MORE PROTEIN FOR YOUR DEER QUICKER AND CHEAPER

New Research

EDITOR'S NOTE: During the late winter and throughout the spring and much of the summer, maximizing the amount of protein the deer on your property ingest will help your deerherd build stronger, healthier bodies and larger antlers. Most sportsmen who manage their deerherds plant greenfields and use feeders in the fall, primarily to observe deer and harvest the bucks in their herds. However, if you want to build a healthier herd with bigger-bodied deer and specifically bucks with heavier antlers, you must provide greenfield plantings and supplemental feed immediately after the rut until the first green-up. But don't stop your feeding there. If you merely insure the survival of your herd until green-up, you haven't increased your odds for growing bigger bucks quicker. This week we'll learn what Dr. Keith Causey, a longtime deer biologist and Dan Moultrie, who has intensively researched the feeding habits of deer for many years, recommend for producing bigger, healthier deer.

"Although feeding corn to deer is one of the best ways to attract deer, most corn only contains 5- to 7-percent protein," Dan Moultrie, the creator and owner of Moultrie Feeders in Birmingham, Alabama, says. "So even though you're attracting deer and they're eating the corn, you're not drastically increasing the nutritional level of the animals when you're feeding them corn. A few years ago, research from Auburn University showed soybeans could be fed out of a spin feeder, and the deer would eat them." Up until this discovery, no one had found a way to use a spin feeder to distribute food with high protein to deer because the high-protein pellets generally used with a spin feeder would swell when they soaked up moisture, causing them to not come out of a timed gravity feeder (spin feeder). To successfully feed soybeans to deer at that time, landowners had to use some type of covered trough. However, trough feeding had one major disadvantage: the deer still would feed primarily at night instead of feeding during daylight hours when the hunters could see them and take them.

To learn more about how to use spin feeders and soybeans to improve deerherd, write or call Moultrie Feeders at 150 Industrial Road, Alabaster, AL 35007, (800) 653-3334, or visit the company's website at www.moultriefeeders.com.

TOMORROW: PEAS AND CORN FOR BUCKS AND DOES