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 week on the show, I'm joined by Jakeofer and a surprise guest to talk about private land conservation and habitat work that can help wildlife. Right now, all right, welcome back to the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by First Light and their Camo for Conservation initiative. And today we are back to wrap up our Conservation Month series, and we're wrapping it up in a really cool way because I think it's going to be very applicable. 00:00:58 Speaker 3: To a lot of folks. 00:01:00 Speaker 2: So far, over the last four or five weeks, we've talked high level, you know, the status of deer and deer hunting in America. We've talked public land policy and conservation issues. We've talked kind of big picture making nature and conservation nonpartisan again. And today I want to talk kind of on the ground, hands in the dirt conservation and to help me do that and to really lead the way doing that is my pale and podcasting content creating extraordinary in his own right, mister Jake Hoefer. So, Jake, welcome to the show in a different, unique capacity today. 00:01:38 Speaker 3: Yeah, super unique. I feel it's for someone that listens to a radio show or something and they have the step in guy. These are these are This is a tough position to walk into, but I'm extremely excited and I feel that didn't get my hands dirty and finding someone that can talk about how people can put some things into action right now instead of theorizing about it. I'm extremely excited. Yeah, so so so. 00:02:00 Speaker 2: Like Jake just said, the plan for today is actually to let Jake take the reins on the show, because if you've listened to the podcast over the years, you've heard me mention this a couple times that I've always thought that Jake is the best podcast host out there outside of myself. If I were in a second, there's anyone, obviously, I don't listen to myself. If there was a podcast I listened to that I actually enjoyed the host the most, it was always Jake. And so Jake and I are working on some possible collaborations coming up here soon. That hopefully we'll be able to announce soon. But in the interim, I thought, why not let Jake take this puppy out for a walk and actually host the Wired Hunt podcast for a week. He is someone who has a lot of experience in the world of private land conservation and habitat work of course, with your own podcast, the Land Podcast, and a lot of the things you've done the past, Jake. So today, what the kind of man date or objective I guess I'm putting forth for you, Jake, is to go out and find a really great expert guest who can talk to us about ways that we as land managers or owners or folks that just simply have somewhere we can do something good on the land, How we can do that, how we can make things better for deer and or other wildlife and or the natural world. So, with that kind of task and that objective, Jake, I would like to do two things now before I run away and let you take this take it from here, Can you really quickly for folks give people a quick background on again you know how you got to this point and what you're up to right now and why you're who someone I think is a really good person to help lead this conversation the rest of the way. 00:03:49 Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll be happy to put some words in your mouth here now I'm just kidding. Aside from that. No, So my name is Jake Hoefer and worked with Exodus for a super long time and throughout that process has built the podcast and anyone that there's a lot of people that don't know. But Exodus closed this doors at the end of December, and I was in an interesting position from a career standpoint of what am I going to do next? Really enjoy these conversations, and actually bought back the Exodus YouTube channel and the podcast and just relaunched that on March twenty fifth, and it's this WHTL and the Social Hatters a white Tailed Deer. So a lot of the conversations and type of content people have experienced in the past is going to continue and will continue to evolve as well. And then also run a show called the Land Podcast, and that was birth out of me. You need to learn a lot and recognizing that a lot of other people need to learn about land ownership and everything that goes along with that. And we've helped over one hundred people by their first farm whether they emailed in or texted, or whatever the case may be. So this conversation is right up my alley, close to my heart, and I love seeing the landscape improve and helping people find the information that will help them do it too. 00:04:59 Speaker 4: I love it. 00:05:00 Speaker 3: So here's the game plan from here. 00:05:03 Speaker 2: I am going to step away, and I'm gonna let you bring in your expert of choice to have the conversation from this point forward. Jake, I will just say this, take good care of my baby. 00:05:16 Speaker 4: Be. 00:05:17 Speaker 2: Number one focus always is providing the most possible value per minute that we can to our listeners, and I know that you know exactly how to do that. So I'm gonna say, let's let you take it from here, Jake, with one hell of a conversation about private land, conservation, land management, and real stuff that we can do right now to make the world and our deer hunting property or lease or Buddies farm or wherever it is, how we can make any of those places better. 00:05:46 Speaker 3: Let's do it, Skip. How's it going great? How are you I'm doing great. I'm stepping in from Mark here. This is a little out of my traditional recording approach, but I'm really excited to have you on here where we're wrapping up or he's wrapping up habitat month, and I figured who else to bring on? Then a guy that's been through the gambit started with no knowledge? Is that fair to say? To very advanced I will say. 00:06:19 Speaker 4: Yeah, zero knowledge. Yeah, so that's the opposite of bragging. So I'll definitely take that badge of honor having zero knowledge on any of this stuff and making every bone headed mistake known a man. So yeah, yeah, let's start there. 00:06:35 Speaker 3: What okay, so I give you a five hundred dollars gift card to go anywhere? What are the must have essential tools for someone to perform some habitat projects on their farm? And maybe it might be a little bit more than five hundred dollars, or maybe you get a little crafty can go to in a state sale or garage sale or Facebook marketplace. But what are the key things that guys really should have in order to start tackling some habitat projects on their farm. 00:07:00 Speaker 4: I'd say a bag seater, a chainsaw, and a backpack sprayer would probably be Yeah, it'd be my five hundred dollars. I'd get it done for five hundred bucks, Okay, red bag seater, and then I'd want to pro sauce, so i'd be over the five hundred. So I'd find a deal on a professional grade saw, and then I would buy a backpacks prayer that has a diaphragm pump. And you don't need to get a real expensive sprayer either, just get one with a diaphragm pump. They don't they don't get clogged up, and they can take like powders and different liquids a lot better through it without clogging. 00:07:41 Speaker 3: What's your favorite saw model? You mentioned professional grades, so what's your go to? 00:07:46 Speaker 4: Steal to sixty one with a sixteen inch bar and a full chisel chain would be my instinct go to. And you don't need for habitat you don't need anything bigger than a sixteen. Really a fourteen would be fine, but at sixteen's on the smaller end. A lot of guys are running out there with eighteen and twenty inch bars. You don't need it. And then just run a full chisel chain, which if you buy like a steel chain, it'd be the yellow chain as opposed to a green chain, and as long as you have some experience cutting, so the green ones are like anti kickback chain safety. They call them safety chains, if you will. But for me, for a guy that's cut with any bit of time, or even somebody, as long as you're not doing super aggressive things, you know, running that safety chain just cut so slow. And I never figured that out until later in life, when I'm like, why do I have this chain that always seems dull? That sucks? And I finally figured out. I was buying the safety chain and I threw them all away. There's a plaice form, but I just personally don't like them, all right. 00:08:51 Speaker 3: And then is there a favorite backpack sprayer model that you just really love? 00:08:56 Speaker 4: Yeah, so I actually buy this cheap one and I might even have to look it up on my phone, but it's like king or No, it's a cheap one on Amazon, but it's a diaphragm diaphragm pump. And I've got like more expensive ones, like I have a steal. I have this red one that everybody would know that it's super expensive and I haven't used it for so long. And then I have the electric ones too. But I'll look it up and I'll fire it back to you. I'll pop my phone on real quick and see if I can find with that back it's not expensive and it literally doesn't leak on your back. There's another one with backpack spears. They always leak on your back, which drives me nuts, and then they get clogged up or they just break and they go bad. And this one, I've just used it for so long that I have really good luck with it. So I'm going to delay here and tell you what I have. 00:09:47 Speaker 3: No, that's good, And I think that this is a baseline because anyone that's starting habitat projects, I think there's probably some confusion of what do I really need? What's the bare minimum because a lot of this stuff is expensive and people that are just getting started out need the bare bones. And I think those three items are it sounds like you'll become. 00:10:06 Speaker 4: Here we go the field King dB. It's a dB smith Field King, but you get the uh, you get the diaphragm pump. I don't know if that's specific to this or maybe all of them have that, but it's cheap. And then when you read the description, like it'll say can can be used to with wet table powders and liquids, so that yes to work of okay, work of both a piston and a diaphrag backpack pump. Okay, just get the diaphragm backpack pump is the simple part, and the field king that's what I use. Now. There's plenty of other good ones. I have not no affiliation with them, but I do like them, and they're very cheap and expensive. And I've got like one for fruit trees, one for killing trees, which I have to label very succinctly, so don't get those mixed up, one for regular weeds, and I've got like four of those sitting around for various uses. 00:11:05 Speaker 3: Love it. What when you were starting out with habitat, why did you want to improve the habitat? Was it for deer hunting? Was it for a holistic approach to conservation? What initially had you motivated to dive into this world? 