Ep. 1018: What Habitat Work REALLY Makes a Difference for Whitetails?

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. Your guide to the White Tail Woods presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light Go farther, stay Longer, and now your host Mark Kenyon.

00:00:19
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. This is Jake Hoefer. On this week’s show, we have Thomas Milsna, who owns the Untamed Ambition, to talk about habitat projects you should be thinking about right now. Welcome back to another episode of Wire to Hunt. I’m your host Jake Hofer, and today we’re diving into a topic that I think a lot of deer hunters care about but sometimes struggle to prioritize, and that’s habitat projects that actually move the needle. There’s no shortage of things you can do on a property, food plots, betting, cud hinge cutting, water holes, access improvements, tree planning. The list goes on, but the reality is not every project delivers the same impact. Some projects great real measurable improvements and how deer use the property, and others sometimes just feels like busy work. Today we’re going to talk about what actually matters. Joining me is Thomas Milsen from the Untamed Ambition. Thomas has a biology background and has been spending years working with landowners across the country, helping them design habitat systems that not only improve hunting, but improve the overall health of the landscape itself. And that’s where this conversation gets very interesting because when we talk about habitat improvement, we often focus on bigger deer or better opportunities, but the reality is that healthier landscapes can also mean healthier deer herds. And a time where hunters are increasingly concerned about diseases like EHD, the role that habitat quality plays in deer health is something worth paying attention to. So today we’re going to break down what projects actually move the needle, and how to do it and why you should consider some of these projects for this upcoming season. Welcome to Wired Hunt, presented by Moultrie. Let’s go in and get into this week’s episode. Here we go, all right, Thomas, Welcome to Wired to Hunt.

00:02:16
Speaker 3: How’s it going great? Great? How are you?

00:02:19
Speaker 2: I’m doing great? We have a lot of exciting things to talk about here today. It’s bring people are either relishing from a great season or even if they are, they’re probably identifying some different habitat projects that are going to help incrementally increase their success for next year and maybe even five or ten years later.

00:02:38
Speaker 4: So I mean a lot of different things.

00:02:40
Speaker 2: There’s a lot of different habitat Conversations that focus on projects like that will hit the high ones like hinge cutting, food plots, creating betting areas. But in your experience, what are a few habitat changes that actually move the needle to improve your property? I understand this is completely situational, but on a high level of the you know, you can sol for a living and you work on you know, your own place and all these different things, what is typically one of the biggest holes in the bucket that people need to get out the flat seal and slap it on a bucket and fix it.

00:03:11
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a kind of a loaded question. You know, every situation is so different, you know, and the complexities of every individual landscape or every area are so different that it’s hard to have, you know, that cookie cutter or generalized answer to that response. What I would say, you know, in every situation, our goal is always to analyze that objectively highlight the strong points, highlight the weak points of every property, and then we prioritize that, you know, what is that low hole in the bucket. When we are trying to build a property, we really focus on three main factors holdability, huntability, and management efficiency. You know, our our design element in and of itself is generally what creates the huntability side of things. The wholdability is somewhat related to the design, but largely related to the habitat. And then the management efficiency is how effective you can improve and maintain that habitat along the way. So you know, we’re talking about springtime, things are greening up. I was just in southern Iowa, which is drastically different from here in the Midwest. I mean, we’re forecast to get eight inches of snow tomorrow. But I get down there and I almost have like a little bit of a panic attack where I’m like, oh, spring us here, you know, like to bring us here, and we’re not ready. And all these clients are waiting to, you know, get ready to hit the ground running with spring. But every single individual client property has different low hanging fruit so to speak, or that one project that’s going to give you the most ROI well, you go back to holdability, specifically with habitat. The common denominator that I’ve seen on every property i’ve bet on this year is a failable ability of food. And you know, availability of food comes in a lot of different layers and levels. More often than not, we’re always thinking like, what’s the thing that we can plant. You know, what’s the magic bean or this food plot that we can plant, which in some situations that might be the low hanging fruit. It’s usually the easiest thing to address, which is largely why a lot of us gravitate towards that. That’s pretty simple. There’s a clear area there, or we’ll push open this area, will plant this seed. It’s going to solve our problems. But I think it’s really important to emphasize and for the listeners to consider or remind them, because we’re all aware of this at some level, right, But understand that when you look at the deer food pyramid, the cultivated food sources and that’s how I categorize them, you know, food plots and even egg fields. Those cultivated food sources make up less than twenty percent of a deer’s diet. Actually probably closer to fifteen or ten percent. Most of the year, so that’s not the thing that’s really going to move the needle for you. It’s all the other food groups in there, soft mass production, hard mass production, forbes and legumes, woody stems, bramble, stuff like that, woody vines, I was gonna say, bramble, and then your your woody brows in general. And then at the foundation of that food pyramid is your moss’s fungus and lichen, which are part of good habitat management, good forest stand management in general, and they kind of go hand in hand with the woody regeneration, which would bring me to, you know, probably the top of the list in most situations, the project that’s going to move the needle to most If a guy has an afternoon or a day to get out and do something, it’s going to be a timber stand improvement project of some sort that’s gonna you know, get ash. You back up your priority or your objective with any timber stand improvement project is going to be to get sunlight to the ground to promote regeneration. But it’s not always straightforward as that, which is why you know, it’s important to have a good plan or really understand what that project entails as far as like what you do and the results that you should expect, which is going to be based on a lot of different parameters, right aspect of that piece of ground, that particular area. So let’s back up. If I want to do a timber stand improvement project, and maybe I want to focus on an area that could be improved for betting. So I’m moving the needle ahead by improving cover, I’m improving availability of food in a secure location, which is going to increase the whole ability of the property, especially when you’re talking about mature bucks that are more susceptible the pressure. Right, So if I want to move the needle on that, and I want to assess that specific location, I’m going in there, and I’m looking at first and foremost the aspect of that location. Which direction does it faces it totally flat ground or is it a hill? How much sun is it going to get when I punch a hole in the canopy here? You know, in hill country where I am, you get a self facing slope. You don’t have to cut nearly as heavy to get the same amount of sunlight in there. But at the same time, there’s different levels to your TSI that will promote the best response, and ultimately, when we boil it down to management efficiency, we want to be thinking about this project, but then how do we maintain that or get ourselves in a routine that incrementally improves the property, whether it’s this one specific area that we’ve improved or the whole property, you know, painting with a more broad brush. But we don’t want to fall into this trap of go cut a bunch of trees like you mentioned hinge cutting. You don’t want to go like hingecut a bedding area and then think that you’re done right. So, like when I lay things out for the client as far as like priority projects, things that are going to move the needle, it’s like, what can we do now, and how do we do that in a way that is a one time time or money investment to push you forward? But ultimately, how do we manage that from that point on so that we don’t go backwards? And that’s what we see a lot on a lot of properties is you know, it’s a project, we cut, we do this thing, you know, maybe it’s broad scale logging project, whatever it might be, but we go in we create this disturbance. Ultimately, mechanical, maybe some chemical for cutting and treating and removing invasives, But how do we keep that in a state that is either constantly improving or at the very least maintaining so that it still offers that food value for de right.

00:09:18
Speaker 2: What are some of those things for someone that’s like, yeah, Thomas, of course TSI. Everyone says TSI’s one of the most impactful projects. I did it four years ago, and you know, it seems like every year. You know, first first two years it was really good and they were using it and there was a lot of brows and man, I found two sheds in their one shed season, and now it just seems like activity and use is going down. So like, what are the things to address of whether undesirable species are coming back up or you know, like what are some of the things that you can diagnose to where you’ve already done it and you’re a year four into it, Like, I need to revisit this because you’re saying the management of it is almost as important as the initiation.

00:09:56
Speaker 3: I would argue it’s more important for sure, you know. And that’s where I have two demographics, two multiple demographics, but two real main demographics of clientele, and both of them have the same problems, right, you have in your realtor so you understand this, right, the cost of land is not going down.

00:10:15
Speaker 4: Now.

