The Ultimate Guide to Food Plots Without Big Equipment

I'm out here this morning in one of my favorite little food plots.  It's only maybe a sixth of an acre.  It’s small but very, very effective.  In this article, I want to talk about food plots in general, but before I dive into it, there are a couple of things I’d like to start with.  First, a quick explanation of why I do food plots, and second, a comment on some of the misconceptions about food plotting in general. 

Why I Plant Food Plots

I plant a lot of food plots every year, not just for myself but primarily for other people, landowners, and friends.  I get to see a lot of different areas and see how the deer respond, but I also get to try a lot of different methods.  I don't own any big equipment personally. I sometimes have access to bigger equipment, depending on which properties I'm working on, but every year, I still do food plots by hand, or the “poor man” method, as it’s known.  The primary reason that I plant food plots really isn't directly for hunting.  Most often, I don't sit right on the food plots.  I would rather be back in cover, away from it.  Looking back at most of the big deer I've harvested over the years; very few have been right on a food plot. I do think it helps keep the deer on and around your property more often and for longer periods throughout the entire year. Mostly, I cultivate food plots because I truly enjoy the process.  It's a ton of work, but I love sweat equity: put in everything you can and see the reward.  For me, the reward is watching properties become more habitable by deer. I like to see the deer enjoy spending time there and watching the fawns this time of year.  It’s cool to see all the work bring growth.  There’s a small-scale farming aspect to it that's truly addicting for me. I've enjoyed doing food plots so much that I'm now a part owner of a food plot seed company.  I put a ton of work into it every year. 

Food Plot Misconceptions

One thing I want to point out about food plots, in general, is the misconception that they are a rich man's game, that you need a lot of equipment to pull it off, or that you need a lot of space to pull it off. I can tell you from personal experience that year after year after year, that's not the case.  As I stated before, I don't own any big equipment myself. Even when I do have access to equipment, sometimes I think it's just easier to do it with just a backpack sprayer and a hand spreader.  Those can be very effective.  Even if your situation isn't what you see on videos or shows, there's likely a spot you could tuck in a little food plot and have it be a very effective little spot, even if it's not very big. 

Another thing I want to point out about food plots, in general, is I think they have a bad rep, especially if you haven't done it before.  The term "food plots" kind of generates a negative connotation – like it is “cheating” and gives the hunter too much of an advantage. I have not seen that in my experience. As mentioned, most big deer I've killed were not on food plots.  Those who say that overlook the fun aspect of putting in these food plots. To me, the experimentation, the trial and error of seeing what you can grow, and how deer respond to it are all rewarding reasons to pursue it. Just give it a try and realize you’re improving the property, improving the health of your deer, whether it’s a property you own, a permission piece, or just a little corner of an ag field.  It's fun to put some effort back into the land and see the beneficial results. 

That said, let’s talk about food plotting. I’ll keep it high level, as the topic of food plots is certainly something you can really get into the weeds on (pun intended).

This is really for those of you who are new to the food plot game and don’t have access to big equipment. Every year, I plant food plots with minimal equipment, and you can’t tell the difference.  Neither can the deer. They don't know if this plot was planted with a weed eater or a $60,000 tractor.  Yes, doing it without big equipment takes longer and requires a bit harder work, but the result is the exact same. 

Environmental Factors

With food plotting, just as with agricultural crops, there are environmental factors that play a critical role.  Two such factors are location and the soil.  Your seed must have good soil contact, and the dirt itself must have the proper nutrients to facilitate that seed.  That includes your fertilizer and lime.  One of the first steps that should not be overlooked when planting a new food plot is getting a soil test to know exactly what to put down for fertilizer and lime to change the pH level.  If you skip that step, you're already putting yourself at a disadvantage.  Soil tests are easy and cheap to implement.  At the end of the day, they will likely pay for themselves.  You won’t put down fertilizer nutrients that the soil does not need. 

Sunlight

Regarding location, how much sunlight is it getting?  Almost everything needs sunlight to grow.  There are certain species within the food plot category that do better in shaded areas than others.  You know, this plot I’m in is relatively shaded, and that's why the combination of clover and chicory I use works well here, but it still needs some sunlight.  Don't pick a spot in the middle of the woods with a tall tree canopy that just shades everything out pretty much all day.  Try to find a spot that gets four-plus hours a day of sunlight. How much sunlight your spot gets will also dictate which seed you should use. 

