Hunting Your Whitetail Food Plot

Jul 15, 2021 | Whitetail Hunting | 0 comments

The work has been put in – your crop is coming up, deer are starting to hit, and now it’s time to hunt. Nothing is more exciting than watching your hard work pay off, and hopefully taking down your target buck over the food plot you have spent all spring and summer preparing. Even though a food plot can be the ticket in punching a tag, there are some steps you need to take for increasing your odds.

Step 1: Know Your Seed

Different varieties of food plot seed all serve different purposes and can be attractive during different times of the year. Clover, alfalfa, peas, wheat, oats, rye, and radishes are big buck attractors for early season and through the rut. As soon as these seeds germinate they give deer a nutritious buffet that deer hit early and stay throughout the year. However, once the frost hits, the attractiveness of these crops become less appealing to deer.

Seeds like corn, soybeans, and turnips can be a killer rut and late season food source for deer. Once the cold hits, deer need carbohydrates to keep them going. After the frost arrives, these crops become more powerful and attractive to deer because of the sugars, fibers, and starches that they contain.

Step 2: Utilize Trail Cameras

No doubt trail cameras play a huge role in locating and figuring out where mature bucks are. A food plot is a destination place – it is where deer will be going, and typically staying longer while they get a full belly. Hanging a trail camera over a food plot will tell you what deer are hitting your food plot, what time they are hitting the food plot, and where they are entering and exiting.

Step 3: Know Your Buck

To eliminate human intrusion around your food plot, spend some time studying the area on the BaseMap App BEFORE you hunt. Use BaseMap to look for, and mark, a good inside corner, a travel corridor where you can intercept the deer going from bedding areas to the food plot, and a good stand site on the food plot giving you easy in and out access.

BaseMap Tip: Knowing a buck’s favorite bedding area is vital to understanding the path he takes into the food plot. Use BaseMap’s high resolution satellite imagery layer to help locate possible bedding areas by pin-pointing ridges, marsh edges with cattails, benches, and thickets that are near your whitetail food plot.

Step 4: Own The Wind

The very last thing you want when hunting is your wind blowing right in the whitetail’s buffet you have meticulously prepared. As mentioned above, this is a destination area for deer, and more times than not you are going to have multiple deer in the buffet at a time. Use BaseMap’s HuntWind™ feature to make sure your wind is blowing in the correct direction before you navigate to your tree stand.