I have an almost 3 acre field in my front yard that I use for food plotting. Over the years I have found that I get the most bang for my buck by planting soybeans. They get the most attention in the winter. The colder and more snow we get, the more deer we attract. I plant 2+ acres of the beans with a few strips of sunflowers for color and birds and I use the rest, less than an acre, for experimenting with other plants. Right now it is all clover. In the summer when the beans and clover are being used by the deer it is just the residential deer. In the winter they come from all over. It would be interesting to know how far they come from and how they found out about it. You can see my property boundary where the beans end. The field on the left was also beans this year and the field on the right was corn. I've planted corn before but didn't draw as many deer. Since I have no way of harvesting any of the crops in the spring the beans are much easier to deal with being both corn and beans are round up ready. You can also see that the deer started on the outside edges of the field and are working closer to the dwelling. The main reason for this is because the deer know about my dogs. The trails in the snow verify this. My back yard is 40+ acres of woods and hills. When the deer come down the hills in the evening to feed they take routes around the dwelling to avoid the dogs. I finally got the dogs trained not to bark their heads off when they see the deer. My big dog just lets out a low growl to alert me to the deer. That was a pretty good challenge because he don't think anything but us belong on our land! Since the end of December The deer have been coming in nightly. It started out to be about 12 to 15 then kept growing to now where there are 25 to 30 at one time. I could have posted this in the Food plot section but I didn't.
There's probably about 25 deer here. They're getting closer. It's hard to see but the back deer of the four in front is a wide buck. I think it's my biggest one with 12 points.
Gotta love Soybeans and clover. Makes for some great front porch views!!!! Now if I could somehow keep those darned turkeys out of my food plots so that my deer could have them!
Thanks for the comments. I've got turkeys also but they don't do a lot of damage. A couple days ago I had a group of long beards in the beans but only once. Might be because the snow is about 16" deep.
It is interesting driving thru farm country, you will on occasion see corn fields that were not harvested but you never see a bean field fail to get harvested.
One of the biggest bucks I have ever seen was hopping from row to row in a soybean field just north of Vicksburg, MS. My uncle found about an acre where deer had cleaned out the middle of a corn field. Didn't know it until he got close to the middle.
