At the Ranch - Whitetail: How to Create and Establish Food Plots

In this video, I want to talk about how to create and establish food plots. Now creating and establishing your food plots is not as easy as it might seem. There’s a lot that goes into food plots and I’m going to take you on a step by step basis. We have just created some food plots on this Wisconsin property and this is the first year doing food plots out here as it’s our first year of having this property. So far, we’ve got seed in the ground, it’s been a month, and we’ve seen some very mixed results. About half of the food plots we’ve laid down have taken and half of them have not. I’ve learned a lot through this process and I want to kind of touch on some things that you want to do when you’re trying to create and establish your own food plots.

One of the very first things you want to do is get a soil test because you want to know what the pH of your soil is going to be. This is very important because you need to know how much lime you’ll need to get the pH of your soil up to. Most of our food plots are right around the five and a half mark, so we added some liquid lime. The product we used is from Deergro and it’s called PlotStart, otherwise you will have to hand spread the lime. You want to get the pH of your soil up into that 6.5-7 mark – so soil tests are important.

Then from there, you need to kill your areas. You want to have typically some type of field and you’ll want to kill it with some type of herbicide. I just use some glyphosate that I picked up from Home Depot, mix it with water, get in a water tank, put it in some type of sprayer then spray and kill those areas. Let it sit for about two weeks, make sure it’s really nice and dead, and you come through and till it up. Once you get the areas tilled, you want to wait for rainfall and then you want to get your seed in the ground right before rain. This will help those seeds to germinate right away. From there, it’s kind of watching it grow, getting fertilizer in the ground, and then you have the food plot established.

I would recommend in your first year planning some type of oats, rape, turnips, something with maybe some clover in your food plots. We planted a couple of our plots in just clover this year, and it’s way harder for clover to take by itself. I’m standing in a plot right now where it’s a combination of everything from peas, oats, rape, turnips, brassicas and the clover, so I would really recommend that.