00:11:18 Speaker 4: Deer hunting, for sure. So I started with a garden, which I had to learn from scratch at maybe ten. I don't know why. I can't think back why I wanted to start a garden. But I wanted to start a garden in our big backyard and just grow things. And I just thought that was cool, and that came out of the blue. I can't explain it to this day. And then from that I got into deer hunting and people think, like food plots are new well in Michigan. So I'm forty six now this would be twelve thirteen, maybe fourteen years old. Yeah, it's probably fourteen when in Zealand Michigan, there was this little seed store called the bread In Seed and guys were starting to do food plots a lot, and like when you get the magazines, I was a kid that was like waiting for the magazines to come in and they were starting to talk about food plots. And then I went there and I'm like, what what should I do? I want to do this food plot stuff right about it in the magazines. And so I know I told you this story before, but I tell it really briefly. I bought a bag of sugar sugar beat seed and then I went to the middle of the forest with my rake, raked up the leaves and planted the sugar beat seeds and then came back and there's never anything that grew. And even back thirty years ago, there was articles like like I didn't know this at fourteen, like little fads or hey this works, or that like they're talking about fertilizing oak trees. Well, I remember buying a bag of fertilizer like that was all my like all the money from a lawn job, and I'm hiking this bag of fertilizer into the hunting land that I just had permission on and fertilizing the oak trees. And that was my game plan. I'm going to make these delicious acorns and the hunting would be better. So when I was young, I definitely fell for every little gimmick or want to replicate what what the more serious group was saying to do. So I try all these things, and I literally tried everything known to man that came out in the last thirty years until I figured out, okay, maybe that's not the best route to go, or actually figured out how to legitimately do it. 00:13:29 Speaker 3: Yeah, what what do you think right now today? Is one of the biggest habitat misconceptions? Or I don't I don't necessarily want to call it a fad, but what's one of the biggest habitat misconceptions that you hear and talk about with folks And you're like, man, I just I don't quite think the the fruit is worth the squeez or the juice not it is not worth the squeeze on a project like fill in the blank. 00:13:55 Speaker 4: I think there's problems with every every food plot thing or every habitat improvement because they're so there's just such a variety of information on any given topic, Like like one guy will be planning seedars because they want to have thermal cover and they don't have seedars on their land, and I think that's a great thing to do if you do it correctly, And then there'll be another video right after it or another podcast or somebody talking about how they are eradicating all their seeds, like you don't want seedars, it's bad for this bad habit at. All these things, is there is there a solution probably in the middle there. Yeah, there is, And I definitely think that. You know, well, I went and planted seedars for in this example, I planted seedars. I put a thousand per acre in there, and I planted all seedar monoculture and I spaced them really tight. Yeah, you're gonna have a problem later. Or the guy that's like, I want no seedars on my ground. Seaters are worthless. Seedars are junk, And this is more Midwest. You know, you get up north and you get back into pines, which could fill the same the same discussion topic as cedars do here, so I don't. So they burn every seed or they mulch every seed, which I think is a big, big mistake. Like I have a seater thinning project right now where it's like one hundred acres of seeds that when I bought this farm was a mess, and they're like, you know, the government's like, you can doze all those up them Like I'm not dozing them all lout. I'll fend them, and I fend them. You know, iind ninety percent of them. But now they're space properly and I can I can put other trees in there. So but I'd say, you know, juice not worth the squeeze. If a guy's starting out, I probably wouldn't get heavy into tree planning. I think that's that's kind of a progression down the road. Now. At the same time, I would get to it as quickly as you practically can, because a lot of times that's a project people put off because it is a project that's a down the road project, but they put it off for so long that they just end up not doing it where they could have had, you know whatever, a handful of trees even just you know, do a handful of trees every year. So other other like fads, misconceptions, uh, you know out there. I mean, I would just say there's a lot of information, and I would just make it a general comment. There's a lot of information on YouTube podcasts all over and just if you follow it enough, you dig in enough, you'll find so many contradictory opinions. One guy says, to eradicate these trees. One guy says, ys like the other day, give you another quick example. I'm going back to trees. But I posted I posted a video on vaneer walnuts, and I know, just like clockwork, that guys are gonna say walnuts have no white tail value, get rid of them. And I knew that was coming. But here's the thing. It's like, dude, anybody stand maybe has two three four vneer walnuts perakre. Maybe a lot of them don't have any. Yeah, And what I would say to people who say, you know, walnut doesn't have any deer value, does it? Actually does? It has an ecosystem value where you know you have a higher I'm gonna go into the weeds here, But it's ecosystem. Everything's related. Well, you have more squirrels, well, more squirrels are gonna are propagate more not transfers, and they're gonna they're gonna dig up more acorns and transfer more acorns. With more walnuts, you have more food for the squirrels and they're gonna eat less aco All these weird dynamics like that. But what I'll say to this when somebody says, I don't want vineer walnuts, so I'm gonna cut them down. I'm gonna cut down these thousands and thousands of thousands of dollar trees. A farm that is managed for veneer walnuts is having a lot of work done, it's opening a lot of canopy up. They take such little space. And I would say the farm that's managed exceptionally well, which is which is very rare, but its managed exceptionally rare or exceptionally well for veneer walnuts will have bigger deer because they are going to have so much open area. They're gonna have so much new regrowth and brows and bedding and just thick covering these bottoms and bottoms periodically or typically are very open. So most bottoms icy in the Midwest are like you know, they're very open. You can see hundreds of yards through them. And by going and doing timber stand improvement to improve your veneer walnuts or whatever else is in there, you're just you're going to kill the eight to ten birds with one stone doing timber stand improvement to you know, foster better veneer walnuts. But you're also going to be able to have different oaks in there and different regeneration. It's not necessarily all about what the mast is falling from the trees either, right, Well, they don't eat a walnut, Okay, Well, so do you want all eight oaks because you know there's a lot of ears where oaks don't put out acorns. It's not about what the mast is coming down so much, and that's a component, but it's more about what's growing on the fourth floor. The regeneration. Maybe it's ok regeneration other trees you like. Maybe it's you know, like box elder and other things, or maple or elm or things that the dear will brows when they're younger. So having an open canopy is the bigger point to why a guy would want to manage for veneer walllance to have all that extra tonnage. And we're literally talking like if you can visualize in your mind and Michigan, I remember seeing this all the time, the maple stands and the open forest there. When you're picturing an open forest, it's like really shaded in. You're talking about zero to one hundred two hundred pounds per acre of brows tonnage breaker. When you open that canopy up to a substantial level, like hey, I let a lot a lot of new sunlight in there, a lot of new regrowth depending on what regrows you can bring that to. You know, one thousand, two thousand and three thousand pounds of natural browse breaker well across the whole forest. That's significant. And when you don't have any, those deer are not in good nutritional safe shape. That is not an ideal near environment for nutrition for any deer. And you know, to go back to the walnut example, you know, picking on the walnuts, well they put out a little bit of a toxinto the other trees and so on. Most people are doing nothing. Okay, so ninety nine percent of the forests out there that you look at, nothing is being done. They're usually just canopied over. Guys aren't debating whether to have walnuts, whether to have this, they're just doing nothing. And those situations, if somebody is able, have so many economic and nutritional values to improve your timber at some level. And clearly we can go a million different examples based on the region you're at. Well, I'm in Michigan and I got these trees, or I'm in a conifer region of the north. You know, there's all but there's all sorts of different things you could do. Probably the easiest way to start is to say, get more sunlight to the foreslow. 00:21:07 Speaker 3: What about I'm in bush honeysuckle country, and there's other people that are in the automolive country or insert whatever aggressive invasive what's your strategy or thought process of you know, someone hears that, like, all right, I'm gonna go open up the force floor. I'm gonna open up the canopy and the understory right now is a bunch of junk. What's what's your process of prepping? 00:21:33 Speaker 4: I would I would get rid of the bush honeysuckle. Now the other the other side of that coin, people say you're removing the best cover, and I understand that. So there's several practical approaches to to address that at the same time. Now, I see bush honeysuckle very much like I see cedar thickets or pine thickets that grow so close together that deer can't utilize it. I see that with bush honeysuckle, and it does get to that, and that is a threshold where you're like, listen, it's so choked out. The deer can't use it. There's no browse, there's no food, there's just this nasty thicket that maybe they can get around this area and that and that's an extreme but I see it quite often and I would. 