What are your opinions on winter feeding? such as corn feeders or bait piles. Not for hunting over just strictly for winter feeding. Do you use them? Do you want to use them? Share some thoughts!
I plant my bait pile in May. It's there all winter to be used as needed. I feel like I can help better by planting quality food sources as opposed to trying to do winter feeding. They have access to 3 acres of standing soybeans, half an acre of brassicas and over an acre of clover and chickory on my 40 acres.
We do food plots as well on our main properties but one piece in particular we just got and haven't had time to do food plots yet, I was thinking about doing some winter feeding on this piece until we can get something going.
I'm not opposed to winter feeding as long as you know what your getting into. If you decided to do a winter feeding, you need to continue that throughout the winter completely, stopping too early could have a negative impact as the deer will get conditioned to eating from the food source instead of browsing. For me personally, we just don't have winters that are so harsh that the deer can't survive on their natural browse. I understand that other areas of the country have much different weather patterns than we do, and it could be more beneficial to have a winter feeding program. Also for me, the cost outweighs the benefits for me. Again, in a harsher environment, I might have a different opinion. I still use corn a little in the spring in summer, but mainly to help do inventory and see what deer are using my property.
well this winter in MN is pretty mild so I sure they have plenty of food available but when we get 2-4' of snow it might be a different story. Maybe ill feed accordingly
I would LOVE to plant food plots everywhere I hunt but my main farm I hunt in SE MN the farmer will not allow us to plant food plots so winter feeding is my only option there. It has been a great winter so far but that could change quickly here. We put out a ton of food to make sure to keep the deer as healthy and unstressed as we could.
Over 1000 pounds of third cut alfalfa, 1200 pounds of corn, 350 pounds of soybeans, 100 pounds of mineral and 50 pounds of sunflower seeds.
i do some years. depends on how much $ i have at the time. 1 year, i put out 33,000 lbs of sugarbeet tailings. had over 100 deer feeding daily on the pile. it was gone within 1.5 months. snow got to deep to get back with more. kinda sucked because i had just logged my woods and had some great browse coming back. all those deer took a toll on that young browse.
The biggest problem I had when putting out corn was growing Boone & Crockett Raccoon's. Those things would rule over that corn pile and run the deer off.
I get raccoons all winter, I am pretty tolerant of them until I get more than 6 and they start giving the finger to the trail cam then the traps come out.
We feed all year around at the ranch with 350# bossbuck feeders. We have 14 so far and plan on getting one per hundred acres by 2016 which will be another ten. I also keep mineral out year around. I mix a ration of ~half corn/milo and soybeans. My trail camera survey at the end of December 14 showed a gain in numbers, decent sex ratios and poor to okay'ish reproductive survival rates and also a vast improvement in antlers over 13. We went from averaging one ten point buck on each farm in 2013 to averaging two on some and three to five on the others. Also our top end bucks were larger and had more inches of antler. I think that's far too big of a jump to write off to just having a good year of rainfall.
This topic got me thinking, found a guy who will take the raccoons and I ordered a new dog proof trap.