00:10:15
Speaker 3: The guys that can afford hunting land either are so busy with their career that they don’t have time to put into it, or they’re yeah, I mean ultimately it’s the same thing, right, Either they’re a prominent businessman that doesn’t have a lot of time, or there’s someone blue collar guy that works his tail off and either doesn’t have a lot of time or doesn’t have an extra a lot of extra cash to jam into the property to hire someone to do these projects. Either way, I look at the same way. It’s like when we break these plans down into different projects based on a timeline. You know, year one, do this, year two do this, similar to like an EQUIP contract, right where they’ll be like year one, focus on this zone, You’re two, focus on that zone, but then go back and follow up on zone one, right, and you get you in kind this routine. But that’s where EQUIP kind of falls apart because then just like well, after three years and you’re paid and you’ve remove the invasives, what do you do so ultimately, prior to stepping into any of those projects, we need to be thinking what are we going to do as far as a controlled disturbance to maintain some level of early succession in this area. And you know my approach, I try to get really really detailed on properties. So we’ll look at specific betting locations, specific feeding locations, and various different types of food sources in general, and we’re creating travel corridors and so on and so forth. But between those locations, we’re trying to paint with a much broader brush so that we can manage at a more efficient level, because it’s unrealistic to think that a client’s going to go in and recut every betting area on their property. Now, again, every situation is different. So if I’m a guy that has fifteen, twenty, maybe even forty acres, you could do that, and you can do that, yeah, exactly, and that’s fine, But I could argue that you could be a lot more efficient with your time having a management plan right, and more productive as far as the regeneration and the response that you see from the seed bank and the current vegetation. So ultimately, what it comes down to is before you create any form of disturbance. You should be thinking two, three, five, ten years down the road, what is my follow up response to that to reset that area into early succession, which is going to promote a lot more food value. Right But ultimately or in addition to that, would be to govern the response of the vegetation or what you’re going to allow to grow. So TSI, to really boil it down and simplify it really for me how I explain it to clients, TSI. The mindset you need to have with TSI is termination or regeneration of what’s growing there. And then am I bringing in some added diversity to that location or am I just waiting for the natural native setting to respond appropriately, which you know, again, this might get in the weeds a little bit more. But what we know more and more now, what we’re learning more and more now is a lot of these invasive battles. It depends on the type of species, but a lot of these invasive battles are a result of soil at its core, the soil makeup this. You know, house soil has evolved over time from lack of management or previous management practices. For example, a property I just came from old cattle pasture. Right, So what happens when you have cattle on a pasture for a long period of time is they’re relatively selective of what they graze, less selective of what they graze, but more selective of what they browse. What happens to most cattle pastures ends up being a sea of Eastern red cedars, multi floor rows, honeysuckle locusts, yes, honey locus, all those things that pop up that the the cold that want to eat. So when you start to decrease the species diversity or composition of vegetation on the property, the soil structure starts to change. In addition to that, you have cattle that are you know, conducive to ground compaction. You know, especially if they’re in a pasture under all types of conditions and they’re not rotated, there’s kind of let to do whatever they want to do. Right, So there’s all these things at place. So if you go into a project and say, you know, another thing that could move the needle quite a bit for someone, depending on their situation, if they have decent timber, or maybe the adjacent property just got logged. So there’s some decent brows that’s going to be taking place there. But maybe their property has more open area. They don’t have a timber project that they can even do, so maybe that property, you know, moving the needle there would be increasing the native ford production and open areas. But just going in and killing off cool season grasses, you know, your seed bank response is likely not going to be desirable because a lot of things are suppressed or you know, have been killed off over time. And even just going in and throwing down seed, which is not cheap perennial native seed is not cheap fantastic investment. Don’t want to discourage anyone there, but just throwing that down and expecting it to do it’s thing isn’t always as straightforward either. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. But it’s a roll of a dice at a cost of three hundred to four hundred dollars per acre for a diverse perennial fort mix. Right. So when we look at that from that standpoint and kind of start with the foundation, you know, again we’re looking at the soil type, we’re looking at the soil moisture content, the current species compositions. How much so it’s going to get when we open up the canopy. And really at the end of the day, it just all boils down to having that plan, like how do I get ahead of this, you know, like whether it’s timber stand or it’s prairie. As simple a thing as like, before I go and plant this, what is going to be my next round of controlled disturbance? And if it’s something like fire, which I would argue at the most exactly so you know that’s going to be the most efficient, then it could be as simple as like, well, I don’t want to start managing that area unless I know I have good access to it, So maybe I need to put a road system in first, you know, And that might not require a bulldozerund site. It might just mean a weekend with a chainsaw and cutting a path where you can follow up a year later with a backpack leaf blower or drive a UTV through a certain area, you know, to get access to the top of the hill or the back corner of the property. Stuff like that. Access is going to be We talk about this all time. Right from a hunting perspective, access is so incredibly important. From a management perspective, I would argue it’s even more important because if you’re not accessing certain areas your property, then you can’t manage them, and not not efficiently. Right if you’re doing everything manually on the ground, piking back and forth, doing all these things like young strapping dudes like us can handle it, right, But then you hit that certain point in your life or you can’t or you don’t have enough time, and if it takes an extra day or extra half a day to prep that, then that project won’t fall into a weekend project list per se. Right, I kind of went down a tangent there, but I think you kind of understand where I’m going. There’s no like straightforward, easy response or approach. But I think the biggest thing is is thinking, like I want to do this thing, but what’s the next step to maintain this thing. It’s like I can I can go buy a nice chunk of lamb, but if I can’t afford the taxes on it, how is that sustainable? Or if I buy my truck and never get the oil changed on it, like that’s not sustainable either, Right, So then your time investment, your monetary investment, starts to decline. And then you look back and you’re like, well, did that really move the needle. Now on the other side of that, you know, that’s that’s talking like long term mindset, long term planning. Right. But if we back all the way up and go all the way back to the original question, like, what’s that one thing I can do now that’s going to move the needle for me this fall? Depending on your situation, you know, maybe you have a property that has relatively poor habitat, but it’s still holding deer because deer are a generalist species. They need food and cover. Food plus equals habitat in a lot of situations. Right now, what we see is that this concept of half atat right where you have cover here and food there, and that holds deer on the property, it’s not a sustainable, long term, resilient ecosystem by any means. But if we’re talking right here, right now, what do I do to move the needle? Or maybe maybe you’re a person that doesn’t have control over the property to begin with, maybe your permission base and you have you can do limited improvements, but you’re not in a position to be putting together a twenty year management plan right and you have deer there. I think that the primary thing to consider is if you have deer currently or you know, probably not currently if it’s poor habitat, because it’s probably not there in February or March right now. But ultimately, if you if you have mature buck activity or the quality of deer that you’re willing to put your tag on activity on your property, right because everyone’s goals are different. But if those deer are there but you’re not connecting with them, then it might be you know, as simple, you know, to move the needle is like dropping some trees or hinging some trees to create a barrier. And that’s where like when it comes to management and hinge cutting specifically, I love hinging trees to manage or to manipulate movement, not necessarily to create food value. I don’t want those trees to stay alive. I just want to stay off the ground so they don’t rot, to create a natural barrier that maintains for the next ten plus years. Right, and in time that’ll kind of fall apart two. But you can a lot of times condition deer to move through certain areas. So like an example I can think of, actually if you dial back two years ago, I probably four years ago, I did a big timber stand improvement cut on an area of our farm, and it moved the needle for sure. You know, we had a logger in, We took out some dead ash, we thin some hickories, we released some oaks, turned into a nice betting area. I hundred the fringe of that betting area a couple of years after that, and we were already seeing pretty dramatic improvements, dramatic increase in forage value in that location, increase in cover holding deer, pretty straightforward. But what happened is on stand I had my target book at fifty five yards, couldn’t get a shot right. Okay. So if you’re in that situation, and maybe you didn’t do a prior improvement, but that’s a situation. You’ve got an area that hunts well to a certain extent, but you have a lot of close calls, or you just can’t cross paths with deer. They blow right through an area that’s where you can go in. And what I did, ultimately was I created a mock scrape set up in one spot, and I felled some trees, some ironwood, some lower quality trees in a different area to force the deer movement around a certain you know, a barrier essentially right to force them around. So now all the movement flowing through there is within shot distance. Now when the deer there, as long as I’m there at the right time, I’m set up for success. And that’s a relatively quick project. So again, every situation is a little different, and when we analyze these properties, we want to look at it that way as like, what can we do to move the needle right now that there’s an overhaul coming to this property, But an overhaul doesn’t happen in one season, right, so how do we break that down? And then what are the low hanging fruits? Is it adding a food plot? You know, I was on a property yesterday and there was multiple food plots throughout the property, you know, and on their map they had two previous consultants on the property, so they had good plans, and looking at the map everything made sense, Oh, you’ve got all these food plots there, Like, how what do we need to change on the property. And then walking the property, it’s very apparent there are the food plots themselves were not great, Like the condition of the plots was not It wasn’t anything that’s going to be super super attractive to the deer specifically. I mean, we could talk about that in a minute or later on, right, but ultimately the food plots weren’t that great and the surrounding habitat was terrible. So if you think that you’re going to pull deer into your property with just a food plot, but you’re not holding deer to begin with, then that’s not going to move the needle for you. But if you’re holding to your and you put a food plot in the right location and it’s an attractive food source there, that can really move the needle, right. But it’s not a long term thing either, because every year you’re looking at going back in and redoing that at some capacity or maintaining at some capacity.