00:22:14 Speaker 3: Get rid of that. 00:22:15 Speaker 4: And one way to do it is to say, like, hey, I own a fifty acre piece of woods. I don't want to do it all in one year because I don't want to remove all the cover. Okay, do ten acres per year then, right. And here's the other thing. When you're removing the bush honeysuckle the first time you do it, it's that's the hard part. When there's regrowth and new bush honeysuckle that comes in, that's just light maintenance compared to the initial work. So when you remove the bush honeysuckle, I would do timber stand improvement at the same time. Maybe it's some hinge cutting, maybe it's you know, just having the canopy open period and bush honeysuckle is closing that canopy in a different way too. So you can have a thick, nasty, ideal betting farm with a lot of diversity without bush honeysuckle. And I don't want it in my farm. And listen, I want the thickest, nastiest stuff in certain places. I want remote big buck cover, but I do not want bush honeysuckle because I know what it does to everything else, and I know it's going to impact their nutrition. It will be a nice, thick mess for a certain period of time, but that certain period of time usually expires, and then you're really sacrificing your nutrition at a huge level by having a shaded out, just bush honeysuckle, nasty mess on your farm. 00:23:34 Speaker 3: Yeah. The reason I bring that up is sometimes in a lot of conversations they just hear the TSI part of it, and they're like, all right, we're gonna, We're gonna. 00:23:42 Speaker 4: So really, simply, anytime you disturb your woods, it is the same thing as disturbing your soil. Hey, I went out and you know when I started, I rote to retill my garden. Now I don't rotory till anything. I do everything, don't tell. But you go till up your garden, I don't care if it's with a shovel, with a rake, with the rotor etail. You're spinning all this stuff up and all you're like, what in the world is all this junk coming up? And every example is different. Your forest is the same way when you allow sunlight in. It's very much like if you were to go till up a field. If you till up a field, you will have more weeds, and you're gonna have all these surprises, like what's that, what's that you're stirring up this huge weed seed bank. A forest is no different than that. So if I had a forest that you know, was just full of bush honeysuckle berries, and I open that up, you're gonna have regrowth. Now the key is there is you can if you stay on it. It's not that complex to just continually treat the new little plants. It's actually quite easy. Like, hey, a day year. I took a day year to keep up on the bush honeysuckle. But there'll be other things too. 00:24:52 Speaker 3: With the backpack sprayer. 00:24:54 Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, there's the main ways to do it. You could do it with fire, you could do it with herbicides, you could do it mechanically and anything habitat. Here's the good part is I had to learn how to do things on a budget of not five hundred dollars. I had a rake, and I didn't even probably own that rake. It was probably my parents. I had no money, so I had to figure out how do I get these sugar beets in the ground. I'll borrow, borrow mom and Dad's rake, no fertilizer, and rake the leaves. And I just wound up with some blisters and that's all cost me. And then I look like an idiot to myself, and I'm like, hey, this didn't work at all. So you can do it with the most basic of tools. So somebody says, you know timber stand improvement, Well I could go do timber stand improvement with a hatchet and a little squirt bottle, right. I could also co take my multure out there, and I've got a like a veil treesaw that rotates and it's got a herbicide button, I could go do it with a Well it's a big difference, big difference. So any problem generally can be accomplished with like ten different tools or ten different ways of doing it. Know, do you have to do everything no till? Do you need a no til drill? Of course not, you don't. There's ways around it, does it? You know? And you got to think of the scale you're doing. Well, you know, I'm working with a half acre. The guy working with the half acres does not need a tractor in or no tail drill. They just don't. But if a guy says, you know, I've got ten food plots and I own a thousand acres, you know whatever, something crazy, Yeah, you might be thinking about that. And the guy with that much more ground probably has the means to buy more expensive equipment. So a million different ways to solve the same problem. 00:26:35 Speaker 3: Which I want to dive into this because I think TSI seasons starting to wrap up here with leaves coming out, and I want you to say what you can and can't do kind of from April to season when it comes to the timber, because I know that's you're a big proponent of fixing timber and what I mean by that is basically a weeding it. 00:26:58 Speaker 4: Yeah, there's not one inch my farm. I don't want to improve you know, fields, waterways, waterways. What a waterways doing for deer? Well, actually you can do some things, but I don't want erosion. Right, So every ounce of my ground there's something that can be done, and there's something that should be done. Now I will prioritize that. And that's why I revert to forest. And you know, food plots, cropland native grass stands, you know, those are probably the big emphasis on improving them. And remind me the question again, just so I have this. 00:27:31 Speaker 3: The seasonality of sas. 00:27:33 Speaker 4: Okay, so sorry, So right now the trees, the SAP is starting to flow and basically your trees are coming out of dormancy. Well, when your trees are dormant, you can open wounds, you can cut limbs, you can do all sorts of things. It's not going to hurt the trees. It's a way for them. It's the time when you do these things, when you start putting big wounds in trees, when they're out of door dormancy. You know, now all the all of a sudden, they'll get different funguses or they'll get you know, different pressures where they can really get sick. So it'd be like, you know, call it'd be like if if you were to cut yourself and it was just you know, dirty and unsterilized, you could get infections. Right. Well, that's kind of versus like super clean in a sterile environment and using all the you know, antibiotic stuff like that. That's kind of the comparison with trees. So right now they're coming out of dormancy. So like oak blight, you don't want to get that, so you don't want to you don't want to open up these fresh wounds. Now. The way around that is to say, hey, you know there is oak issues. Just understand oak trees. You don't want to be putting injuries on them, or any desirable trees that you're like, hey, I want to promote this type of tree, just don't injure them, don't cut them. Now. The way around that is to say, hey, there's undesirable trees in my timber and I still want to do a few things real quick, and you could you could do this today, you could do this in a month. Just find the undesirables, you know, It could be hickory, it could be maybe it's cedars or pines that you want to thin, stuff like that. Anything that's a non desirable tree, you can cut that as long as it's not you know, tipping into a desirable tree causing wounds. That's as simply as I can put it. So you know, I would probably wrap this up very quickly. But you know, I'll buy a farm where I'm like, hey, I bought this thing in June. Uh, you know, I miss the window? Do I wait till next winter? I don't I go in there and start cutting some inferior stuff, and I just I'm just very careful about it. But I want structure on the ground so that so I'm breaking it up kind of like you know, saying there's a big, wide open pond with nothing in it versus a pond with rock piles and brush piles and trees. Well, I want structure in my woods, So I'll go knock some of that stuff down, create structure and thermal cover stuff like that and the other thing it's doing. If I buy it, say I did buy it, or may now I have, you know, months of full sunlight coming in there, and I'm gonna get forbes of memes, all sorts of different things that are going to pop up. Some of them good, most of them good, some of them bad. But that's gonna be food, brows, more betting. You know, visual barriers for you and the deer. You know, my timber, you can't see a lot of it twenty yards through it, where when I got it you could probably see three hundred yards through things. It was wide open. So just having timber that is full of structure, full of visual barriers, full of thermal cover, full of brows, full of more betting, those are all the benefits to doing these things. But yes, I'd say just do it very, very carefully, more with like a scalpel, now, very strategically, and baby those trees that are you're desirable, so you don't cause your self issues. 00:30:51 Speaker 3: Do you feel you have been on a bunch of arms over the years. Do you feel that for most guys that are just getting started and they're thinking of wherever they hunt or have mission or the opportunity to improve. Do you think that the timber, if there is timber on it, one of the best starting points for most farms. Is that safe to say? 00:31:12 Speaker 4: Is timber stand improvement being the lowest hanging fruit for most farms, oh for sure, for sure. And you say timberstand improvement, Well that's just an acronym, really, that is just it's such a high level term timber stand improvement that it could mean so many different things. It could mean, you know, well, wait, so I could do timber stand improvement on a pine or a cedar stand, but I could also go do it on these beautiful oaks. Yeah, you could do it on both, and they're both very, very different. So it's a very broad term. 00:31:41 Speaker 3: But there's i. 00:31:43 Speaker 4: Would say ninety nine percent of cases there's some level of timber stand improvement, So improving your timber, whether that's thinning out you know, a certain stand. And I would say this one's a real common one. Why see the forest what it is is right, it's stocked correctly, No, it's not. Ninety percent of the time is far over stock. There's you know, ten trees in this spot where there should be one, and a lot of times if you want some openings, that means there's ten trees in this spot and I bring it down to zero, you know, and little pockets here and there. So most most timber is overstocked. By definition, just because you look and see what's there doesn't mean that's ideal, and the vast majority of the time it's not. So it could be, you know, it could be opening the canopy up. It could be crop tree release, which is taking your best quality trees and freeing them up. Now you can take that step further and say, oh, I'm going to really free them up and just start knocking back a lot of your junk, which you know, one you're you are freeing your crop tree, but you're also you know, allowing all that new sunlight, new growth and new brows and more betting. So and I'll find if I'm doing crop tree release to improve my crop trees, I'll find areas where I'm like, hey, there's no crop tree here, It's all a solid hickory stand, and I might just nuke it, I mean, just wreck it. And maybe you know, and if you have solid stands like monoculture stands of junk, which do happen, you know, like, hey, I just have one or two species of trees there. You know, I can thin it back, I can pick the best one and free it up. But I still am stuck with this this blend of this handful of trees. Well, then you can get into like interceding different things and just you know, hey, there's no oaks on this on this and I'd like oaks or or I'd like some different softwoods, or I'd like shrubs. Well, you know, doing timber stand and prove me you can do those both at the same time. And then a lot of times there's ways to combine those, like, well, now you get tree tops on the ground, maybe I'll try and plant some of these new trees in the treetops. So they're kind of a natural deer caage. It's not perfect, but it's it's a technique that does have its benefits. 