Welcome to “The Food Plot Doctor” column in Whitetails Unlimited Magazine! Although J. Wayne Fears has retired and his column is no longer active, feel free to browse through his past articles and learn more about food plots.

For those of you I haven’t met, please allow me to introduce myself. I have been managing and writing about white-tailed deer for some 50 years. I grew up on a trap line, as my dad was a trapper and my mom, a country school teacher. As a child growing up in the backcountry, I was fascinated with wildlife, and wildlife habitat management. We were too poor for me to even dream about going to college, but after serving in the Army, I used the GI Bill to obtain degrees from Auburn University and the University of Georgia. Not only did I want to gain knowledge in wildlife management but I took all the agronomy and soils courses I could to understand the basics of growing the best deer habitat.

After graduation, my first experience working with food plots was back in the late 1960s. Deer food plots were almost unheard of then, but quail food plots were a major part of the wildlife management programs I was involved in with the University of Georgia Cooperative Extension Service, where I was working as a wildlife agent. As we tried various food plot plant materials for quail, we noticed that deer were attracted to the food plots, often to the point of destroying the small quail plots. This caught our attention, and our interest in developing food plots for deer grew. Little did we know that deer food plots would become an industry years later.

At the same time, the sportsman’s interest in deer hunting was growing nationwide. This gave me opportunities to do deer habitat management consulting out of the south. This was enhanced by an article that appeared in Outdoor Life magazine on my work. Some of the major writers of that era, Charles Elliott, Fred Bear, and Grits Gresham, to name a few, came to Georgia to look at the work I was doing. We became friends and they encouraged me to start writing about my experiences. I needed the extra income; hence my writing career in magazines and books was launched.

By the 1970s, deer hunting was one of the country’s fastest growing shooting sports. I had been employed by Gulf States Paper Corp. to lead one of the country’s largest hunting/wildlife management programs on private land. On 500,000 acres of forest land, I was responsible for the management of a rapidly growing deer and wild turkey population, 220 hunting clubs, a private wildlife law enforcement department, Westervelt Hunting Lodge, plus hunting programs in British Columbia, Alaska, and the Rockies. With an outstanding staff of dedicated deer biologists, we studied deer habitat management with a passionate emphasis on food plot research. It was our future. We learned just how important total habitat management, and population manipulation, on a year-round basis was to having healthy deer. The years of hands-on experience was like obtaining a post-graduate degree in deer habitat management.

Fast forward to the early 1990s. I was named the Rural Sportsman Editor of the nation’s largest and oldest magazine for farmers and ranchers, Progressive Farmer. “Rural Sportsman” was a wildlife management magazine within an agriculture magazine. For the next decade, I had the opportunity to write for and visit some of the best wildlife managers across the United States. We sponsored an annual Wildlife Stewardship Awards program recognizing the best wildlife stewards we could find in the U.S.A. I had the privilege of visiting each of their farms/ranches and seeing, first hand, outstanding habitat management and learning their techniques.

During that same period I edited a monthly column on food plot crops and we published a book entitled “Planting for Wildlife.” It was an instant hit.

I have had the good fortune of meeting deer hunters all over the U.S. at various sportsmen’s shows where I was giving deer hunting or management seminars, and during the 1990s, at the NRA Great American Hunters Tour where I was a speaker in numerous cities. I’ve also appeared on many TV shows as a guest hunter or doing segments on wildlife management or survival.

My career as a magazine and book writer has been a long one. I’ve had over 4,200 magazine articles and 20 books published, and have had the pleasure of having my name on the masthead of some of the best outdoor magazines out there, including Outdoor Life, Shooting Times, Turkey Call, Hunt Club Digest, The Trapper, Bowhunting World, North American Hunter, Buckmaster’s, and now Whitetails Unlimited Magazine. Currently I have 900 acres in a deer management program where I am involved daily with working with the latest food plot crops, soil fertilization, native habitat management, and ATV/small tractors and implements. I am really doing it just like you are and on a tight budget.

I managed the “Rural Sportsman” section of Progressive Farmer just as we are now doing “The Food Plot Doctor.” I asked the readers to tell me what they wanted to read about, and they dictated the subjects we wrote about. It was a win-win for both sides. Progressive Farmer had well over 600,000 subscribers so due to the number of readers I would hear from each month, it was impossible to answer each e-mail, but it was their questions and comments that made “Rural Sportsman” the success it was, and I expect the same thing here at Whitetails Unlimited Magazine.

But that’s enough about me; now I would like to help the Whitetails Unlimited Readers. Below is a vast array of topics from how you can have better food plots on a year-round basis, and how you can improve the habitat on your hunting property. While I don’t claim to have all the answers to food plot problems, I do have a vast network of experts in deer nutrition, agronomy and soils science, native habitat management, and the other necessary scientific fields which I tap into to get correct—and practical—answers. I count among my food plot advisors such innovators as David Forbes with Hunter Specialties, Bobby Cole with BioLogic, John Carpenter with Pennington, Steve Scott with Whitetail Institute, and many others who have contributed to the field of deer food plot improvement.

J. Wayne Fears