00:22:16
Speaker 2: What’s you know, for the end of March, first two weeks of April, what is what is the window of TSI or what are time sensitive projects that are like, man, if you’re going to do this and it’s kind of somewhat of a blanket statement for you know, the corn belt or you like or even you can throw in Michigan, southern Minnesota, southern half of Wisconsin, what are either the what’s the window of TSI? And second question of that is what are time sensitive projects for the end of March to the first two weeks of April.

00:22:46
Speaker 4: Like, if you’re going to do this, you need to get it done.

00:22:49
Speaker 3: Well. This actually is not a great time to be doing some certain TSI projects. So I’d emphasize that if you have a property that doesn’t have a lot of invasive pressure, then you can do just about anything. You know, cutting trees. When you go back to what I was saying earlier, you know this this idea or decision you want to make as far as I want to regenerate this specific species or terminate this specific species. Right right now is a great time for regeneration. When you cut a hardwood deciduous species, when it’s dormant, it’s got the bulk of its energy load in the root system. So when you cut it then it will regenerate with a lot more vigor when it comes out of dormancy. Inversely, right now, these trees are kind of starting to wake up a little. You know, also SAPs starting to flow. Guys are tapping maple syrup. Like I said, I was just down in Iowa, things are already turning green. So on the other side of that, if I’m trying to terminate any given species. Now is not a good time to do that because if I try and cut and treat with a chemical and that vascular system is moving the energy or the sap from the roots up, it’s going to push most of that herbicide out and you’re going to do it lot of work, and your efficacy is going to be dramatically lower. So it’s kind of a I don’t want to say, a wasted effort, but in many ways it can be because you might think you’re doing this thing that’s you know, one and done, and it’s certainly not. So this specific time of the year I would avoid, you know, and you’ll know if you’re cutting trees and they’re sap pouring out of them when you cut, then it’s definitely not time to be cutting and treating anything. But if you’re just trying to cut to create instant cover structure on the ground with that top, maybe feed the deer some buds right now, late in the winter and then set yourself up for hardwood regeneration or you know, herbaceous growth that’s going to come for getting the sunlight to the ground now is definitely a good time to do that. That’s what I would be focusing on more than anything. You know. Right now, we’re we’re what I’m personally doing across client properties or what my clients what I have them doing, is we’ve done a lot of the betting area cuts and stuff already, so we’re kind of working our way back now and we’re we’re finalizing and setting ourselves up for the food plot side of things, where we’re feathering edges, improving the edge structure. Maybe we’re prepping for tree plantings where we’re trying to peelback some of the non desirables and plug in some you know, more specific attraction based species in there. And then we’ll segue into pulling soil samples, prepping for food plots and so on and so forth.

00:25:13
Speaker 4: A lot to it, man, there’s a lot, a lot of it never happens.

00:25:15
Speaker 3: And that’s the thing. It’s like, it’s hard to be like, just go do this one thing, It’s going to solve all your problems, right, It’s just that’s just not the reality. In most situations, most properties have that one thing that can exponentially move the needle forward. But there’s, like I said, with the complexities that are out there, it’s not easy to say, like this is that one cookie cutter plan or idea that you should overlay on your property and expect to see the same results that that guy saw or that guy saw.

00:25:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, yeah, I completely agree with that. And I’ve been on a bunch of different farms, and it’s sometimes you can almost categorize farms to where depending on I mean most of most of where I’m at, obviously Illinois. So it’s like I can kind of categorize different farms here in Illinois. So let’s run through a scenario for someone that they did not have a great season. You know, they had night pictures of bucks, they didn’t find really any many sheds. Sign was pretty lackluster. But you know during peak rut you had just enough hope and excitement to keep you out there. But it’s like looking inversely, like, man, you know, something has to change if I want to increase my odds of success. So in that scenario, I’m picturing average blow average habitat. You know the field, you know, like there’s ag ground nearby, but you know there’s really not enough room to have a true destination food source. I mean with something like that, is it an uphill battle that can that’s worth hiking up the hill scenario and hopefully that’s enough context where you can picture a farm like that. I think realistically more farms than not fall into that category if it’s not strictly managed.

00:27:09
Speaker 3: Yeah, one hundred percent. You know, I would go back to Now, this is just operating under the assumption that someone has full control over their property, right, not necessarily like you said, maybe they don’t have the space or or it does come down to the time and the budget, right. You know. I talk about that food pyramid, and then directly related to that, I’ve got my time investment pyramid, like where should you be sticking your time on your property that’s going to have the longest and the highest ROI return on that investment. You know, when I have my discussion with clients, a lot of them money is not the issue per se. It’s the time, right, And even if they’re willing to hire things out, it’s like, you can only get so much done in a year, So we want to look at all the different parameters there. But if you have control over the property, every situation is different. To be honest with you, I don’t I almost rarely rarely promote destination style food plots on properties. If there’s egg in the area, the ROI on it just isn’t there. It’s it’s just not so if you had, if you had, let’s run this.

00:28:16
Speaker 2: Okay, so someone has I’m gonna I’m gonna put I did a podcast with doctor Bronzis Strickland and like the break even on a big food pot. What he discovered, I want to say it was either three or six acres. I think it was six acres. So Thomas, I have six acres that I can do whatever the heck I want to do. You’re not telling me to plant six acres of a corn and bean rotation and leave it for food. That’s that’s where you’re getting at, because that’s kind of.

00:28:42
Speaker 3: Yes it well, and again it’s all relative. If there’s egg in the area, Okay.

00:28:48
Speaker 2: Let me add a caveat there is agg in the area, and you flip a coin. Whether they put anhydris on it in November or if they work the field as soon as they pick it, like sometimes they do it, sometimes they don’t.

00:28:58
Speaker 4: So like you can’t bank all that nearby at well.

00:29:01
Speaker 3: And here’s where I’ve what I’ve boiled it down to. Okay, and there’s and my journey is obviously different from a lot of guys out there talking about this, Right, I’m looking at things. I’m trying to look at things objectively in every situation and not just say this worked here, let’s do this here and then ultimately, you know, I’m looking at this from the long, long game perspective. Where has deer habitat come in the last ten years, right? I think I think it’s been a great thing in the industry in general as far as like bringing a lot more awareness to improving habitat for deer. But I also think that we’ve gone off the path a long ways when we start to consider corn and beans as deer habitat period.

00:29:45
Speaker 4: Dear food, dear food.