Rainfall

Another big environmental factor that is out of our control is rainfall.  Everything you're planting is going to need moisture to germinate and grow.  While you can't control that, you can somewhat control the timing of when you do things.  For example, for fall food plots that are planted late in the summer, I give myself a month window to get seed on the ground, and I’ll look at the weather forecast to pick the actual day. If I see one or two rains in the forecast, I’m going to get out and get that seed down just before it rains.

Choosing Your Seed

When it comes to choosing the right seed variety for your situation, one thing I’ve learned about the seed industry is that there's a big variance in seed quality across the board.  As with any other product category, there are the low-quality, cheaper, more generic brands and the newer, improved varieties that have better characteristics such as superior drought tolerance, heat tolerance, and browse pressure tolerance.  There are seed blends that make sense and pair well together from a deer nutrition and attraction standpoint.  And then there are some blends where it just looks like everything got thrown in a bag – a wide variety of stuff, with none really growing well together. It can be overwhelming but try to understand what you're buying.  Are you buying a seed off the shelf that has "VNS" (variety not stated) printed on it, so you can’t really determine what’s in it?  Or are you getting a variety you can look up and find data and reviews for?  Just be aware of what you're purchasing.

The price difference between cheaper seed and higher-quality seed is usually not enough that it's worth opting for the cheaper seed and hoping for the best.  You're better off buying the better seed and not putting yourself at a disadvantage immediately.  In choosing the right seed, here are things to consider: your deer density and, more importantly, your plot size.  Anything a quarter-acre or less, you must factor in the amount of food you will put in that spot and the deer browse pressure. My first choice is a clover/chicory mix. A small plot like mine provides a ton of forage in a small area. The deer can't over-browse it.  It regenerates quickly and does well in a small area.  My next choice would be some type of brassica blend. That also provides a lot of forage but is a slightly higher risk of being browsed out in a small plot of a quarter acre or less. 

Anything bigger than a quarter of an acre, you start to get more room to play and more seed choices.  In fact, for anything an acre or bigger, I usually split the plot in half in some capacity for more variety.  If you have an acre to work with, you can really get creative and offer the deer two different types of food.  Maybe it's a half clover/chicory, half brassica blend.  You can rotate those year after year.  Once you start getting an acre and a half and bigger, now you can include grains as well.  You can have a soybean food plot, a corn plot, or a sorghum plot.  It’s hard to grow less than an acre and a half of those grains because the deer just don't let them get to maturity.  They get browsed so hard during the growth stages – especially corn and soybeans – that you really need enough acreage to allow for an electric fence to keep the deer out during the growth stage.  In my experience, anything less than an acre and a half is just not worth putting into grains.  Instead, I opt for a green combination such as brassicas or clover and chicories.

Clearing Pre-existing Vegetation

Once you have your spot picked out, the first step is to get rid of the existing vegetation. There are a couple of ways to do that, but the primary way is to use chemical spray.  You can do that with a backpack sprayer.  I use a backpack sprayer all the time on the little plots.  You could use an ATV sprayer or tractor sprayer. Sometimes, if it's tall vegetation, it helps to mow it off first before you get in there so you can get a better kill with the spray on the shorter stuff that may be growing up in between the taller stuff. Then you'll want to find some way to get rid of that dead thatch once it dies off. If you have a disc or a tiller, you can do that. I've burned it off with fire. That dead vegetation burns off quickly.  Just keep in mind a couple of things.  When you're clearing a plot, let's say you disc it up, till it, or even burn it, many times you're regenerating new seed. When you're regenerating new weed seeds like that, sometimes it's best to let whatever you don't want to grow back, then spray it again before you plant the seed that you want in there.  That will prevent you from having to fight weeds growing within your food plot. 

For spots that aren’t super heavy with vegetation, I've often taken my backpack sprayer and sprayed and seeded on the same day.  Because I'm not disturbing the soil, I'm not regenerating new weed seed.  I'll just spray it, broadcast my seed, and that dying vegetation folds over the seeds and does a good job of keeping moisture down on the ground that those seeds can utilize. Certainly, you won’t get the perfect germination out of just broadcasting seed without prepping a nice seed bed, but you can get good enough.  And again, that's about as minimal as it gets: a backpack sprayer and a hand seeder. I did one a few weeks ago in a new plot, and it's already coming up.  The clover/chicory is already coming up, and that'll fill in nicely. Very few weeds have regerminated just because I didn't bother the soil. 