00:33:56 Speaker 3: So you know, in a one acre hickory stand, let's say there's create hackberry and some black locusts. Let's say, and that's the general gist in this one acre plot. You you basically start over, how do you know or how do you encourage positive regrowth? And maybe you would like to see a variety of different oaks in there. I assume have you ever just thrown out, you know, buy a bag of acorns and put them in piles and say, get to work squirrels, or I mean, like, what, what are some some things that people could do? 00:34:27 Speaker 4: Okay, so like something like a black locust, you're gonna want to treat that and kill it so it doesn't come back. That's key. So you might cut it down and be like, hey, I'm gonna I'm gonna start over. If you didn't kill that, you're not starting out. You're creating a jungle. So yeah, you could, you could intercede things. Like what the approach I would take if I'm going to interceed acorns is to overload the squirrels because they'll dig them back up, but then they'll replant them. Two overload them. And what I do is just find like any park in most states will have a diversity of oak trees, and a lot of times they're on like paved roads. Well I just go like sweep them up and fill like barrels with them. And you know, I filled truckloads with these things and didn't take that much time. And this is when I was younger and I had more energy. And then you could intercede them, you could scatter them, and then it's just a numbers game. Is your success rate going to be real high? Depends depends how you do it depends how far you go with it. If you were to like direct seat each one of them and put them down in there and put them in like sheltered areas, you actually probably have a pretty good success rate. And I would do that. Like here's how I think about it. Like I go anything the government's involved in, Like look along your highway, and a lot of times there's really desirable shrubs in there, like like high bush, cran barrier like whatever. 00:35:51 Speaker 3: I mean, there's a bunch of dogwood on the Wisconsin Highway. 00:35:54 Speaker 4: Yes, I mean you could grab all that, grab seeds, spend to pull over, hopefully you don't get trouble with the police, and uh, you know, pull over and go fill bags up with dogwood seeds and so on. I mean, you know, silly ideas like that. I've done all that stuff and it does work, So you could do that now. It's probably slightly more practical if you're talking about a small scale though, like hey, I'm working on five acres, two acres, one acre, then I probably would just say go less and buy like barroot seedlings and just protect them. Just put put a tube with a really good steak. Probably in both sides. I use the tea posts because I just pulled tea posts around my farm. Somebody go, oh, that's more money and more work, and they're free because they pull them. But then your success rate it's way up with the tea post in you know, tube them or cagem for example. Because the biggest failure on trees is just I'm just gonna throw a bunch of stuff at it and hopefully if you survive, and that's just not a good tactic. It's just not so have some strategy behind it, and I would just say plant less of them and get a higher success rate versus doing a lot of work and just hoping a few things stick without really thinking it through. So less is more for sure with tree plannings. But yes, when you're doing timber stand improvement, there is a lot of times where you're dealing with a handful of species of trees and you can do as much as you can to open that canopy and try and encourage other things to grow there, but there is a point where you need to change the composition of that forest through either plant direct planning or you know, nuts berries, And I do a major diversity on what you added to that too. 00:37:46 Speaker 3: What are some good sources for someone that needs to find what are good species depending on what part of the country they're in and where to source them. Like I know, Illinois has a tree sale, Iowa has a tree sale, Missouri has a tree sale. 00:37:59 Speaker 4: I always would start there. I'd always start with your state nurseries because it's native trees. They're generally going to be the lowest price. And every every nursery could have complaints like and you know, every nursery still employs people by the hour that make mistakes. So somebody's like, well I got this batch and it was no good. Yeah, it happens. You know, you've got an employee that maybe let it sit in the sun. But that's not a reflection necessarily on the nurseries. Just stuff like that happens, and it's happened to me with private nurseries and the state ones. But you say, well, the state's a little bit bland. They don't have, you know, the cool stuff. Well, a lot of times they do, because you know, they'll have so many diverse choices on like oaks and shrubs, and I'll guarantee you you're messing a pile of those a pile and they're very very good. So find the native things that your state nursery sells the natives and buy the things you don't have, or the things that are you know, desirable to your farm. And maybe you say, you know, my farm's just got bur oak. Okay, go buy pinoak and swamp oak and maybe even some white oak. Well white oak aren't going to have acorns for all these years there. It's actually faster than you think. If you don't have red oak, plant some red oak and understand the sites they grow on. But I would add all those things. But if your farm is and this is one maybe a little bit contrary to what some forsters would recommend. But but if my farm is full of burroaks, I'm probably not going to go out and plant a pile more bur oaks. And somebody say, but but that means they grow real well on your site. Yeah. I still like having diversity too, and I want to I want to add some different things that will grow ideally on those soils. But and you can start adding some staples that like, Okay, the state nursery is not carrying Chinese chestnuts or Chinese chestnuts going to be invasive. No, they're not they're not. Somebody might disagree with me on this, but they're not. You could add those, you could add American person and they do just fine. In most zones you start getting way too north. Maybe not. I would probably add like crab apple, and I would add I like growing things from seed, too, So I have my little nursery in the backyard or nothing. 00:40:18 Speaker 3: Really, I guess you get the little nursery and then you have the cher too. 00:40:21 Speaker 4: But both of them are of scene for the location. So my house in a subdivision, I look like a hillbilly because I have this big cage train dustry to keep the squirrels out. Really, and I'll grow like chestnut and hazel nut and per simon and dwarf chinkapin oak and chinkapin oak and these hybrid oaks that I found that's a mix of probably three different types of oaks, all these weird things. And then I'll actually grow pair from seed, and well, I don't quite know what I'm getting. That's fine. That part doesn't bother me. I like dis messing around with it. And so that's in like town kind of. Then you come to my farm and you're like, oh my gosh, you way overdid your tree nurseries and your orchards all over the farm, and yeah, I overdid it. Just do way way less than what I do, which most people won't know what I do, but it's too much. Just do start low, like, hey, I want two hundred trees, start with like twenty, then I want two thousands, start start with one hundred. 00:41:21 Speaker 3: Just because it's so important to treat those twenty like babies. Yes, and two thousand, no tube, no prep, no nothing, because you probably won't even end up with twenty trees. 00:41:31 Speaker 4: Yes, yes, And you know we're digging into the tree stuff and you know it's definitely a huge component, no doubt about it. And I would say, you know, managing forest, your forest is going to be your number one. Planting trees and stuff like that is generally down the list of importance, and the bank for the buck is just it's a delayed gratification. And you know, but the four just your forest can have so many instant benefits where you know, if I go plant a paratree, which I will, I'll go plant a paratree, Well that might be five years before it's been now a good amount of fruit. Well, when I go and do timber stand improvement. That's instantaneous benefits like the next day, and then throughout that whole growing season there's just astronomical benefits, nutrition being a huge one of those. It's not like I said, it's not like, well I want more acorns on which I do. I do, but that's not the main reason. You know, the TSI kills eight ten birds with one stone. It's just phenomenal. Now you know the food plots is and what I plan now I farm, so I have to get down that whole can of worms too, and you know my brain goes just as deep on those things as well. 00:42:45 Speaker 3: Yeah, which I do want to talk about food plot. One thing I want to ask is, obviously you've done just a ton of projects and your main farm there you've had for over a decade. What beyond the deer have you noticed on your farm? Do you see all different types of birds, wildlife, birds, butterflies, bees across the board from all these different things. Cause if you take a cruise around anywhere in the Midwest, a lot of pasture by overpastured ground. There's a lot of forests that have not been improved over the time, and so like yours is a playground. What have you noticed beyond just more deer and more mature bucks. 