00:29:46
Speaker 3: It’s deer food. Yes, it’s deer food, but even the ROI on that and the cost of that. You know what, from a holistic standpoint, right, I’m a holistic land manager, And I say that in the sense that I emphasize and and everything I do is based on managing systems and not individual species or individual plants. Where do deer fit into the system that they’re a part of, right, Deer they manage the vegetation on the landscape. They cycle nutrients through the landscape, so they are definitely part of the system. Where do hunters fit into that part of the system. We manage the deer and we manage the landscape, right, so we have to figure out this balance as far as like what problems are being caused upstream, what can we do to mitigate those, and how do we stop causing problems downstream?

00:30:32
Speaker 2: Right, So let’s let’s talk about where maybe we have gotten off off track. And I’m giving you the opportunity to say, like, hey, maybe we should think twice about this management practice or that management practice, or like everything you’re saying is long term, right, And I think inherently to a fault, deer hunters are one year minded next year, Yes, next year, you got any good bucks hunt later this year? And like that’s you know, that is to a fault deer hunters well, and.

00:31:03
Speaker 3: I I yes, And I don’t want to pretend like I’m like that much different from everybody else out there.

00:31:10
Speaker 4: Right.

00:31:10
Speaker 3: I used to say that I I used to remember my past based on the rock albums that were released by the artists I followed like back through you know, back you know, people listening to probably even know what CDs are anymore, right, but that I used to think about that and now it’s it’s on the target book that I pursued, right, I can think all of about I remember, like my wife was like, what year did we start eating? I was like two thousand and eight. I can tell you exactly when I started dating. How do you remember that? Because I remember the deer that I didn’t kill, the day that I didn’t go hunt to go meet you at college and go out to dinner. I was like, I remember that deer played this day, right, So I’m in the same boat, and you know, to back up on it again. I think that our biggest issue, the biggest issue is that we have we’re trying to follow, you know, and I don’t want to like beat the food plot horse to death, right, but with food plots and now it’s kind of starting to extend into habitat management as a whole. We’re trying to follow this mindset or this conventional management mindset and mirror conventional agriculture. Right, And if you take a step back from that, there’s nothing really great about how that’s how that’s helped our country, how it’s helped our environment. All these things. Right, the only benefit from conventional agriculture is it’s efficient in the sense that you put so much in, you get so much back out. But it’s failing us as a society as a whole. Right, we’re not producing the healthiest foods. We’ve got the highest disease rates we’ve ever had as a country. Our healthcare costs are through the roof. And if we turn around, we take that same model and now we’re employing it to farm for deer, create deer food. Where do we sit right now? We’ve got the sickest deer herds we’ve ever had in this country. In some areas there’s way less deer. In other areas there’s way too many deer. But we’re setting ourselves up for this long term failure because our ecosystem resilient and see is at an all time low because of the biodiversity. So to back up to the question the conversation with Bronson, the food plot size and stuff like that. Where I’ve shifted over the last five or six years is these bigger destination food plots. If we’re planting a ton of food, a cultivated food source to feed deer right out of the gate, our mindset is failing us. We shouldn’t be cultivating an insane amount of food to feed deer per se. Now, having a supplemental food source post rut early winter into the winter, I think is advantageous. Ultimately, I always refer to them as seasonally attractive food sources. So what can I plant there that’s going to hold ensure that deer aren’t leaving the property, especially during the hunting season, and ultimately pull them into the most huntable or accessible areas on the property so that I can keep pressure off of the more sensitive areas. Right. I talk about this all the time with clients. You know, ultimately we’re scouting, we’re looking for or looking to create the most accessible pinch points possible. There’s two types of pinch points that we look for or look to create, and ultimately my goal is to always to create some hybrid version of the two. We have a physical resistance type pinch point, like I alluded to earlier. Maybe you’re dropping some trees, maybe it’s a river crossing, you know, a hole in the fence, Topography, ravines, all these things that restrict deer movement on the landscape and choke deer down. If you go out and try and engineer a spot like that. It can go against you if you try and choke deer down too tight. So the other side of that is an attraction based pinch point we’re drawing deer in. It can be a food plot, it can be a water hole, some sort of limited resource. Well, when we hybridize a pinch point, it can go from either angle right. So we hybridize that we want to choke deer movement down to a certain extent and then draw them in the rest of the way. You know, it’s like kind of trying to get your parents to change their mind on something. You have to kind of plant the seed and influence it and ultimately has to be their decision. If you try to get a mature buck to choke down into a small gap, he’ll do it, but not very consistently. I’ve watched it many times. So these deer getting they spots and get nervous, they back out, maybe they go wide. You know, then you’re out of the game. So if you can choke them down to a certain extent draw them in the rest of the way, that’s a beautiful thing. With food plots, we do this in many different ways. Right, we can draw them into a big area, but maybe we feather the edges and create barriers, force them to enter in one end or certain areas, and that makes that three or four acre food plot hunt like a quarter acre a half acre, and then we know where to set up. But ultimately the issue that we see that I see more and more is this mindset of planting more food for deer that’s annual food versus perennial food. So there’s a concept we talk about frequently that is permanence, right, Like, what’s something you can put down that’s going to be more permanent on the landscape. Now, nothing’s truly permanent, right because everything’s evolving and changing, But what’s something that’s going to last more perennial type system? So what I’ve done a lot the last couple of years and all the designs I drop, well, we’ve shrunk down these six acre food plots and stacked our food plot create a system to stack our food in one area that ultimately has a lower footprint, a smaller footprint. So instead of planting four acres of food, because let’s be realistic, most of those big destination food plots have to be four acres because the browse pressure is so high on them that if you want to get one or two acres of standing beans to last through the hunting season, you have to start out with four acres. Okay, So what is the cost of that management efficiency? What is the cost of that? I can tell you the exact cost of that three hundred and fifty to four hundred and fifty dollars per acre probably on average for beans. When you start talking about seed cost, fertilizer costs, chemical costs, right, ye, Corns even worse. Four hundred to seven dollars hundred dollars per acre.

00:36:50
Speaker 2: Probably right, I mean, yeah, depending, you could probably make an argument that’s seven, seven, eight or nine hundred dollars depending on the chemicals and treatments and fertilizer.

00:36:58
Speaker 4: And corns are pretty hunker crop.

00:37:00
Speaker 3: And to anyone listening that’s planted corn the last two years and like that didn’t cost me that much? Just wait, just wait, because getting corn pulls a lot of stuff out of the soil and doesn’t put a whole lot back in the soil, right, And that’s a whole other thing too. So let’s actually talk about the cost of a food plot, like that on average, you know, depending on your planting practices, but on average, corn and beans are responsible for about two to ten tons per acre of top soil loss on an annual basis. Just by trying to force a monoculture that doesn’t protect the soil between the ropes. You lose a lot to wind erosion. You lose a lot to water erosion. Where does that end up? Right? That ends up silting in these ponds that are catching runoff. On top of that, the chemicals that go into that, where do those end up? Right? Those end up in those ponds? They end up in the groundwater. Now take this another whole other level. What has what happens to those ponds? Right? Anyone who’s listening that’s dealing with or or terrified of the next year ahead with EHD potential EHD outbreaks maybe took a huge hit last year. You know, hopefully the deer that survived are immune to it now and not didn’t just avoid getting bitten period, right, because you don’t want two three years of that in a row, right. One year sometimes is actually probably a blessing in disguise to help kind of reset things as much as it, you know, it hurts but but ultimately where is that coming from? Right, What’s this? What’s the problem the root cause of that? When you look at the landscape, and I can argue again objectively analyzing these landscapes, being on many properties that had EHD issues and seeing the weak links and all these properties, it comes down to biodiversity. So as simple a thing, and to go all the way back to the food plots and where my mindset is and the strategies I employ, and this is the same thing that we use to combat EHD, to combat CWD, to combat whatever the next nasty disease is. You know in the South, I’ve got Southern clients that were break seen for impact with the New World screw worm if you if you’ve read anything on that, right, this is a potential issue coming down the pipe too. Fly lays an egg and an open wound and basically that that worm eats that deer alive. So there’s there’s things like that out there. It’s you know, moving through the cattle industry. Why not. But anyways, the way that we combat that is by increasing native plant diversity on the landscape. TSI projects a lot of times can be overwhelming for people and harder to manage. And again I think that that’s where most people should be looking to move the needle. But if you do, and this is kind of our approach, if you take that six acre destination food plot and shrink it down to a super efficient two acre system, and then you take the remaining four acres and plant that to the HOXY native seed native perennial food plot mix, right, just throwing that out there, you know, a native food plot or native mix.