Seeding the Soil

If you can access a tiller or a disc, you can get a nice seed bed, till it up, and get that soil nice and soft.  Most of these small seeds that we're talking about, such as clover, chicory, and brassica, are very small, very small.  You do not want to plant them very deeply. A quarter inch or less is enough. Just a nice light till. Ideally, if you have a cultipacker, you run over the entire thing, the cultipacker, then seed, and then cultipack again to really get that good seed-to-soil contact. That's very, very important. If you don't have a cultipacker, you can use your ATV tires or a lawn roller. If you can just press that seed down into the soil rather than just letting it sit on top of it, that seed-to-soil contact will make a big difference.  There were times when I didn't have access to something to press it down, and in spots where I left tire tracks or footprints, that's what germinated the best and came up the quickest compared to the seed just sitting on top of the soil.  Again, the ideal method, if you have access to equipment, is the disc or till then cultipack, then seed, then cultipack a second time. That will result in good germination for your food plots. 

Fertilizer

Regarding fertilizer, get that soil test done to get your fertilizer recommendations. If you can apply the fertilizer while you're discing and incorporating that fertilizer into the soil, that will give you the best results. With certain fertilizers, nitrogen especially, you can have some volatilization of it where you're losing some as it sits on the ground, especially on hot sunny days.  If you can incorporate it into the soil, you significantly decrease that volatilization while increasing the seed's utility.  If you don't work in the soil, you're relying on rainfall to do that for you. If you're not going to incorporate it into the soil before planting, then time it before rain so that the rain can help work that fertilizer into the ground.  The best time to do that is at planting or right before planting. I've done it after planting, too, just before rainfall. As an example, once brassicas get up and germinate and have a few inches of growth, they really like nitrogen. You can go top dress just to give it a little extra boost of urea, which is straight nitrogen.  You can broadcast that before the rain and really give those plants a boost as they start to grow and really fill out. 

The other thing you can do that really helps, especially on a year that has drought conditions or a lot of heat and you're not getting that rain to broadcast fertilizer, is you can use a foliar fertilizer, which is something you spray just on the leaves themselves.  That's what will absorb.  It doesn't have to be worked into the ground or anything. 

Fertilizing, Weed Control, and Mowing

So, your food plots need a shot of fertilizer.  There are water-soluble options, or there are just straight liquid fertilizers you can run through a backpack sprayer.  I do that almost every year on my food plots.  I'll go out, especially in the mornings, and spray the leaves with a water-soluble fertilizer to give them an extra boost when we're not getting the rain we need.  When it comes to maintenance on food plots, it's certainly not a plant-and-forget; just show up in October and expect to have a great food plot to hunt over.  Maintenance is involved, and it depends on what you've planted.  With brassicas, your maintenance would be the fertilizer option I discussed. If you have a lot of grass coming up in it, there are chemical options that are grass-selective, such as clethodim, which you can go spray the whole food plot with because it won’t hurt anything but the grass.  Weed control and fertilizer are the main things to consider when plotting brassica. With clovers, it's somewhat similar, but you also have the option of mowing.  Clover plots like to be mowed at least once or twice a year. With clover/chicory plots, you want to eliminate some of the annual weeds that are coming up.  Again, you can spray the clethodim in for grasses. There are some chemical options to take care of the broadleaf within a clover plot, too. 

Closing Thoughts

This is only a very quick overview of food plots, and there's so much more to consider, but this should at least provide you with a starting point. Think about things like location, and don't be afraid to experiment with different spots and different shapes. Try different mixes of things to see how the deer respond. I can't emphasize enough that the fun part is learning, trying things, and seeing how the deer respond.  Don't be intimidated by it, either.  There is a ton to cover, but if you just keep the basics in mind and understand that you don't need a lot, you can plant food plots with a backpack sprayer, seeder, broadcast hand seeder, leaf blower, weed eater, fire – all minimal in terms of equipment. You can get a good-looking food plot established to provide yourself with a nice little hunting spot or just provide the deer with extra incentive to stay on and around your property.  The final thing I want to say is don't be afraid to reach out to myself or other resources. I got into the food plot industry partly to help people get into it or become better food plotters.  Please know that I'm available to help with your specific situation.  I enjoy that process. If you haven't tried it before, the biggest thing I can say is just try it. Give it a shot, and I think you’ll find yourself in a situation like mine, where you become addicted to it, and you become addicted to the work and the experimentation of it.  So, uh, best of luck out there. Reach out if I can help.