 a bushel.  All I am doing is "eliminating the middle man".

More importantly, there is a big difference in growing corn to sell and growing it to attract deer.  My 100 bu/acre stuff, which contains some weeds between the rows, where I intentionally "go wide" with the planter (to allow grassy bedding areas to form) or where the cultivator shovels miss some, is a lot more attractive to deer than "clean" 200 bu/acre stuff that most farmers aim for.  Their livelihood depends on squeezing every bit of yield possible out of their limited tillable acreage.  They profit from that "clean" corn being less attractive to deer, which is why they go heavy on the herbicides.    

Even if I included the equipment costs (I could get by with just my old 8n, a plow, a disk, a planter, a sprayer, and a cultivator), it would add up to about $ 70 more per year.  That brings my cost per bushel up to 41 cents.   As a strict meat-hunter, I determine food plot effectiveness by calculating the cost of boneless venison per pound after subtracting input costs.  I only include the deer taken in and adjacent to the plots for these calculations.   $1.00 per pound is the target I usually aim to beat.  

 

ps (for DOC): 

As far as my time spent working on foodplots, I value that significantly higher than my time spent playing golf and just slightly less than my time spent hunting or fishing.   As I mentioned earlier, that time involves all of the good stuff that you get from farming and very little of the bad.    

Edited July 29, 2017 by wolc123