00:39:55
Speaker 2: So like for someone that’s like, what what is that? Why would I, you know, take up just food pot acres for something that doesn’t look really awesome like from the drone or you know, it’s like the deer are just going to be selectively browsing in there where it’s like most times probably don’t even know what they’re really eating because there’s so many different things popping up. So what’s in that that is truly attractive enough for someone to give up acreage?

00:40:18
Speaker 3: Well, and that’s the beauty of it, right, So we go back to habitat food plus cover eqals habitat. The beauty of native habitat hardwood regeneration native forbes is there’s a huge amount of food value in there. The timing of the year isn’t the same as a food plot.

00:40:35
Speaker 2: Right.

00:40:36
Speaker 3: That’s why I say food plus are seasonally attractive food sources. The food we’ll use the native forbes for example, Right, So pollinator planting, flowering forbes, like if you just whittle it down, like if it’s a wild flower and it flowers, it’s a wild a weed that flowers that is most likely a forb or legume. Those from a deer perspective, directly to the deer offer a ton of food value, specifically during the growing season. So to start out, you have a perennial plant with a significantly deeper root system that has evolved over the last four million, four hundred million years plus, right to supply those animals with the right amount of nutrients that they need. Deep root system, mining minerals, the fiber ratio in there with the protein, all these things are perfect for those deer. And that might be one bite of that plant today and not for a week. Right, But when you have a lot of diversity thirty forty fifty different species growing in any one given area, those deer in there every day throughout the growing season. And the reason I bring up that native food plot mix from hoxy is because there was a lot of thought put into that to engineer that to get the most desirable, most palatable deer species in there, and that starts to lose its attractiveness and food value going into like mid October time frame, which sets you up perfectly to pull deer into your food plots because they become more attractive, but at the same time, it still maintains the level of cover. So what we do on most of our properties now is we’re shrinking down our food plots and we’re filling that void on the outside with perennial food sources like that. So we’re conditioning deer to flow in those areas, providing a lot of you know, it’s basically like creating a big feathered edge or buffered edge in these areas and as it transitions in, you know, and adding shrubs in there. If we want to create better lines of movement, we plant rows of shrubs.

00:42:33
Speaker 4: Stuff like that. How tall does that make skit?

00:42:37
Speaker 3: Most of the time, you know, and again it’s going to be dependent on the conditions, right, you know, the soil type and whatnot. But most of the time, what we mean, there’s oh much taller than that. Really, I would say, you know, there’s there’s species in there, but there’s a it’s a wide variety. So you’re you’re gonna have shorter statute species like some of your like prairie clovers and stuff like that that are only going to get a foot or too tall, but and you’re going to work your way up to like golden rods and asters and stuff like that that are going to be three to four feet tall. And then you’re going to get up. You know, there’s some grasses in there, some extra structure and some cover.

00:43:11
Speaker 4: And grass in it.

00:43:12
Speaker 3: I think, yep, yep, you know, but ultimately you’re going to get I mean there’s things in there that are five six feet tall, depending on how established they are on the soil type. And why I love it is because from a deer perspective, like the best deer cover out there, especially in a transition zone, is eye level high on a deer. They can stand in it, they can feed, they feel safe and comfortable, and then you take a hunter and you put them at an elevated position even you know, like if I have a box line set up near a food plot like that, I like to keep them relatively low five six eight feet off the ground, not too high. But now you’re looking down into that so you can see everything. But the deer feels super secure and safe in there, right, But from a deer perspective, directly feeding on it huge advantage. But that’s not the point I’m trying to make here with with this whole system and the true cost of it. Right, So we go back to the disease mit again and managing a system as a whole. When we increase the vegetation or the diversity of plant species on the property, we increase the diversity of insects species on a property. Okay, when we do that, it’s the same thing for deer. If we only plant food plots that are attractive in the fall, then we shouldn’t expect to have deer on the property all year long. Right, So if we increase our food look at that whole total food pyramid, have a lot of food sources. We condition deer to stand on the property year round, or at least the bulk of the year. Maybe they’re coming and going, but they’re always anchored to that spot. The same thing goes when we look at insect diversity. If we have a lot of insects on the property. Now we’re anchoring and holding insectivores on the property. So our predatory insect population like dragonflies and predatory wasps increases exponentially, Our bird population increases exponentially, our bat population increases exponentially. Why is that important Because when Midsummer rolls around and the biting midge that spreads EHD works its way up from the south and creeps further and further north, bites a few deer, lays some eggs in the mud, waits for that next hatch. When that hatch takes place, if we have these predatory animals, these insectivores on the landscape, they clean up a hatch really quickly, and maybe you lose one or two deer, but these flies aren’t running rampant.

00:45:29
Speaker 4: It’s mortality in another experience, yes.

00:45:33
Speaker 3: And then they go lay these eggs in the mud again, and the next cycle is even worse. Right, So instead there’s like one round and mostly it’s gone. And we were talking about this earlier, like on properties that have really good biodiversity, we don’t have EHD issues, plain and simple. And it’s a snowballing effect because you know the sediment top soil that ends up in these ponds. That’s part of the problem. The chemicals that end up in these ponds, The chemicals we put on the landscape, they all affect other things. There’s a lot of collateral damage with them. Now I’m not entirely anti chemical, right, It’s just like what moves the needle. If we’re just putting a lot of time and money and thinking that a two or four or six acre bean or cornfield, it’s going to change the game for us, we’re setting ourselves up for failure. And I can take that to a whole other level on that too, because if we’re creating these plots like that, specifically a standing grain that is super attractive in the wintertime, right, what we’re doing is we’re pulling deer and increasing the concentration of deer on the landscape during the time of year where conditions are at their worst, the resources are at their lowest point in the season. So it’s easy from a deer manager standpoint to be like this is awesome, right, you know, and there’s consultants out there to talk like this, you want a big food plot because you want to pull deer in from all around. Late in the season. Well, if you’re in an area that has CWD, do you want a high concentration of deer on your property during the winter. And I’m sure there’s people out there right now rolling their eyes not real things. Yes, And now I’m speaking from the perspective of someone who has dead deer on their farm every year from CWD. Okay, So I think it’s also important to understand, like, if there’s people out there that are trying to pooh pooh the threat of CWD, if they’re not directly dealing with it in their scenario or on a client property, then they shouldn’t be talking about it, plain and simple. That’s my perspective right now. I’m not in the mindset of the sky is falling, right, you know, I don’t do anything any differently, to be honest with you, for CWD, we still need really good habitat management. Why because it keeps deer spread out and keeps them healthy. You know, it’s the diversity of the diet, the diversity of the nutrition that they receive throughout the whole year, and the consistency of it that’s going to keep them healthy. With that habitat comes the balance in that system. So we’re mitigating things not just the EHD spreading, biting midges, but things that increase pressure on deer, mosquitoes, biting flies, ticks, all these things cause problems for deer that can all be mitigated by increasing the biodiversity and having more predators on the landscape that consume these pests. And you know, these these these uh parasites. That’s as kind of drew blank, these parasitic animals, right, but ultimately with c TOWD in general, like keeping those deer spread out is a big part of it. But that’s not even the whole issue that I’ve been seeing more and more and more across properties. So again, sorry we’ve been going on a tangent here, but you back all the way up and like, if your goal is to improve your property for the long term, and this is all is my goal of clients, is what can we do that’s going to be incrementally improving the property without this like two steps forward one step back, or or more so one step forward two steps back is what we’re seeing more often than not, these big standing grain attractive late season foods versus what they do is they pull in a lot of deer so that in and of itself is a problem. But something like corn, when you look at it from a nutritional standpoint, it’s not very good deer food. It’s a very fast burning carbohydrate. You know, deer ferment everything in their system, right, so it burns fast. But it’s no different than people. So if we go eat a ton of carbs or a ton of sugary stuff, do you ever feel full? Or you just want to eat more and you want to eat more? Right, Like you go out to eat dinner and you eat, you know, you go to a specifically in America because of our grains and how they’re grown. Right, you go out, like eat a bunch of pizza. You wake up the next morning you feel like garbage, but you’re just hungry again. You just want to eat more and more and more. You’re never satiated. You have to have protein in your diet to feel satiation. And deer the same way. So if they go out and they eat a bunch of corn, you’re pulling all these deer in. Now you’ve got all these deer from miles around that have pulled in, And what are they doing when they go to bed down during the daytime? They’re just mowing down on your native habitat and setting you back. I mean this property that I was just on. When you want to highlight or emphasize the weak link on the property, you know, of the food sources that we grade properties on, we look at cultivated food sources. We look at soft mass production, hard mass production native forbes and brows, or native forbes and legumes, bramble and woody vines and woody brows, and then at the base of that is mosses, lichens and fungus. Okay, well, we greade all that and we explained to the client we’re looking for those low points, bottom hole in the bucket. This property I was on yesterday. I brought the client over and it was explaining the brows issue. But it can be deceiving because if you don’t understand the species you’re dealing with, it looks like there should be brows and it should be covered because there was plenty of brush and a lot of areas in the property. But it was almost one hundred percent Japanese barbery, multi floor rows and northern prickly ash, which is not an invasive but shows up with lack of fire, lack of management on this property the deer were eating. Like if I had to guess feet feet worth of the canes off of the multi floor rose, I mean the response where multifloor rose was browsed down to about a foot off the ground and the stem was like a dime size, And the same with the bush hunt or the northern prickly ash. I was just like, if deer eating this, that’s a problem. Like that’s a big problem, right, So it kind of explains that you know to move needles.