00:43:40 Speaker 4: The whole ecosystem flourishes when you do things correctly. So like I'm in deer country, and I'll tell people that if I wanted to go out and shoot my limit of pheasants in thirty minutes, it'd be no problem. Like what, I don't have pheasants around here. I have billions of pheasants, I have tons of quail. I've got all sorts of diversities. My turkey numbers are through the roof. And then you go, well, you know, is that just from your habitat? No? No, because people in there there's the question. People will hit me with it. But I have really good habitat too, and I don't have that many turkeys, and I don't have many pheasants. How many coons are you getting rid of? Well, we haven't. We haven't trapped coons for a decade. Yeah, you have thousands of raccoons out there now, like I'll trap You know, we counted before, I mean I was, I was trapping like six hundred raccoons in one year. The times we counted six hundred draccoons. So you say, well, that's a lot of time. Well, just take a a dog proof trap and put a couple of them at all your gate entrances. And when you're at the farm, film with cat food or peanut cat food and peanut butter or corn or fish or whatever you like, marshmallows. Just fill them up. Takes two seconds. And here in Iowa we got to legalized where we can trapped coons you round, because they're at epidemic levels. I mean, they're doing massive crop damage. And here's the thing is when you go take six hundred raccoons off the landscape, these things that are just walking around every day just sniffing out nests. It's why when I was doing my chores or doing farm work, I would find and I'm out here every day, I'd find all the nests ripped apart by coons almost always. So it's like, is that really that big of a surprise that turkey numbers are down? When you have fifty gazillion raccoons and possums and skunks around, it's not a surprise to me. And then somebody says, so you're loaded with pheasants and quail and all these other things, and you don't see ness get torn apart hardly. Ever, No, I don't. I'm loaded up with them. And you know, and I don't disagree with some of the theories on like you know, like bird flu impacting turkey populations, or the seed treatments or the sprays. I mean, some of the insecticides very concerning on like turkey populations. But at the same time, in every direction from my farm, they're putting the nastiest stuff on seeds known to man. In my turkey population, I'm like, I need to thin them. There's millions of them. So I do think there's some detriments to some of the you know, insecticides and fungicides and stuff we're applying to our crops, and I would love to see a lot less of it, absolutely, But you know, is that the reason that turkey populations are decimated? I don't necessarily buy it, because I've got an extreme example where I just took out the nest predators and there's gazillions of turkeys with the same dynamics as everybody else who's suffering. And I would say the worst turkey populations I've ever seen, where I've seen them tank is when I go down to Kansas and that's just, you know, my firm belief there is everybody's just gotten, you know. And I hunt there every year and I love Kansas. But I'm just gonna say it, like guys have gotten so lazy with I'm just gonna throw a corn piles. So they don't do habitat improvement. Yeah, there's They hardly do food plots. The amount of foot bluff timber stand improvement in Kansas when you ask people, are you doing timber stand improvement, it's a tiny fraction of what it has done in Iowa. And I'm back and forth all the time. Nobody does it because like, man, I just do a corn pile. And then you look at their photos. Look at this deer. I don't look at the deer. I go, dude, you got fifty raccoons in that photo with the deer. Don't you do anything? Nah? Man, you know, like I don't want to mess with it. I just do corn piles. And they get lazy. Yeah, and the habitat and the ecosystem suffers, so you know, and then they can't figure out whether there's no turkeys. There's my point is I went there twenty years ago. 00:47:47 Speaker 3: This is fact. 00:47:48 Speaker 4: I went there twenty and twenty five years ago to Kansas, and you would see hundreds of turkeys. Just like Iowa, you would see very few bait piles. I never I don't think I ever saw a bait pile when I start going there, and I was all over the place. If they were there, they were extremely rare. Now they're littered across the landscape, like distasteful in my mind, They're everywhere, and you go, what happened to all the turkeys? They're gone? I mean there's a few, but it's nothing like it used to be. Well, you've kind of supplemented this raccoon population, plus nobody's trapping them, plus you're throwing out massive corn, plus you don't want to take the time to deal with it. And now you guys have probably double triple quadruples, I mean some staggering figure of raccoons that are raiding the nests every year. It's like, how can a turkey have have a nest out there? I don't even hardly get it how it's even possible. So you know, that's when you start impacting the whole ecosystem by making certain choices that ripple the different animals. And this is coming from a guy who doesn't turkey hot, and I'm not going to go shoot a pheasant off my phone. I'll go up to northern Iowa where it doesn't mess up my deer hunting, and then I'll hunt. But I'm not going to turkey hunt. My guess. Well, so I like there to be turkeys, I like there to be quail. But I like the ecosystem. Those are indicator species. They're indicators of health, and just like the bees and the butterflies and all these things, you know, I like having them around, and I think it's indicative of a better quality environment and a healthier ecosystem and things. Things are far more linked together than anybody would realize. Like, you know, I want I just want big deer. Okay, Well you know coyotes. How many coyotes do you have? That's that's a big component of it. It's a huge component of it. You know, all these things are just interlinked. So you know, if I go to a farm that has in general just lots of brows, lots of good nutritious food, whether it's plots or forest, along with robust habitat, and then people are taking out, you know, the highly populated things that are that are rippling through the ecosystem that maybe aren't natural, like yeah, not trapping raccoons for ten years. Maybe they are at you know, too high of a level that isn't sustainable, and you balance that out. And let's let's just face it, any big game, small game, really, any animal in the Midwest is going to be managed by humans, good or bad. So we just have to figure out do we want to do the good things for them? Do we want to try and balance them ourselves and take the time to do it, and and does it work? Absolutely, it works. It makes a huge difference on the health of this or you know, the balance here. Man's intervention is key here. It just is. So a lot of people don't want to do that, and that's okay if you don't, but just understand it's going to have consequences. And like, hey, I have a you know, huge ranch here and nobody is allowed to shoot a coyote ever and nobody's trapped for decades. You're gonna have detriment because of that. It's going to cause you major problems. So all these things are just interlinked and intertwined. 00:51:04 Speaker 3: That's a really good point because I think we all get stuck on the fun stuff, unless you like trapping raccoons. I mean, most people look at it as a chore, right mostly it is kinda it can be fun. It's kind of rewarding though, absolutely, But I think for most people are like, yeah, I'm not gonna do that. 00:51:21 Speaker 4: So here's and I hear that all the time, so and I just tell them, I'm like, dude, just get a couple of coon traps at every gate. Maybe it's five of them, and they're around. Sometimes you'll have all five filled and just put them and you know you're gonna do your chores, and when you're there, set them for the night and then dump them all it takes you. And once they're set in the ground, you know you could leave them there get a little rusty. But we're talking a matter of a few minutes. And that's with anything though, that's with anything, if you want it to be better. There's the people that are like, I'll take the few minutes to do this and their farm is better off for it. Then there's the guys like I don't have time and I can't and I don't want to, and okay, I mean that's human nature on anything. Anything. That's why you know the habitat on most farms is far from ideal. Yeah, keep going with this. It's why most of society is overweight. Do you not know how to stay in shape? Do you not know that if you eat healthy and go to the gym and being great? Well I do, but I did don't want to do it, So I don't want to do it human nature, Yeah, it is one hundred percent. I want to weave back into the food plots you mentioned. For most people, they probably don't. 00:52:32 Speaker 3: Need a drill if they plant an acre food plot half acre food plot. So how from a habitat and conservation minded approach, how do you plant a half acre food plot? In your mind? And let's get more specific too, whether it's a clover or a fall blend of greens, What's what's your approach? 00:52:53 Speaker 4: So you know, everything truly does have its pluses and minuses. So somebody might say I don't like herbicides. Well, if you tell the soil, don't think there's not environmental impacts from that, right, and soil loss and huge detriment. Now am I a proponent of herbicides? I guess I would be kind of in the middle where it's like, I don't want to be constantly exposed to herbicides. I don't want them drenching on everything all the time. But used, you know, so I just try and minimize their use. And if a guy has like half an acre, you could and you'd say, well, what what's practical without you know, tillege equipment or a drill or whatever. Clovers fit right into that and that's easy. So a half acre you literally could go out and frost seed that. You could still probably do it now there's still frosts that's coming in a lot of the forecast, which just sucks that seed right up to the soil. It just just hold it there perfect. So that's a great time to do it. So you spread the clover. And even if you're like, but right now, I just got this grass patch, Okay, take your backpack sprayer, then fill it with clethenhum and crop oil and just go over it with the backpack. But that's that took me thirty minutes an hour. Okay, fine, bring an extra few jugs to fill it up and just sit there and spray that grass with clethenum and crop oil when it comes up later, and you could have a clover plot, and you know, you could take that a step further and be like, you know, I'm generally in a area with low pH soils. So you take your same backpack sprayer spreader and you put pelotize line in there, and then you put a bag of P and K in there and you spread that. Oh that took me fifteen minutes minutes on each of those. I mean, this is very minimal stuff, very very easy. Even if you're like, hey, oh yeah, I mean to put to do one hundred pounds of poetize line, for example, which is all right on a half acre clover one, it will make a difference absolutely. And two, I mean that might take twenty five minutes. For example. Usually you're getting frustrated if you're by yourself because you're trying to hold the bag open if you have a bag as opposed to like something for and then it's spilling over, and then you're getting ticked off, like, I get that's still this day, I'll spill seed or whatever, and I get mad. 00:55:24 Speaker 3: I just got that. I got that, I got the bucket Earthway spread Yeah that year, just because I got so sick of spilling stuff. I'm pretty clumsy. 