Deer Farming on Small Property

By Joe Blake

Producing big bucks starts with quality food plots. Photo by Joe Blake

It was a cold, cloudy day in late October, and the dampness in the air brought the promise of fresh snow by morning…and the promise of rutting whitetail bucks as well. I had already seen over a dozen does, fawns and small bucks feeding out in the field of Imperial Clover that stretched out in front of me over the course of the afternoon, but as the sun neared the western horizon I had hopes of bigger things to come.

The sun had nearly disappeared when movement along the north edge of the three-acre field caught my eye, and a quick check through my eight-power binoculars revealed a massive 8-point whitetail just emerging from the dense oak woods that bordered the field. Although his tines were not particularly long, his massive, 18-inch-wide rack would score in the 130 class on the Pope & Young scale; and I quietly eased my longbow into position as the buck entered the field and began feeding in my direction.

The buck was eyeing a group of does that were feeding close to the giant, old oak that held my ladder stand; but he couldn’t resist a few mouthfuls of lush clover so he wasn’t cutting the distance between us as fast as I would have hoped, given the short amount of shooting light remaining. So I slipped the grunt call from my pocket in hopes of speeding up his progress. I was just about to send a challenge in his direction when the brush behind the big whitetail parted and a giant non-typical stalked onto the scene!

Now I had a dilemma: the smaller buck, although a nice trophy, couldn’t compare to the 190 class non-typical; but the 8-pointer was less than 60 yards away while the bigger deer was still over 100 yards distant, and I knew that if I grunted, the lead buck would come in first and possibly spoil my chance at the monster. Not that this is a bad dilemma to have, but at the time it seemed insurmountable. So much so that I decided to leave well enough alone and let nature, and the two bucks, take their course.

Eventually both bucks were within longbow range, but the light had faded to a point where I couldn’t pick a spot on the bigger deer as he worked over a scrape 22 yards away. Although it was still legal shooting, the overcast sky simply made it impossible to make an ethical shot, so I waited until both deer disappeared to the south and then quietly exited my stand.

While certainly true that not every bowhunter gets an opportunity at a buck of this magnitude every season, the point to this story is what can be accomplished with a little diligence when it comes to managing a property for quality deer and quality deer hunting. My wife and I purchased our 160-acre farm in west-central Minnesota exactly three years before my encounter with the giant buck; and although many people would believe that such a modest acreage would be impossible to manage successfully, nothing could be further from the truth.

When we first looked at the property, I was much more interested in the wildlife habitat than in the house and buildings themselves; so we spent the better part of a day hiking through the woods. It was actually in mid-October when we first looked at the land; and we jumped numerous deer and turkeys and saw lots of rubs and scrapes, so the potential was definitely there. The main problem was that the tenant living in the house allowed anyone and everyone hunting access, so there were few big bucks roaming the area. So after buying the farm that winter, the first thing I did was post the land to limit access.

The next key ingredient to improving the deer herd on this property was to thin out some of the does and let the young bucks grow. Of course, this was not a one-time thing but rather was  and still is  an ongoing effort. But the results have been obvious: the first fall we owned the property, I passed up eight different racked bucks with my longbow – all yearlings. The second season I passed up a similar number of yearlings as well as a couple of nice 2 1/2 year olds in the 110 to 120 class. During the third autumn, I again passed up a similar number of young bucks as well as their slightly older brothers, but was also able to watch and bowhunt two real trophies – a mid-150 class 10-pointer and a mid-140 class 8-pointer, both of whom I watched throughout the summer and fall but was unable to harvest. Finally, during the fourth season of ownership, my farm revealed the giant non-typical as well as three other Pope & Young caliber bucks. Over the course of these four years, I arrowed a number of does from the property but no bucks, and the amount of buck sign as well as the total number of buck sightings and especially big buck sightings rose dramatically.

Of course, besides the time to grow a big set of antlers, a deer has to have the proper living conditions, which include food, water and cover. Water was the easy part here because our property includes four good-sized ponds scattered throughout the woods.

Food also wasn’t too difficult to provide, especially given that approximately 70 of the 160 acres was tillable. When we first purchased the land, all of the tillable acreage was in the final year of its CRP contract. Since the condition of these grassy areas had deteriorated over the 10-year period, I decided to put the land back into production. The first year I rented the tillable land to a neighboring farmer and paid him to leave five acres of corn stand as winter feed for the deer, turkeys and pheasants; but I knew that more effort would be necessary to complete my land’s improvement, so I made my first of many calls to the Whitetail Institute.

From that first conversation, I decided to put in a three-acre field of Imperial Whitetail Clover, which I did adjacent to the south edge of the 90 acres of heavy oak woods that makes up the majority of the property. The results from that first planting were astonishing, as each evening showed 20 to 30 deer feeding on the lush, green forage, including as many as ten bucks. It was during this summer that I started seeing Pope & Young class bucks regularly on the property; and on most any evening, I could find one or more of the bruisers feeding in my food plot. The trouble with the plot, from a hunting standpoint anyway, was its size – it was simply too big to hunt productively because the long, narrow field bordered heavy cover along its entire length so the bucks could enter and exit the field just about anywhere.

To help with this problem, I decided to put in a couple smaller food plots as well, both in small openings deeper in the woods where I hoped the bucks would come to feed earlier and offer better shot opportunities. Unfortunately, I was offered some free seed to try from another company and it didn’t come close to living up to my expectations; so I was soon back on the phone with the Whitetail Institute and ordered some Alfa-Rack and Extreme to put in this spring to complete the three food plots I intend to utilize on my land.

Even with top-quality food plots, I realized that the deer still need some type of supplements to give them the optimum in nutrition, especially at those critical times of year when does are carrying and bearing young, when bucks are growing antlers and when the deer are preparing for the long Minnesota winter. I started out with one mineral lick in an area of heavy deer traffic and used Cutting Edge products in this location with excellent results. The deer immediately began utilizing the supplement site, and now I regularly have to add dirt to the location before the whitetails reach China with all their excavating. Now I have three separate mineral licks scattered fairly evenly throughout my woods. All the lick sites are in heavy cover and adjacent to areas that show lots of deer traffic; and all are maintained regularly with Cutting Edge, 30-06 and 30-06 Plus Protein from the Whitetail Institute.

The final ingredient in my land’s transformation was to improve the cover available to the deer and other animals. The make-up of the property includes about 90 acres of heavy woods, mostly mature oaks but with several stands of planted pines and a few groves of poplar trees. While the oaks provide a considerable amount of feed early each fall when the acorns drop, I quickly realized that many of the trees had passed their prime and weren’t producing well anymore. Also, their huge canopies were blocking sunlight from reaching the forest floor so the ground cover was sparse in many areas of the woods. During the second year after we purchased the land, we hired a logger to thin out a small percentage of the oldest oaks, which provided some income to help defray other management costs, but more importantly opened up the forest and proved to be a huge boon to establishing saplings, brush and other vegetation that made these areas much thicker and more attractive as bedding areas to the local whitetails. In addition, the loggers pushed the topped-off oaks together to form huge brush piles, and the deer really like to crawl back into these mazes to bed down.

Food, water and cover are the three key ingredients to a healthy deer herd. Throw in age structure in the form of allowing young bucks the time to grow to maturity – if you are interested in trophy antlers – and you have all the management tools necessary to improve the health and size of whitetails on your property. With proper land management, small acreages can surprise people in regards to trophy buck potential. The beauty of any management program is that it benefits all wildlife, not just the deer. So if you want to start getting the most out of your land’s potential, and the most out of your deer hunting, start Deer Farming today.