00:51:32
Speaker 2: So ultimately that’s a good spot check for people that maybe the next time they’re going out to the farm, look at for the browse line and look for what they’re browsing. And if you see a row of cedars on the edge of the field and you’re like, okay, well we have this is something needs to get addressed.

00:51:48
Speaker 3: Yeah, one hundred percent. But it’s a snowballing effect. And that’s why I like, I don’t you know my job at least the way I actually had to clients, Right, it’s like we’re going to take this thing. You know, we kind of started this out or we alluded to it many times, Like there’s a lot, there’s a lot here to talk about. Right, So let’s take this thing that’s super complex and intimidating for people who intimidate that yes, is all new to them right now. Well, and instead of trying to dumb it down to be like you know, and this is something that we were talking about earlier, and I’ve heard it many times from different consultants, different foresters, like, well, it’s not worth the battle fighting these invasives. You’re never going to get ahead of them. And that’s just blatantly false. It’s blatantly false. If you have a good management plan starting with the physical set up, the physical structure and components of a property, and access included, vegetation included, right starting there and working your way up, it’s very very doable. It’s very very doable. And if we ignore it in its entire and just say, let’s simplify this, just focus on a food plot. That thick cover that’s being produced from those invasives is advantageous to us because it holds deer. It really does. Right, anach form of cover next to any type of food will hold deer. I mean, you can drive through I’ve got a client up in Duluth, Minnesota. You drive through the Duluth Minnesota on any given day and there’s bucks bedded down behind wood panel fences in people’s backyards and they’re feeding on bird feeders and introduced alien shrubs in their yard. Is that good deer habitat right? Not really, it holds deer. Point being is we don’t want to oversimplify things to the point where it’s just like cookie cutter, buy this, do that. We want to take this complex thing and boil it down. And I do think at the end of the day, it’s pretty simplistic, just like focus on native diversity and then the species types. You know, basically the amount of structure and cover that you’re going to produce in any given area of your landscape is going to be based on the species and the disturbance or the return interval of the disturbance. Right. So the more frequently you disturb it with good management, you know, I say that because you can disturb and everything can turn into grass.

00:54:09
Speaker 4: Right.

00:54:10
Speaker 3: But the more frequently you disturb, generally speaking, the more food value that location is going to potentially have. So, like food plots fit right in that same equation. If I’m doing an annual food plot, I mean there once a year, maybe twice a year doing a couple of things for that provides pretty good food value, but it’s very narrow in that timeline versus like a timber stand improvement where maybe we go in and reset with fire. Maybe you can’t run fire through there, so you do have to do some chainsaw, bring a maulter in, brushog it off during certain times of the year. That you know, something you do every three to five eight years. You know, it just depends on the growing conditions, but that resets things, gets back to early succession, and that’s how we kind of govern the amount of structure versus food. But ultimately we want native habitat because it provides food and cover together, which is truly what habitat is. At the end of the day.

00:54:58
Speaker 2: One question that we’ll go to a quick rapid fire here more of a more of a request than a question. Give these folks right now a sense of words of encouragement of like, because when the people hear this, like, so you’re telling me I have to do more than just do my fall food pot to really be a true advocate for the for the landscape. And to your point, like the farms have really good habitat. They typically seem to be more resilient to EHD than the ones that have been degraded. So give a word of encouragement. This effort is worthwhile because for a lot of people, they’re gonna have to go down a wormhole and start learning a lot of different skill sets, which I like, I get excited about that.

00:55:39
Speaker 3: What do you say to them, Well, you know, there’s an evolution of a hunter, right, we probably talked about it before, I know, I know for sure Mark has talked about it on this podcast. Right, there’s hunters go through this evolution where you know, they’re just trying to get closer to deer and they’re trying to kill deer and then trying to kill a specific deer. But ultimately, as land managers we go through this evolution. I see this with my own clients. You get to a point where the enjoyment, the bulk of the enjoyment comes from working the land at some level or some capacity, right, And that could be a small thing, and that’s where I you know, food plots don’t generally move the needle, but I understand it. It’s kind of a gateway drug into land management, right, Yeah, because it’s like you do this thing and if things go right and you have a good plan or a decent understanding, And that’s where I would argue, like having a better understanding allows you to be more flexible and adjust your plan versus just like this cookie cutter chain of events that we follow and pray for rain and hope it works right. But ultimately, if you’re in this and you’re enjoying it, you start to get to this mindset where you’re trying to build something that’s truly long term. And I ask my clients straight up every time, like is this a long term legacy type property or is this you know, maybe it is a least property, or is this just like a here and now I want to make the most of it in the next five seasons. Maybe it’s just a land investment. I’m gonna flip it. I don’t want to put a lot of time and money into it, and I totally understand that too. But I think the biggest thing for people to think about or to focus on, is this concept of permanence or perennial systems, Like what can I invest my time and money in right now that’s going to move the needle for me? Maybe it doesn’t move it a ton this year, but maybe after a couple of years of implementation and initial management, you know. So like the native native food plot blend, for example, So let’s let’s prep for that. Let’s plant it. The first year, we keep it mode knees to ankles, knee high, mot it down to ankle height. That reduces annual weed pressure stuff like that. The next year we don’t do anything. By year three, it’s like alive and rocking, right. So once we get that set up, then it’s just you know, every few years we touch it either with fire or mow it, and we have a system there that’s feeding and improving the resiliency and the quality of our whole system, but doesn’t talk. It doesn’t take any more time or money after that. So that’s finally at a point where like we’ve done this thing here. Now we can move away from it. Yes, we have to revisit it, right, we always have to maintain, but it’s moved the needle incrementally forward in a way that’s not just like, well we got to do it all over again next year and all over again next year. So I really back to the food plot thing. I really emphasize with guys like building perennial systems to where you know, maybe something happens, business family, not enough time, not enough money. You could walk away from that for a year, and it’s not going to change the dynamic of how your property hunts. Period. You know, a lot of my clients right now are in our generation. A lot of them are popping out babies left and right. They’re starting businesses, changing businesses. You know, they’re doing all these things. And it’s like the conversation I had with the client yesterday’s like this, this is awesome, Like everything that you’re telling me makes so much sense at this point, and they’re a little bit disheartened from the fact that they wasted ten years from these other consulting plans that were just like a list of projects. Do these projects, you’ll see the needle move. But ultimately he said it straight up. He’s like, what we need to figure out is who’s going to do the work and how are we going to pay for it? Right, And that’s a whole other level of it too, and we can go down that rabbit hole. I mean, a big thing I do with these properties is we’re looking for ways to create more cash flow on it outside of you know again like a project based income like a you know, logging project, or even the limited cash flow that comes from renting out crop land, right, you know, and and and you’re a great a great advocate and educator on like the EQUIP and CRP programs. And that’s the other beautiful thing of you know, and not to not to give them too much credit, but you know that that that perennial native food plot blend from HOXY falls into a pollinator planting for CRP. So if you’re a guy that has row crop land that you want to improve habitat, you can get paid perak or to plant a perennial food plot for your deer. And it’s a beautiful thing when you can pull it.