00:55:32 Speaker 4: Those are definitely nicer. And I ordered one of those the other day and they sent me so I heard the Earthway and they sent me a different brand, Chapping or something, and I went to spin it and it was so hard. I'm like, man, I'm not in bad shape at all. I'm in very good shape. But I'm like, after sixty seconds, this thing is so hard to turn. So I sent it back. But I'll probably get that that Earthway one if they can get it right. But yeah, you know, a bag spreader can do a lot of stuff. And you know, clover, for example, would be a staple for nutrition, not just shooting, and we can dig into that a little bit deeper. But like, I don't look at food plots or crops or or even the stuff I was talking about with timber stanmprovement is like, well, I'm going to have this opening here or this food plot here so I can just kill a deer. That's not why I do it. It's some of the reason. And I would say most people's reason for planning food plot is like that's where I'm going to shoot a deer. I don't think along those terms, and I'm not saying others should think the way I do, not necessarily, but a big component of what I'm thinking about is optimal nutrition across my whole farm, across my food plots, across my timber. Optimal nutrition year round is what I want. And clover is a great staple to offer that, and clover can do both. Clover can be a component of optimal nutrition. And I would say clover has to be a component every single person's farm period, and a story has to for nutritional reasons. From right now, look at the clover right now. Those deer, especially the bucks that are like run it out, they're just picking at every little green thing that pops up, and it's green, and it's popping up right now where You're like, is there any soybeans right now? No, We're a long ways from that. So clover is replenishing these deer skeletal structures, replenishing their bodies and giving them high rates of protein actually along with other nutrients. So clover will be desired really even in the winter when there's snow, they'll pull at it, eat it all the way to Yeah, I hunt over it in the fall, and I mean it's almost a year round food source. 00:57:47 Speaker 3: It really is. 00:57:48 Speaker 4: It's almost a year round food source, so clover has to be a component. 00:57:52 Speaker 3: So would you say, would you say clover is the most attractive for the most amount of time out of any food source. 00:57:58 Speaker 4: One hundred person. It's definitely more attractive. It has more benefits than alfalfa. And I have alfalfa fields. I love alfalfa, and alfalfa is more like, I gotta have alfalfa fields because that's cool. It's different, it's next level, and it is it's harder to get established, it's plusier. 00:58:16 Speaker 1: Do you like it? 00:58:17 Speaker 4: You can bail it, But clover versus alfalfa, I'll take clover every time, and all of my alfalfa fields where I bail them, or I put a grazing type alfalfa with a very leafy type of alfalfa, I'll still have like, hey man, that's a ten acre alfalfa field you have there that you bail, and one acre of it is clovers. And I can sit there and watch the alfalfa field and be like, I know when they're in the alfalfa when they prefer that, and when they're in the clover room when they prefer that. And I would say, just to make a long story short, if you want to do alfalfa, that's fine, and there's a place for it, and it has its benefits, some of the benefits over clovers. But overall, if you weigh the two alclover is going to be better. They're just going to be more desired and used far longer into the season. And that's my experience over and over and over, year after year after year watching these fields with alfalfa and clover in them. So just to wrap a quick bow on it, establishing clover for anybody, even me, dummy me that planted sugar beets with a rake in the forest at fourteen and used my mom's rake just to recap. I could go get clover done. That fourteen year old could get clover done. And literally a bag spreader or any kind of a spreader and probably a backpack sprayer with cleft them and crop oil maybe butterac. If you get different weeds in there, broad leaf weeds, and if you could clip it, you know I would, Yeah, there we go. I got my grandparents old lawnmower. When they upgrade their lawnmower, they gave me their lawn boy, and I would do my food, you know, I'd mow my clover with that. Not not ideal, but you know, if you could clip it. Well, here's the other one I did too. I'd use a weed whipper forever, took forever, but again another tool that's cheap that everybody has to solve the same problem. So maybe you clip it once, especially the first year. I probably would clip it because you're gonna get weeds in there. But yeah, you could frost. See that. Now, if a guy wanted to go drill it and wait and add oats, or I want to do this or smooth out soil a little bit and lightly disc it and cold to packet, that's great too. It's great have a little more weeds to deal with. But if you can do that, then you can probably clip it. And you can probably split spray with cleft and crop oil and butter act two four d B not two four D but two four d B. And if you read the alfalfah read the label on alfalfa, you can tank mix those two. And I tank mix those two. I guess it's that's technically for alfalfa, but I did tank makes it. Maybe it somehow cross that line and got into my clovers and it turned out fantastic. Takes care of every weed. I don't I don't need round up ready alf alpha. You can use clothing them, crop oil, and butterac and it really should cover about everything other than maybe sedge, which you can use sed shamber. 01:01:20 Speaker 3: So there you go. 01:01:21 Speaker 4: Anybody can do this super simple now, really quickly. To answer your other question, though, what if I want to do greens, Well, greens are going to be this like like brassicas or rhymex. You could do the same thing. It's going to be a little bit a little bit trickier because you're not dealing with like frost suck in the seed close to soil. But you could spray it, kill it off. You could maybe lightly scratch it and broadcast brassicas into there radish turn ups and you know you got one component there. If you do want to add nitrogen, you either have to time the nitrogen application right for a rain, which most people know, but I'll still mention it, or you just get agurtain and treat your urea so it doesn't evaporate, and then you can just go right over the top in your bag spreader again with treated urea and that won't evaporate. So and literally a guy could be like, man, I got to go to the co op to get treated. Youuia, you could. You can buy a jug of this, put it in your backpack sprayer and put a tarp out with your urea and spray your urea with this stuff and then it doesn't evaporate and it's worth taking the time to do that versus being like, yeah, I put urea out and didn't rain for the rink and it was ninety degrees and it's all gone. You know, don't do that or you know, well I'll just disc it all in. How much time does that take? 01:02:45 Speaker 3: A lot? 01:02:46 Speaker 4: What does it do to your soil? It's not great. So doing treated aureas has huge benefits and a little bit of time to treat some with a backpack sprayer with agurtain and a little bit of cost. Well a jug costs me a couple of undred bucks. It' last a long time, super super effective. So again, bag spreader, backpack sprayer, kill off gly, kill off whatever is there, heavy gly maybe ammonium sulfate with it, maybe two four D if you've got some really nasty stuff, and just make sure it is dead and then maybe scratch it and intercede it. And you can do a lot of things like that. You can do rye like that, you can do clovers like that in the fall, like late summer. You could do breasts because like that, he's not so much. Oh, it's not so much. They're a little fussier, but like rye win or wheat we'll do. Okay, there's a lot of things you can do. 01:03:42 Speaker 3: That. One thing I want to bring up to and you've touched on this with nighte Gen and basically MPK, how important in terms of conservation and for the nutrition of all animals eating out of these plots is soil health because I think a lot of people want just the simple aesthetics of a good looking food plot, but the soil health. What is your opinion on it? And I and that's a that topic has a lot more buzz than probably three years ago in my opinion, but I think it's important to bring up and get your perspective. 