Irregular Food Plot Shapes = Scent Proofing
Are food plots made equally? If you’re designing the perfect food plot, ideally it would be at the base of a natural funnel. If you’re creating them like I did with a bulldozer many years ago, then you’d want to run them east to west for the best sunlight. Food plots should be made long and narrow as to not disrupt the illusion of safety for the elusive Kentucky trophy whitetail deer.
Deer hunting in Kentucky has some natural obstacles that have turned into quality traits. We have some mountainous terrain that can make creating and food plot management a little difficult for a guy on a budget and without a bulldozer. On the other hand, if this hunting paradise was flat and easy to navigate, it would cost twice as much and the average hunter couldn’t afford the land anyway. Kentucky outfitters embrace the unfavorable farm settings because what follows farm settings is development and people. In the long-term, this makes deer management much more difficult and it will also drastically begin reducing the deer herd. Food plots are essential to bring whitetail bucks in your direction, but in the mid-south, there is not shortage of food and browse for the deer. It’s only when you start reaching northern climates is when the deer densities drop because of the lack of year-round nutrition.
So let me ask you the question, “Are food plots that are square in size bad?” Of course not! All the suggestions us “pros” or qualified writers talk about are just suggestions on how to maximize your odds. A blind squirrel finds a nut and people do shoot deer while smoking in their stand. Everything is relative to the experience and how you want to approach it. There are 1,000 things you need to cover to put the odds in your favor of harvest a Kentucky trophy deer. Outfitters will help you with ways to approach food plots and wind directions (article), etc., but there are so many other hunting tactics an outdoorsman needs to calculate within seconds of a buck being within their sites.