Food PlotsOne of the best tools creating and holding big bucks are Food plots. Here is a plot we seeded in late August 2007. It has turned out great!
The two kinds of fields that we use to give the whitetails good nutrition year round are clovers and brassicas. The clovers are perennials that will come up year after year. The deer and the turkeys really love clover. Brassicas are annuals that need to be replanted every year. The Brassicas I use consist of Rape, chickory, and turnipes. They start as starches then turn to sugar after the first frost, deer won't eat them until the first frost, and after that they will eat it like crazy.
The are two kinds of fields to plant; forage fields and hunting fields. The forage fields are to provide the deer with year round feed. These fields should be large enough to support many deer.
The hunting fields will be in or near the woods you plan to hunt. They should be irregular shaped and secluded so the deer won’t be afraid to come to them during the daylight. We planted a nice clover/brassica mixture last year. It is only ¼ acre in size which is very small but the property we hunt is only 40 acres. We did not hunt directly over the field; we hunted the trails between it and the bedding area. This was done so we would not spook any deer off the field when we left after hunting in the evening. This strategy worked for the me as I took a nice two year old 8 pointer on the second day of the archery season. If you really want to grow and draw bigger bucks try planting a good deer food plot.
Do you want to instantly know what the PH of your soil for your Food plot is ? Here is a nice, small, easy to use PH indicater to give you instant results.
PH Tester - AWH Price $9.99
 Here is a great buck from Dean Loppenow and what he has to say about AWH Seed.
"Hi Dale Thought that I would share a picture of the deer that I shot November 4th on our property in Richland Co. He has a 23 1/2 inch spread with 14 scorable points. He was checking for does just outside a foodplot of your Brassica Blast. This foodplot has been a deer magnet since I planted it in late August. My mom has been bowhunting for many years but has never shot anything, so this year we set up a ladder stand right in the Brassica Blast for her. We are in a unit where you have to shoot a doe before a buck, so I figured that the doe and fawns would be hitting the plot pretty hard early in the year. The plot worked like a charm, she shot her doe, but also saw four other does, six fawns, two six-pointers, and the buck that I ended up taking in November. Our farm has about 80 acres of standing corn and the two farms around us also had about the same. The Brassica Blast plot we were hunting was a little under one acre in size so I would say this stuff works pretty well ! Thanks Dean "
Here is a real nice AWH Food plot that Brad Ten Pas put in near Crivitz this year. The picture were taken on Oct 27th. The little clump in the middle is a spot that had a small ring of wire around it. Inside the wire it grew to roughly 18" but outside as you can see the deer kept eaten down.
Here are three pics of one of our hunting plots. Last fall we put "AWH Fall Fusion" in and it worked great.
The first picture was taken in April of this year, there is still some left over "Rape" from the fall mix growing. My son Ty is reseeding the plot with "AWH Autumn Feast". The second picture was taken in the middle of July. Due to our lack of rain, the weeds did better then the clover. The third picture taken was in mid September. The rain came and now the plot looks great. This is what we did to the plot this year;
4/30 reseed with clover mix and fertilze.
5/30 mowed plot to control weeds.
8/30 reseed again with clover mix and fertilze.
8/30 mowed plot.
We never tilled the plot this year and look at the results.
We reseed with a clover mix in the spring then mow and reseed with a brassica mix in the fall. You can do this year after year. You can do it too. 
For Food Plots in Southern Wisconsin, contact Dean Loppnow Food Plot Services for custom food plot installation. Dean is based out of Ixonia, Wisconsin. You can reach Dean at 262-370-4713 or 920-474-7472.
Or email them at dean_loppnow_jr@yahoo.com
Dean Loppnow Food Plot Services - Food plot Building in Wisconsin.
Here is what Dean has to say about AWH Food Plot Seed:
"I have to say that I am impressed in the quality. I told you awhile back that I had planted each of your seed types in rows on my own property to see how they worked, and boy did they work. The turnips in your mixes are at least twice the size of the other brand that I put yours up against."
Here is how we start a new clover patch. The first thing we did was get a sample of the soil and have it tested for the pH level. We took a small sample from different spots in the food plot and took it in to our local county Ag Office. This cost us about $10 and took about 10 days. The soil analysis said our pH was within the proper range 6.0 to 7.0 and it stated what fertilizer our soil needed.
Now is the time to get busy. We started spraying to kill all the plants and weeds with a herbicide like "Roundup" or "Killzall". All the plant life should be dead before tilling the soil. You can use a hand sprayer like ours showed in the picture, or a larger pull behind sprayer for bigger plots. Be sure to use the correct ratio of hebicide to water and follow all safety instructions listed on the label when mixing and appling chemicals.
When all the weeds are dead, it is time to use the brush cutter and get all the dead weeds and shrubs chopped down. We used a walk behind brush mower on our plots. It will be more work to start a new food plot then it will to replant a existing plot due to all the weeds and high brush that will have to be cut.
You can rent high brush mowers from you local rental store for about $40. You should be able to get all the brush cut in one day depending on how big the plot is. After all the weeds and shrubs are down it is time to till the soil. While we are tilling the soil, we add the fertilizer that was recomended from the Ag Office.
Once the soil has been tilled and the fertilizer added, we will roll the soil to compact it, then we will spread the seed. For small plots we use a hand held seed spreader. For a larger plot you can use broadcast seeder mounted on you atv or tractor.
After seeding we use a roller to press the seed into the soil. This is the last step, now we wait for rain, as you can see it is very dry. Hopefully the rain will fall and our clover patch will grow well and the deer will come and eat. It is not too difficult to create a good food patch, just a little work. Feel free to email me with any questions about creating food plots. Thanks,
Dale
We took the following pictures on May 28th, 2006.
The picture on the right is our first food plot we made two years ago. We planted a top end perennial mix from one of the largest food plot seed makers. Last year I found lots of yellow rocket or mustard weeds growing in the plot. I pulled them by hand and got rid of them. Now this year there is even more yellow rocket in the food plot.
We now have to spray all of our food plots and kill off everything and start all over to get rid of the yellow rocket. We will then reseed with our own, high quaility AWH seed.
To make a long story short, Read the label before you buy food plot seed. The seed we planted had 29% "inert matter" in the mix. Well, we all found out what "inert matter" is: "weed seeds".
All of our own AWH Seed contains less then .5% inert matter. AWH seed mixes will give you much better results then the so called "high end" seed mixes from the big guys. You can purchase our AWH seed mixes below.
For the Best Food Plots, Click here to order AWH Premium Food Plot Seed.
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Here is a picture of another plot of ours. We planted this one last year. There is more yellow rocket in this one then the other plot. Once again we used a top end seed mix from from a major seed company.
I thought that the yellow rocket was coming from the surronding fields in the area, what I didn't realize until yesterday was that the yellow rocket was coming from the expensive top end seed that we planted. We planted the food plot in a 1/2 acre square. Look at the picture, it is a square, 1/2 acre of yellow weeds.The weeds didn't come from other fields, it came right out of a bag of food plot seed!
The year before, we had planted a small 10 x 10 clover patch from a cheap farm store mix which had a very small percentage of inert matter.The next year we planted the big 1/2 acre plot around it. As you can see in the picture there is no yellow rocket in that small patch, only in big patch.
