Okay, you got me on Foothills. What's a trophy? 3 1/2+? 120"?
Or better yet, what about a "Quality" hunting experience (QDM)?

Let's take Chuck Swan.

24,000 acres,deer herd at or below CC, controlled access, mandatory check-in and check-out, active forest management, and food plotting. Don't anyone try and convince me it couldn't happen because of soils, either. AGE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SOIL QUALITY.

I've spent the last 4 years doing habitat research out there.Every year, they kill one or two nice ones. When your buck harvest is close to 70% yearlings, you aren't going to produce many good deer.

We ATTEMPTED a camera survey out there. Out of 8 cameras and over 1000 pics, we had 6 bucks. we couldn't even use the data for sex ratios, age structure, etc.

TWRA calls it a place to go if you've got no where else to hunt. My opinion fwiw: If I have to get drawn for a hunt, it better be worth getting drawn for. There are 100's of thousands of acres of public land in E TN especially, where someone can go to just kill a deer.

I spent yesterday at CS and saw plenty of deer, the problem I see with CS is the lack of natural food and based on the tiny body size of those deer something is wrong. Either it is food sources, or there are too many of them, but I saw mature does that might weigh 60 lbs. If the overall deer size is that small, then nothing will change to allow them to all be monsters.

As to the % of yearlings, that was from a guy that worked there. That's what he told me, just passing it along. It's the lack of early successional habitat up there. The Div of Forestry could get in high gear and do some serious timber cutting, but the hunters don't want that.

I agree, the body size at CS is laughable, but I've seen a couple of deer up there sporting some really nice headgear, deer that anyone would put on the wall.

Isn't Catoosa in about year 5 of antler restrictions? Seriously, How has that worked out? Good or Bad. Catoosa has always produced some big bodied and big antlered bucks. Are they seeing an increase in these numbers since the AR's were put in place?

Apparently you know way more about it than I do from a quick drive through. Maybe I should consider another career path.

It's not that I don't think that those guys aren't doing a good job, I just see a whole lot of untapped potential in that place. If you could show Tn hunters that QDM can there with its "inferior genetics" why couldn't it work anywhere in the state.

Just a question- Why do you think you saw so many deer this time of year?

Oh and as to soils, we grew 5' high soybeans with 30% crude protien, and had native vegetation that we sampled over 20%.