01:04:22 Speaker 4: There's a lot of there's a lot that's missed with soil health. So people are like, you know, the general ones like being kay, that's soil health, right, No, No, that's a component of it. But your organic matter will probably be your number one component. Well, that's not what he's asking kind of is you know, if your organic matter is five versus two, it's a huge difference on your nutrition, on the success of your plot. What's going to grow there, what's going to be able to be utilized, all the all the nutrients that are going to be able to be utilized by the plants with your organic matter and surviving a drought, Well, how do I improve that organic matter? Well, plant high biomass crops or plots high biomass. Don't till I add, like compost a grade of food matter. That's how I fertilize or cattle manure. People aren't going to do that, they're just not so high biomass. Things like rye corn sorghums, milos with probably some legumes blended in there for nitrogen will be a great way to build your soil. Don't tear it up. And you know your pH will probably be next, because you know, if you say, I keep hearing P and K fosterous and potassium, but your pH is wrong one, you're all the calcium that critters need will not be there, and then everything that the plant needs to grow PK and then a whole nother list which I'm going to get into and address this, because this is missed all the time. Those plants can't uptake that. So pH would be like next, with organic matter next in importance. So getting your pH right, you know, six five to seven is ideal. In some areas, it's like, well my pH is eight, I'm in this you know, uh spot where the soils. The other way, well, you'd have to add a lot of sulfur to deal with that, right, which is. 01:06:19 Speaker 3: Probably a lot more rare. 01:06:21 Speaker 4: It's it's more rare. But in Iowa there's a line. If you get into northwest Iowa, you start getting into higher phs. So guys will use more sulfur, and once in a while they use gypsum, which is fairly neutral. It's got calcium and sulfur. But you do got to address it in the same for the same reason. So, and if your pH is like six or five. If it's five, you got big issues. You know, stuff isn't really going to want to grow there and it's not going to take up the nutrition that it should without the proper pH. So and what you would notice if you ate two plants, like you had a garden with the proper pH, and you had a garden with the wrong pH, one would taste very bland. You'd be like, and you'll notice this at the store. If you buy like cheap produce that's grown in like Central America and junk soils and they're just putting the basics on it, it will taste bland. Like an apple. Go eat an apple from the store that's from Central America, and then go eat an apple that's grown in the Midwest. Your brain will instantly know it. One is packed with nutrients, one is bland. Well, that's what would happen with a garden. If you put two gardens next to each other. One's pH is correct, one has the proper calcium levels and all the other nutrients to which are critical, and one the pH was wrong. One one would have smaller plants, less healthy plants, but they would taste bland. The one with the proper pH would be flavorful, and it would your brain would would recognize this, and it would crave without you even knowing, it would crave the proper pH. Garden with packed with nutrition. So when your pH is correct, now your plants can uptake all the other things and It's not just P and K. I cannot emphasize this enough. It is not just P and K. I mean, granted, you have nitrogen, which is the other huge component, which is a different subject. I'm going to leave nitrogen out though. But like our sulfur deficiencies are very rare, are very common across the Midwest. Okay, so almost everybody listening to this, I will guarantee you if you pull a soil sample, and you should pull a soil sample, absolutely you're going to be fifteen to twenty pounds deficient on sulfur. I almost guarantee it. I guarantee you you will be low on boron. Ninety percent of the people listening to this will be low on bora. You will be probably low on manganese. You will probably be low on zinc. You will probably be low on copper. You will probably be high in magnesium. And you probably have people, if I say a strong majority, will be high and iron. Thus, I need to figure out how to supplement boron manganese, copper, zinc. What the heck? This guy's a chemistry teacher, boring me out of my mind? How do I fix this? Just understand that a co op and a lot of the different folio sprays you can get. You can. There's ways to fix this and most of the co ops now because there's such a Midwest problem with all these deficiencies, offer most of these things. They're for sure your co op for sure, if they're any bit decent, is going to be able to get or have sulfur on hand. Solfur is the biggest efficiency problem. We have a crowd some Midwest that people pay attention to. Now you can. You could get online and say, hey, I'm going to order some boron, I'm going to order some zinc. 01:09:35 Speaker 3: You know. 01:09:35 Speaker 4: But but what you need to do really so so I don't confuse people and make this sound like a chemistry discussion, is just go get your soil samples. 01:09:46 Speaker 3: Do it. 01:09:46 Speaker 4: Just get a probe any way to get a soil column that's six inches deep. They get you a good representation from the top to down six inches doesn't need to be perfect. Send it in and get the full analysis. So all your macros and all your micros, and with that it will tell you on every sample you know, one A, one B, one B C. You're gonna label them all different around your field. There'll be different results. It's gonna tell you what your organic matter is, which is a big deal. That's the first thing you want to look at. It's gonna tell you what your pH is. The second thing you're gonna look at. It's gonna tell you what all your macros and your micros are. That's the third thing you're gonna want to look at. If you're a nerd like me, you're gonna start looking at your exchange ratios and your buffer index and all this stuff to worry about that. Don't worry about that. That will be region based like sandy soils stuff like that. But pH, organic matter, macros, and micros. Test for all those and address all of those is the work you can do. 01:10:48 Speaker 3: It Is it worth doing that on a half acre FOD plot? Because I guarantee someone listening right now is thinking, man, it's only a half acre food plot. Is it really worth all that effort? You know, the twelve or twenty dollars soil sample and then going and getting whatever it is, two hundred pounds of product from the co op. Is it worth it? 01:11:06 Speaker 4: So put put it in context, then you know half acre you're you know, if I added all the high level if I'm really deficient on all these things. Yeah, you have to. 01:11:17 Speaker 3: You have to. 01:11:18 Speaker 4: I mean, you'll grow a mediocre plot at best. But if you're really deficient, even on a half acre, you know, you'll see a huge difference with the results, like the amount of tonnage it will produce. The desirability to the deer. If you are very deficient versus deficient versus like, hey, I fix this will be vastly different. So you know we're talking about you know, in a half acre, I mean the most the worst soils. I could think of a few hunds. Yeah, you know, I had to add this, and I had to do this, and I had to do this a few hundred bucks to make your plot far more desirable. I think it's worth it. 01:11:59 Speaker 3: Well, that's and I think you would say all I have is a half acre, So you would want to make that half acre as great as possible. 01:12:06 Speaker 4: Yeah, I would. It'd be like seeing, I'm going to take the time to carve out a little garden in my backyard for my family. Are you gonna pull the weeds? Are you gonna you know, are you gonna take care of that? Are you gonna skimp on everything? You know? Then just don't plan it, right, I mean, if you're not gonna do anything. These are basic things. Though it's not that complex, it might be the first Here's the most complex part of it is doing it for the first time. Well, I don't know how to do a soil test, and that was hard to figure out which one to ask for. I went to Midwest Labs and I realized it was SC three was the code I needed to submit, and it was a little bit hard for me to get through the website. Well, just call them up and say what soil sample do I need? How do I send this in? And you spend twenty dollars and a half acre plot maybe forty because you pull two samples, and then you been two hundred bucks correcting the worst parts of your plot. Well, you don't ever really have to go to that extent ever again, and next time you do, now you know how to do it, so it's easy. Just doing it the first time is the hardest part period. 01:13:14 Speaker 3: Which would probably be all of these projects we talked about. Yes, it's the learning curve of doing it, and I think that Skip, can you give everyone permission right now to not do every project perfect? 01:13:27 Speaker 4: I've done every project, the wrong way, the sideways way, just I've made every mistake. But I also had to go from no knowledge, no tools, to hey, I got a riding lawn. More to hey, I got a four wheeler with a carrow. And then all of a sudden, I got a small tractor. Then I have a medium sized tractor. Now have a big tractor with auto steer and precision planning and you know variable rate spreading on fertilizer. And you know, so in every step throughout that process of trying to accomplish the same goals at different scales, and made huge mistakes. I planned when it was muddy, don't play in the mud. Why because it will be a compacted mess. Play in the mud. Your crops will be a dud plant the dust, your grain bins will bust. Whatever the saying is silly things like that. I had to learn every single one of these things the hard way, all of them, because nobody was there to teach me these things. And now you do have some things that I didn't. I was maybe too stupid to utilize or they didn't exist, which is you know, all the the information online and you know that's when I got involved in like iowaytail. I'm like, oh, here's all the solutions, all these things, and you know, spending a year on that website, I'm like, oh my gosh, I did a lot of dumb stuff. Uh, and that fixed a lot of my issues right there. And now you you know, there's websites, there's content like this. There's all sorts of sources for people who are seeking wisdom or seeking solutions, or seeking to eliminate mistakes and do things more efficiently. I mean, there's plenty of information. I would say, it's almost like the opposite now where it's like there's too much information. Yeah, so you're trying to sort through what's the garbage, what's the garbage, and what's great? And there is a lot of garbage out there. That's the only discouraging thing I would say to people. There's some things that are just. 01:15:29 Speaker 3: What percentage? What percentage do you think is well, let me ask you this. With the content that you watch or hear about, or whatever the case may be, do you think it comes from a place of ignorance or a different motive of the person that's sharing it. Maybe they have something to sell or they're just trying to be an expert when they're not quite an expert yet. Why do you think that is the case? And what would be a tip to make sure you're getting good info. 01:15:53 Speaker 4: All of the above? I think when you're if you're really sponsored a certain way and the money's info into you a certain way, you're going to push a certain mindset and a certain type of products and a certain method. I think the other way though. The other thing though, his guys are like, listen, I did this system at one point to make a successful food plot, and I continue to have a pretty darn good food plot. So I'm going to say that's the best way for everybody, Like, like, hey man, yep, see, watch me use my rotary tiller, go down eight inches in the soil, then pack it to plant a clover seed that's going an eighth of an inch deep. It works, it will turn out. Now. Is there huge downsides to that, huge problems that come up with that? 01:16:37 Speaker 3: Yes? 01:16:38 Speaker 4: Yes there is. Is that the incorrect way to do it? Yes, I'm going to say it. That is the incorrect way to do it, But you will see people doing it crazy. The rotary tillers should all be sold for scrap. It should all be torn apart and made into no hotel drills or or packers or harrows. There's a few pieces out there like it does not belong in the Midwest and maybe rare circumstances, you know, well, and my buddies will be well, dude, I only used it one time to smooth out soil, and a will never use it again. Okay, you know there's little caveats there. 