Different "trends" in management practices come and go as new ideas hit the management world. A really big trend for a while was creating "ecotones" or feathered edges around food plots. Basically, this just means creating a transitioning set of habitat types that produce some cover around the edges of food plots. The goal was to increase daylight use of these food plots under the theory that deer are more likely to step out into a plot in daylight if they have some type of thick cover right up against the edge of the plot. Looking at observation data from my own property, food plots that have thick cover directly adjacent tend to produce higher deer sighting rates than plots that are surrounded by big open hardwoods.
In the past, I never had "food plot acreage to spare" when it came to producing such transition zones. But now I do have some to spare. I've been considering leaving tall-growing summer crops standing around the edges of the plots. This coming spring, I plan on planting a mixture of beans and sorghum in my summer plots, and come fall, leaving at least one or two bush-hog widths of the sorghum standing around the outer edge of the plots. Has anyone tried this and do you believe it was effective in getting deer to use the plots more in daylight?
