Small Acre Whitetail Habitat Improvement

When I talk about a small-acre property, what I have in mind is property consisting of anything from 10 to 60 acres. Mine is closer to 100 acres, but I’m not counting the tillable acres. I’m counting the 50 or so acres I had to work with to make changes immediately. I've owned it for a couple of years now, which, when you think about how long it can take to transform a property, is a very short timeframe. I’ll tell you what I did to transform it into a premium whitetail habitat, and while I hope you can apply some of these methods to your own situation, every property is unique. Everything I did for my farm may not make sense for yours.

When I bought this property, it was basically a cattle farm. The landowner had run cattle across most of it. There was an area along the creek that the cattle couldn't get into and was good cover, but for the most part, it was your typical cattle property with a lot of pasture. The timber that the cows could get into is your typical cattle timber. It was well-browsed with not much undergrowth.

When I think about transforming a property into a whitetail farm, I primarily think of food, cover, and water. This farm has some pretty good water sources, and I plan to add a pond very soon. That will definitely change the game. However, for the purpose of this article and video, I will cover the first two elements—the food and the cover, both of which were lacking on this property from the beginning.

FOOD

This is really where the uniqueness of a property comes into play. As for mine, I had options. There was plenty of open space where food plots could go, but my idea was to keep the food near the center of the property. My core food plots – grains, greens, and clover – would be right at the center. The center is where I want the deer focused. If they bed closer to the perimeter, that’s fine, but feeding at the center is important for several reasons.

First, I have great access to the center via creek systems on multiple sides. Secondly, the center of the property is the most immune from pressure, such as with surrounding neighborhoods, or people driving by. The deer will move so much more in daylight and feel much more secure in this secluded section of the farm. The middle is a low-lying area surrounded by plots, so it is not visible from my entry to the farm, from any roads, or any point around the perimeter. There’s cover adjacent to it, so the deer don’t have to go far to get to the food and back to cover. I have 1½ acres of corn and 1½ acres of beans for late-season grain sources. I also have a clover and chicory plot for year-round food.

To create some diversity, I have another 1½ acres nearby with soybeans and brassicas. Any time you can grow greens and grain together or some type of diversity, you increase the use of that area. The deer don’t have to go elsewhere at different times of the year if they have everything here. I expect this to be a major hot spot in the Fall. Making this the spot the deer want to come to in the afternoons makes my hunting access and strategy much easier.

The main creek that runs through this property helped to dictate where to locate the food. Access is everything, especially on small properties. This creek allows me to travel in and out of the food area below the line of sight to get in, hunt the food plots, and get back out.

I do have a single exterior plot that provides a different wind opportunity for hunting and is easy to access. I planted it with a brassica and cereal grain mix. It’s a long ¾-acre rectangle teed to a little anterior clover and chicory plot. I don’t hunt on this plot very often, but it works really well as a transition out to the brassica plot. The deer are in there all day long. It’s a cool little spot right along the creek that provides a good amount of forage throughout the entire year.

To summarize, the primary considerations for my food plots are: first, how can I get in and out? Second, where do I want the deer feeding so they feel secure and secluded? Third, am I giving them enough food diversity? I’m going to give them as much as I possibly can to reduce their leaving my property to find what they want elsewhere.

Of course, food plots are only a part of it. There are adjustments you can make to the natural browse to increase their options as well. For example, you can nurture the acorn crop by removing junk trees that compete with the oak trees.

COVER

The next element, and I would argue, possibly the more important element when it comes to small property management and habitat is cover. With small properties, it's all about increasing your holding capacity. How many deer can you support? Food certainly helps with that, but you must have room, cover, and good bedding for the deer. Holding capacity was certainly something this property was lacking so I needed to increase it. One of the first things I did to help achieve that goal was to go into a 5-acre section of cattle timber that was very browsed-down and covered by a mature tree canopy and remove some of the pasture walnut trees. They weren’t of the highest quality, but they were worth something, so I did a select cut of the better walnuts and used some of the money I got from those to put back into the property. This also achieved the goal of opening the canopy to expose the sky and let sunlight in, allowing browse and cover to grow. Leaving the felled treetops behind creates instant horizontal ground cover as well. The understory has exploded in this area, and now there are deer beds all around here. Holding capacity has thus been increased, and burnout has been reduced. All the additional cover has also made it much more difficult for deer to see me coming from a long way off.

After taking some of those walnut trees out, I planted about 200 trees in this section and tubed them. I planted a variety of native hardwoods, including some walnuts, but went heavier on oak species as that particular section of the farm was lacking those. Less than 2 years after I planted them, they're already starting to grow above the top of the 5-ft. tubes. The tubes protect them from deer browse and act as a greenhouse. Trees grow quickly in them. I have those spread out all the way through this patch of timber that I took walnuts out of. There are still a lot of quality walnuts in here that will be valuable someday. I just took down the ones that were way over-mature and could potentially blow over in the next windstorm. It achieved my goal of creating cover, and it put a little bit of income in my pocket that I could put back into the property.

In another section of my farm, there’s a different kind of timber. When I first purchased it, it was the best cover and habitat on the property. It was a CRP (Conservation Reserve Program) that the cattle didn’t get into, with numerous trees planted in rows nearly 30 years ago. When you plant so many trees to the acre, you’re supposed to periodically do mid-contract management to thin it out so the trees aren’t competing with each other. When I came here, it definitely needed more thinning. There were so many of them that they were stunting each other’s growth. There are a lot of good species here, including oak, walnut, silver maple, and cherry. The key is to select the best of each – those with the best chance of thriving – and take down the lesser trees competing with them. This not only helps the best trees thrive but also opens the canopy to let more sunlight in and produce more browse on the floor. So that’s what I did. I had a forester come out to help me choose trees to keep and trees to cut.

The changes to that section of timber have been great. The browse has exploded upward, and the chosen trees have flourished. Felled trees combine with the browse to make perfect cover and bedding areas. I’ve continued this way, taking ½-acre sections of the farm and focusing on the TSI (timber stand improvement) to make every part of it a better habitat and increase the holding capacity of my farm. The cover makes the deer feel more secure and makes it much easier for me to enter undetected. I see a lot more daylight movement of the deer now.

I can't tell you how rewarding it is to see this place transformed. The most telling sign is the number of deer utilizing the property now compared to when I bought it. The amount of browse everywhere is also a good indicator. That's really what it's all about on a small property. You just have to ask yourself a few things: what can I do to attract more deer, hold more deer, and how do I make this property hunt bigger?

Good luck out there, and make sure to have fun along the way.

--Jared Mills