How to Plant Ag Food Plots

Planting agricultural-based food plots can be one of the best ways to hunt late season. It can result in some of the best hunts in the world where you see a ton of deer. Having corn and bean plots that does are routinely feeding through creates social hubs for bucks and a lot of opportunities for you as a hunter. Whether you're cutting them off once they leave the bedding area and enter the feeding area, or you have a blind on the feeding area, you have a good chance at getting them in bow range pretty much all the way throughout the season.

When I'm talking about ag plots, I'm talking about corn, soybeans, and I'll throw sorghum into that mix as well. Those are the three main types of food people plant for deer.

Location

Step one, when it comes to putting in an ag plot, is to select your location. There are a couple things to keep in mind here. You want to have great access whether it's a tree stand, a food plot, anything I'm setting up to hunt, it's going to be strategic for access.

Second, I want to be as tight to the bedding as I can be. The reason for that is you maximize your daylight activity on your plot when you're tighter to the bedding. Even when the conditions are not ideal, you're still giving yourself a chance at deer in daylight because you're close to the bedding.

I realize sometimes you might be limited on where you can put your plots depending on how your property lays out, but the closer you can be to those goals, the better.

Seed Selection

Step two is a pretty easy one, and that's to select your seed. All the following steps depend on what seed you plant. If you're starting a new food plot, corn, beans, and sorghum each have slightly different needs in regard to fertilizer and spraying.

Soil Samples

I think this is probably one of the most undervalued steps of any food plotting process, especially when starting a new food plot. Certain plants like certain types of fertilizer, but when it comes to your ground and maximizing nutrition for the plants, there are certain elements that you wouldn't know to enhance if you didn't do the soil test. There are a ton of different things that play into that, but it's always a step that I recommend.

Ground Prep

Step four is where our work comes in. We're going to prep our ground. Depending on what this could be, I'm going to combine mowing and spraying into one step here. If you have a lot of brush on your plot, go ahead and mow it and then let it regen for a week or two. Depending on whether you're planting corns or beans, you'll be in the April to May timeframe. You can plant beans all the way into July.

Fertilizing

Your soil test is going to determine fertilizer type. Corn and sorghum love nitrogen, so you'll want to go heavy on that for those crops. Beans don't necessarily need nitrogen. They're legumes, so they're producing nitrogen and putting it back in the ground as they go. Beans are a little bit better for your soil. Corn can be hard on your soil, so when you're looking at recurring plants, you want to consider things like crop rotation, heavy fertilization, etc. You can kind of play with that, see how your ground is, and go from there.

Spraying

As far as spraying goes, I keep it kind of simple. I do Roundup and/or 2,4-D and some kind of pre-emergent a couple of weeks after mowing to let that region come up and get a good kill. The great thing about most soybean and corn varieties is that as soon as you spray, you can plant, or you can even plant and then spray, so it saves you a little bit of time. You can be at the farm for one day to get all your work done.

Planting

There are a ton of different ways that you can plant corn and soybeans. With beans, you can even broadcast them if you prep your dirt beforehand and then compact it after broadcasting. Beans don't require that much depth, depending on your variety. It's around three-quarters of an inch. In my experience, they'll grow a lot shallower than that and do just fine.

Corn is a little bit trickier. It has to be two inches in depth at least, and, depending on your soil moisture, there's a lot of things that go into that. That's where drilling and having a corn planter will come into play, or knowing somebody that has the ability to do that. There are a lot of guys out there who put in food plots for people and, it just takes maybe a little asking around to find somebody who can do that for you.

I personally recommend drilling. That's how I put in most of my food plots. When it comes down to it, I'm going to drill beans and you can even drill corn. I personally don't have experience with that, but a friend of mine does land management for a living. He drilled in a ton of corn this year, and it came up great, so I'm excited to see how that goes throughout the year.

Replanting

Once your seed is in the ground, you want to keep your eye on it. Sometimes replants happen, whether that's due to browse pressure or dry conditions. But a replant doesn't mean you weren't successful. Stuff happens, we do it all the time. Even when you have good stands that come up, if you're not fencing your food plots, you're going to deal with browse pressure if you have a lot of deer around, and that can really ruin the plot pretty quickly.

Respraying

Progressively throughout the summer as your weeds come back, after your pre-emergent wears off, you'll spray again. Whichever seed variety you have in the ground will determine what you spray. If it's Roundup-ready beans, don't go spray 2,4-D on it. Generally, I try to go towards agricultural beans, which are Liberty-ready, 2,4-D-ready, Roundup-ready. You can spray just about anything you need to on it. Cean plots are great plots. It helps your plants thrive and maximizes your yield and the food for your deer.

Plot Fencing

This step is optional, but I think there are a lot of benefits to it. It's a lot of work. It's a little bit expensive, but if you want to make sure you have the best food source come hunting season, if you've planted that plot specifically for deer, it's hard to argue with fencing them to maximize longevity through the late season and throughout the year.

--Rye Ludwig, Midwest Whitetail