01:17:20 Speaker 3: But. 01:17:22 Speaker 4: Yeah, uh so I would say there's a lot of ignorance and it worked this way. And I have buddies they're like, well, I'm gonna keep killing because my plots turn out fine. And they do, but they and I'll say, well, how many times do you have to spray for weeds a bunch? It's like, dude, I don't have to spray for weeds with my brass because I never spram and then and then the other one like Braskis is a great example because it's always grown in a vulnerable time of year where success where failure rates are higher. And had you grown corn the same way or anything with the same things going against it as brass, because you'd see a lot more failures. It's just you have more forgiveness planning things earlier. But Brasskis is a great example because guys are like, well, dude, if I tear up the soil and I do this, I still have a great brascal pot. But I'll ask them a lot of years, how many times did you have to spray this year? A bunch and then the common one. I'll bet you half the guys I know, if not seventy five percent to do that, have Brasica failures. Now that's a lot, like over half fifty one percent at a minimum, Like, yeah, dude, they did. Nothing's grown there. I have never had a Brassica failure. Ever. 01:18:28 Speaker 3: Why do you think they're failed? 01:18:29 Speaker 4: Because they're tearing up the soil and all their moistures going away, and they're getting all this weed pressure which is taking even more moisture out. It's competing with their plants, and they're degrading their soils year a year for a year. So while I'm building my soils and my organic matter went from like four to five and a half, they probably went from like four to three. And little by little they're like, hey, it's still working. But ten years from now they're going to be like, I'm having more failures and I can't really grow things. And I'm not even gonna play Brascus anymore. And I know a lot of guys. I'm just sick of the failures. It's always dry, we have a drought. It's like you part, you're part of the reason for that, on what you did to your soils. So uh, just because there's a successful way to do something, it's it's it's a lot like how corn is done here. I mean, guys, on these you know, really erodible ridge tops that are two percent organic matter, have to go till the living daylights out of the soil and they have a good stand of corn. Now with the hybrids, they can tolerate some of the more poor soil, but they're they're continually degrading their soil. It's just getting worse and worse and worse. And they're in a way their hope is the hybrids will just get better. 01:19:46 Speaker 3: So they've. 01:19:50 Speaker 4: But had they been enhancing their soils the whole time, uh, they they have less inputs and they'd have a more robust crop. And now where you really see the farmers, this is like real world. I have to grow things to live. The farmers that do that, you know, they might shine on a year when the weather's great. But hey man, I degraded my soil. It's junk, it's two percent organic matter. And then they get hit with a drought and their yields really whatever hybrid just get just get clobbered. Where had they taken great care of that soil and built it up, they probably wouldn't have had such a devastating result. 01:20:27 Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I think the theme of this is figure out a way to add more to your ground, improve it rather than extract. Yes, which would be in my opinion, like the definition of conservation. 01:20:39 Speaker 4: And you know, I would just say, the more you do to add to nutrition, you know, which all all these things intertwined, just like the ecology we were talking about earlier. But the more you do to add to your nutrition of your plants, of you know, there's more brows. This translates into bigger bucks, absolutely bigger bucks. And you might say, well, the bucks around you only get to four, fine, but that four year old will be bigger. He'll have more. Like I'm looking at a table full of sheds that are just like all full of like beating and splits and kickers. And when I got this farm, you didn't see that stuff, you will have bigger deer because of it. You'll see that. You'll see it in the racks, like you'll see all the beating and like, whoa, the three year olds used to look like this. Now man, they have a lot more of you know, the extra stuff you give them, the proper nutrition, which some of that can be like artificial stuff too. I mean there's supplementation, there's mineral there's you know, even even stump sprouts, you know, and and areas that have soybeans or alf alpha versus areas that not that don't are gonna make huge differences. But you know, getting the nutrition on your farm done in a variety of ways, whether that's through the forest, the plots, is going to create bigger deer. It will make substantial differences in the inches that deer can actually put on. And then you know where you tie habitat together. It's like, okay, now the cover component, what does that do well? That allows those deer with proper cover to get to those older ages right and not get shot at the younger ages because they don't have ideal cover, they don't want to be there, they leave all these other regions. So proper habitat really does combine ideal nutrition with safe habitat to reach the older ages, which is what people need in any region. Maybe you're trying to grow three year olds because everybody shoots one year olds. I mean, you know, the habitat component is a big part of getting those deer to age. It's a safety component, it's a desirability of the deer to be on your ground. So there's all these reasons where those two issues, nutrition and safety and seclusion and wanting to be on your farm go together. And so bigger deer, older deer with proper nutrition and proper habitat. Its sounds easy, it sounds easy, it's not. 01:23:06 Speaker 3: We gave We gave folks a punch lists to start, and that's where that's where you just have to get started. And I say it next year, next year, next year, and never get anything done. So this is the thing, just the kickoff. This is the kickoff right here for someone right now, they're gonna say I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna go do this, I'm gonna go and figure it out. And that's where you. 01:23:24 Speaker 4: Can start today. Start today, even if you have no money in your pocket and you got to pick up some popcins uh and redeem those to get a little bit of a little bit of money to get going on something. I mean, very very basic to do something today for anybody, and just keep going down the rabbit hole, because if you enjoy it, you're gonna want to keep going down the rabbit hole and you'll just get bigger and learn more things and and this learning will never end, and you're never You'll start buying all this stuff and it'll obsess you and it never ends. 01:23:57 Speaker 3: It's fun though, It's yeah, it's the wormhole that doesn't end. Well. This is this is fun because we just finished up a live Q and A last week on the Master Academy and we answered you answered direct questions of very very specific things, which was was pretty fun. So I feel like that's the next level of this conversation with really specific examples and questions. And I want to give you an opportunity to plug Iowa White Tail. I find myself on there sometimes by accident when I Google something and I'm like, oh, I'm on Iowa y Tail trying to figure out whatever problem I have going on. And there's a lot of really good threads on there too. 01:24:33 Speaker 4: It's great. It was part of my progression, you know, being the guy that knew quite a bit at that point, quite a bit, but then discovering Iowa Tale and being like, oh my gosh, like I said, there was all these mistakes I made. So my good good friend ended up being my neighbor in Iowa. This guy named double Tree who contributed to like all these different forms back in the day, and he passed away maybe like decade decade and a half ago, but you know, twenty fifteen ish years ago. I did some projects with him. We learned a lot of stuff together. I learned so much from him, and he contributed to Iawhitetail. So when I could buy iowait Tale, it was kind of like, hey, I got to preserve this information and keep his legacy going. So all that's still there, like the Doubletry section, habitat, anything related to habitat. There's so much there. And it's like if I post a video or talk about a certain topic, like people want to ask me like all these questions and I do try and get to them, but it's like it's all there. It is all there. Please save me a little time, especially during farm season, and just go there and it's all like so I just to be like transparent, iowait taal is like, you know, no profit I don't do. There's no money that comes from it. It costs me money, right which to most people doesn't make any sense. But it's just a way to get back in a way. You know. Maybe there's some things I'll do that make some money at some point, and maybe I have to spend a little pivot a little bit. But right now, you know, I'm just farming and uh, you know, I work on land and that's that's my living. But iowait tail, you know, and this won't change. Ioway tail will always be there for a resource for people to help for the causes on you know, regulations on habitat, how to how to you know, keep the the Midwest a better place environmentally or for deer hunters, or be just like that that hardcore information source that sifts through the garbage. Like when you see information on there, it's not going to be the missing Like like, there's things I'll say that is wrong, that is the wrong way to do it. I completely disagree, and I'm not saying I'm not wrong on some things that I'm far from it, but the information on there, especially double trees information, and the members there at at a level, a top tiered level, and I would be extreme, dreamely confident to take any information there and implement any information there. 01:27:04 Speaker 3: Twelve So that's great. Well, what a way to cap off habitat month and people are equipped to go get to work. Yeah, thank you, yeah, thanks once again, thanks for having me

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