Food plots or clear cuts

Food plots or clear cuts

Food plots or clear cuts is a question many ask.  Clear cuts are easy and provide income.  Food plots are time intensive and much more expensive.  You have to look at your big picture goals to figure where each will fit into your management equation.

Food plots or clear cuts for hunting

Food plots or clear cuts depend on which part of the habitat equation you are trying to solve.  Food plots provide 15 times the food tonnage of a clear cut.  If food is your limiting factor in the equation, go for it.  Clear cuts will house a local deer herd with high stem density and secure cover.  If your deer live on the neighbors and feed on you, pick a dead area or hole in your lineal travel patterns and add another bedding area.  Have a professional plan laid before you make a huge mistake, and know in advance you may be making a 20 year mistake if you whack all the trees in the wrong spot.

Sometimes neither is the answer.  If you improve the entire property, movement becomes completely random.  Random movement is hard to predict.  Stupid sentence but I am trying to drive home a point.  Random improvements will destroy the huntability of your land because you can not predict where the deer will bed, feed or water.  You need a solid working plan before you decide where to start cutting trees.  Get some help, or risk making a mistake you may regret for many years to come.  Food plots or clear cuts is not a simple question.   It’s an answer to problems you may have not yet uncovered.

Food plots or clear cuts

Food plots yield far more deer forage than clear cuts. You get 15 times the deer forage in a good food plot as you do a similar sized clear cut.  You may have a dead area or several on your hunting spot right now, and in the right spot that is a bonus.  Use your food plots and clear cuts as part of a comprehensive management plan, and you will score.  Set them up hilly nilly and you will get busted, and the deer will know you are hunting them.  Be careful, thoughtful, and wise when manipulating that slice of heaven we call deer camp.