00:59:54
Speaker 4: General general continuous is open right now, so this.

00:59:58
Speaker 3: Yes, get in there. But ultimately it comes down to like thinking about you know, there’s the short term things, there’s long term things. You know, put this water hole in, do this thing, like how do you maintain it moving forward? But the mindset shift that comes with thinking long term as far as like where can I invest my time and my money Now that’s going to set me up or more so maybe even set my children up for success, right, I think that’s a big thing that we’re we’re overlooking more and more and more now is you know, we’re just focused on how do we kill a deer this season? But if we, if any of us, take a step back and objectively analyze the current state of affairs, things are not getting better. They’re not getting better, right, they are in the sense that, like the I do think that there is a mindset, mindset shift happening in the industry, pushing more on habitat beyond just food plods stuff like that. But where it stands right now, the current the conventional practices are being pushed and preached and promoted by some of the biggest voices in the industry have not been setting us up for success. And if you take a step back and look at those objectively and go, is that guy’s mindset based on permanence or product sales? And that’s where we fall into this trap, and myself included, I sell food plots seed to my clients for a living, and not not necessarily for a living. You know, it’s a supplemental income, sure, but I’ll be the first one to tell you, like we should cut your food plots in half and pay for this one time expense that you can set yourself up for that’s going to increase the resiliency of your property across the board. You know, there’s a lot of it there, and there’s a lot of opportunity out there. But the mindset to go all the way back to the mindset of like invasives are here, they’re not going anywhere, we just have to deal with them is complete bs. You know. Another example of that is read canary grass is another good one. For a long time, the conventional thinking there, even within like nrcs and some of these government agents, you can’t get ahead of read canary grass. It just is what it is. Right. So, anyone that has a wetland area that has reed canary you know that provides a decent amount of cover during part of the year and then mostly it’s just lays out flat and zero flud value. Right. So we’re actually working with HOXY on creating some wetland mixes. But I bring this up is I want to just tell people like, first and foremost, there is a very effective approach to mitigating read canary grass. And secondly, when you look at ecosystems and their potential productivity. We rank things on a parameter referred to as net primary productivity, how much dry matter or forage production is produced with any specific habitat type. And when you look at different habitat types and what is the most efficient or the most productive. Water is the number one nutrient there. So the wetter the habitat type, the higher the net primary productivity. So when you have a wetland area on your proper to just especially and I’m thinking of this because I have a call count up here in an hour with a client that fifty percent of their property is a wetland area all recinary grass and.

01:03:08
Speaker 2: The trees, like is there like maples, cottonwoods, bastwood trees or.

01:03:12
Speaker 3: Is it around some of the edges.

01:03:14
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:03:14
Speaker 4: Other than that, it’s like a mat of reacan area right now.

01:03:17
Speaker 3: And almost completely flat. The other the property rolls into this like really cool like ungulated topography with some little peaks and ridges and stuff like that. So it sets up really well. It’s like you got food. You could have a lot of food in the swamp and a lot of betting up here, and even add betting structure and stuff in that swampy area. You know, it’s not like a true, true wetland. It’s more like seasonally wet. Right, it’s wet enough that it’s choked out a lot of stuff. But recnary is thrived, is what it is. But you know, something like that from a productivity standpoint, has the potential to not only increase you know, dramatic amount of biodiversity on the property, which creates resiliency, but ultimately feed your deer an insane amount. So you don’t need to have five acres of alfalfa on your property to feed the same tonnage to those deer. And at the same time, it keeps them all spread out throughout the whole year, not concentrated around those only food sources on the property.

01:04:10
Speaker 2: Real quick, for someone has freak canary, what is the book? As fast as possible, I want to be respectful of your time. What’s the quickest way to get rid of it again?

01:04:18
Speaker 3: Or you’ve got to be thinking management. So first and foremost, you gotta if you can burn. If you can’t burn, you got to figure out a way to create a burn break around the perimeter of what you’re trying to burn. And what I would tell people, and this, you know, is another big thing that I preach is like the more you can cooperate with your neighbors as better off it is because sometimes there’s a ton of time and money to create a burn and break across the middle of a swamp if the property line is there. But if you talk to your neighbor and say, hey, can we just access on this and maybe we do a collab and we do this together. Right, So that’s one side of it. But ultimately timeline there you want to be thinking, is you want to burn you know, in the springtime or late summer, but you want to burn off the thatch later, thatch later and then a fall. Treatment of herbicide is critical, like either cleth or even just gly you know so, and I tend to lean on glyphysate a lot more. You know, glip State’s been in the news a lot negatively, but it is the lesser of all the evils. I will tell you that right now. All of those herbicides have downstream effects or soil residual effects. Glyphysate is the least of our problems. It just becomes more problematic with repetitive use. Right, So, like food plot wise, we try and peel off the chemicals as much as possible once we get food plots established, different topic of conversation, but in the fall specifically, it’s important because when those plants are starting to go dormant and read. Canary grass has a very risemous root system. It’s you know, essentially creates like a turf barrier, very similar to turf grass, but like insane. And another mistake I see guys make is like, well, I went, I worked up that area when it was dry. Don’t do that. Every time you bust those roots in half, you just multiply that. You know, you cut that worm in half and it regenerates into two worms. Right, So you don’t want to approach it from that standpoint. You want to fall treatment of herbicide. And that’s why I like GLI. It’s cheaper, it’s equally or more effective in general, but it’s the timing of it. And you want to hit any cool season of grass in general, if you can hit it after a cold stretch in the fall when it’s still warm, you know, warms back up and it’s still actively growing with a fully herbicide like that. The big thing is in the fall, it’s going to grab that herb side. It is going to draw it down on the root system and usually in one year, a lot of times two years, you can wipe out most or all that reed canary by doing that. If you try and burn it and spray it right away in the spring, it’s hit or miss because it’s pushing a lot of energy up and it’s actually growing, it’s a lot harder to kill. So that’s the protocol that we follow. And you know now with drone sprayers and stuff like that, it’s a lot easier to get that done. You know your conditions. And also with glyie you know you can get Wetland approved glide which has you know, different type of surfactant and built into it. But ultimately you can use the herbicide at the most effective time and not be limited by the ground conditions per se, or even like the pressure it puts on your property. Instead of the zigging and zagon out there with an ATV or you know, bigger equipment or god forbid, you have to do it with a backpack sprayer and that volume right, it would be terrible. A drone guy can do it super efficiently in and out and out with it. But it the key thing there is you got to reduce the thatch layer so you get better contact with the herbicide, and then a fall treatment of the herbicide is a really good way. And if you get into the part, I usually would give it at least a full year to make sure. Once you get to that last fall treatment, then you can go right in there a lot of times in broadcast in that perennial blend, and it’s got the whole winter to cold stratify and it’ll get a big boost the next year. So that’s that’s our operating procedure in there. And you know, again there’s a lot of layers to it, depending on site conditions and you know, individual landowner goals and such. But that’s very effective.

01:08:02
Speaker 2: Okay, real quick, rapid fire. Most underrated habitat tool in your arsenal.

01:08:12
Speaker 3: Most underrated habitat tool in your arsenal. I mean, obviously it’s easy to say a chainsaw or a drip torch, right, but I think I think we talk about those a lot now and people are starting to catch on to it. Yeah, I mean, you know, again, it kind of starts with that foundation. Sometimes the most underrated habitat tool is just a plan, plain and simple. That’s fair. That’s fair, you know what I mean? Because again, like we don’t want to be thinking like project, project, project, and setting yourself up for success. You know, the burning thing always comes up. And I have this conversation with every single client. Are you willing to burn? Do you want to learn about burning? Some guys have done it, They’re all for it. Some guys are apprehensive. Some guys are completely against it for various reasons. Usually they’ve had a a traumatic experience. I had a client that had a house burned down.

01:09:06
Speaker 4: Oh my god.

01:09:06
Speaker 3: It’s just like, I don’t even want to think about running fire through here. And I always try and ease their mind. I’m like, I’m not saying this to brag. I just want to give you something to relate to. I did all of my personal burns last year with my four year old daughter and my eight year old son. They were the only staff I had, right, And I say that very very very cheap, not super effective. They’re mostly spotters, right, you know. I park my daughter on one corner, safest spot she can be in. You watch that fire line. If that fire gets across it, you yell for dad. Son can go on the other side. He’s a little bigger can make better decisions. Give him a shovel, electrically floor. If it hits the fire line, put it out. If you can’t get it out, get out of there, yell for dad. Pretty straightforward. But ultimately what it all comes down to is having a really good plan laid out. You know, we’ve got a good plan. I know the timeline there, I’ve got the you know. I could also say, like, you know, an on underrated habitatool will be a bulldozer, right if we cut in burn brakes or a mulcher cutting in a burn break, or a skitzteer chainsaw, you know, all that falls into their backpack, leaf floor, creating access points in burn breaks, something that’s easy to maintain, where you know the conditions look right today, I throw on the leaf bloor, go out, zip a perimeter around that I’m ready to burn and not like this ongoing thing where it’s like, oh, this is all this prep that comes you know with that, but ultimately having the plan laid out and it’s no different than how we hunt. Right, It’s like if I’m a guy that only has like, you know that one week out of the year that I can hunt my property and I have to really be dialed in. I’m looking for a very specific set of conditions to go into some of those really really productive spots, and if I hunt them at the wrong time, it can cause problems for the whole property. Right. The same thing goes with a burn plan or any plan. It’s like, if I have everything laid out in front of me, where I understand the timing that’s going to promote the best response, then I’m just sitting back and wait for the conditions to be right and I can jump and go do it right now, you know, maybe I’ve got an hour at the end of the day. Up, zip up there, relatively easy, right, you need more an hour to burn most of the time, not the burn itself, but the mop up afterwards. Right, But even that, it’s like, oh, we’ve got the right conditions today and rain’s coming tomorrow. I’m burning, and I’m gonna watch it a little bit and I’m gonna sleep a lot better knowing that rain’s hitting, you know, at the wee hours of the morning to suppress everything else. But yeah, you know again, drip torch is great chainsaw. You know it is probably going to move the needle for more people more than anything else. But that’s short term if you don’t have a long term plan. So I would argue and we could whittle it down to having a plan, a good plan. And I’m not saying that from the viewpoint of like you need to hire me, but you should write things out on a piece of paper, take your map, lay it out, look at every individual tary of your property and go, Okay, what do I want this to be and what’s it going to take to get there? And then what’s it going to take to keep it there? Or how do I reset it? Cause you know, again painting with a broad brush. There’s gonna be properties where you know, maybe all they’re doing is managing via timber harvest. Okay, well, then don’t harvest the entire hundred acres in one or two years, stagger it, break it up a whole bunch in a mosaic so they’re in there every five years and you have a rotation in there, right and again you got to stay ahead of the invasives. That’s a big problem that we see on these properties where they just go on and cut heavy and there’s no management plan, because then you don’t get any good regeneration and then then you’re talking a lot more cost perakre to get ahead of it down the road when you decide that or come to the realization that it’s a problem.

01:12:33
Speaker 2: Essentially, yeah, most overrated habitat practice. And then and then that’s it.

01:12:39
Speaker 3: Most overrated habitat practice. You know, I don’t want to jump on this bandwagon, but I would definitely say hinge cutting is right up there.

01:12:47
Speaker 4: Why is that?

01:12:48
Speaker 3: Well? You know, and again I don’t I don’t want to be I don’t want to generalize too much. I definitely employ hinge cutting and utilize hinge cutting, and promote hine cutting to a certain extent. But when you’re hinge cutting, I think it’s important that you want to look at hinge cutting and again, what is this going to turn in two years down the road? A successful hinge is very problematic down the road in the sense that it’s hard to manage. It’s one hundred percent manual reset of that hinge. So if you’re a guy with a small property or even a big property, and you have like a handful of very specific hinge cut areas, betting areas, screens, whatever however you create those, then you just have to have that on your reoccurring schedule of every x number of years, I’m going in there and I’m recutting that, right, versus going in flush cutting or cutting like pollard cutting and cutting out different heights and stuff like that to encourage regeneration at certain levels that can be managed a lot more easily either resetting with fire or just going in and cutting like one felt swoop, whatever it might be. Where hinge cutting I think is the most effective and how I utilize it the most is that back to what we’re talking about creating barriers or obstacles in some sense, when I hingecut to create a barrier, I don’t want the tree to stay alive, so I’ll cut it as far the way through as I can to keep it hanging on. And sometimes I’ll leave a hinge cut it and i’ll girdle it below the hinge, or usually girdle it first and then hinge it so it’s easier to get access to. But ultimately I just want to keep that tree off the ground because I want a barrier there that doesn’t rod away in three to five years, and also keeping it off the ground creates a little bit better barrier also, Right, But if I keep it off the ground, out of the moisture, less bacterial, less bugs there, it lasts a lot longer. I’m creating structure that lasts a long time. So if I go in a bedding area, i might hinge one or two trees in there, but I’m not doing it to keep them alive. I just want instant back cover. And I’m understanding that in time it’s going to fade. You know, it’s not going to be a permanent solution. But I would definitely argue hinge cuttings. You know, it falls right in those parameters of a project that creates more work for you down the road. And I’ve been on so many properties where there’s these nasty hinge cut messes that you know, basically, it becomes a tree with way too many stems to try and manage again, and then around it is filled in with invasives. It’s hard to access those spots and becomes a tangly mess, and then the mature bucks just don’t like them as much. You know, the doles will talk in there, the bucks will bet on the backside of it, but they don’t generally get into it. And I say this, you know again, people are listening to this and be like, wow, that’s bulls. Yes, you know, I’ve seen that on my property at work. Every area is different, right, it’s all relative to the area. But as far as things that I think are way overblown or way overdone are like massive hingecut projects for sure.

01:15:35
Speaker 2: Well, Thomas, if someone’s fired up and wants to learn more, maybe once to get a plan. Where is the best place to get a hold of you and anything else you want.

01:15:45
Speaker 4: To plug here?

01:15:46
Speaker 1: Yeah?

01:15:46
Speaker 3: Well, hopefully I didn’t just confuse everyone or turn there.

01:15:49
Speaker 4: There’s some confusion, but hopefully sparks curiosity.

01:15:54
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, well you can reach out to me. Instagram is probably social media where I’m the most act give the Untamed Ambition. My website is probably the best place, you know, if you if you’re serious and you want to plan or you want to have a detailed conversation, the best thing is just go to my website and schedule a free call. That’s just the Untamed Ambition dot com.

01:16:13
Speaker 4: Awesome, Well, thank you so much, Thank you