About J. Wayne Fears

It happens far too often: a food plot is not planted for one season, and the land becomes a dense weed field. Overlook it a second year, and it’s on its way to becoming a brush infested early stage forest. The longer the ground is not broken, planted, and managed, the more difficult it is to reclaim.

This past summer I discovered a food plot on my property that had not been planted in two years. What was once an opening had become a head-high jungle of emerging saplings, ironweed, goldenrod, ragweed, tickweed-sunflower, and various other tall growing weeds. In late August, it was a wildflower postcard picture, but there was little for deer to eat, and just walking through it was very difficult. I was faced with the challenge of starting over. Here are the steps my sons and I took to re-establish the food plot.

Step 1 – Mowing
The first challenge to reclaiming a food plot is to get the weeds and small saplings down to a manageable level. In my case, and in many cases, this is not a job for an ATV with a mower attached; it requires a farm tractor with a PTO driven mower. It usually takes three to four passes over the entire field to get the litter/stubble chopped up finely. This needs to be done by mid to late summer.

Head-high weeds choked our food plot that hadn’t been managed for two years.

After mowing the food plot, I like to wait a week or two before I do step two. During that time, the field needs to be gone over carefully to pick up sticks, stones, and other debris that might hamper the rest of the reclamation project.

Step 2 – Soil Test
It’s a safe bet that overlooked food plots have not been soil tested for several years. After the field has been mowed so that bare soil can be reached easily, it’s a good time to visit your Cooperative Extension Service agent to get soil test kits for your food plots. These are available for free in most states. Go to the food plot and take a soil sample following the instructions included with the kit, then send the sample to the designated soils lab for analysis. There is a small fee for this service, but it’s well worth the cost. The report you receive from this lab will tell you exactly how much and what kind of fertilizer, and possibly lime, you will need on the food plot for the crop you intend to plant.

Step 3 – Spraying
This is one of the most important steps to reclaiming a grown-over food plot. It needs to be planned with help from the local county agricultural agent (Cooperative Extension Service). Since state and local requirements differ in the use of herbicides to kill weeds and brush, be sure to check with the extension regarding your area. Be sure to ask if certification is necessary for spraying your food plot. The county agent will be a great source of information for which herbicide to use on the weeds and brush found in your area. Also, he or she can give you the mixture formula you will need to use, and the best way to apply the spray.

Since the herbicide I use is a systemic killing agent, I like to let the mowed field sit for about two weeks to let fresh new leaf growth emerge. Then when the field is sprayed, the new leaves take the herbicide straight to the roots and the entire plant is killed.

The food plot I reclaimed last summer was only a little more than ½ acre, so we used backpack sprayers to apply a glyphosate nonselective broad-spectrum herbicide. For larger food plots, an ATV mounted tank sprayer would save a lot of time and deliver even coverage.

We sprayed all plant stubble and everything green found in the plot. After giving the herbicide seven days to work, we came back to the plot and spot sprayed any green plant material remaining. After another seven days, we made one last spot spray. Now we had a completely brown plot that was ready to be broken and a seedbed established.

At this point, if the soil test report had called for lime we would have used an ATV pulled seeder/spreader to lime the field; however, our field did not require any.

Step 4 – Breaking the Ground
Food plots that have not been worked for a year or two can be difficult to break-up due to a thick mat of weed, brush, and sapling roots. Even when the ground cover has been mowed several times and the stubble killed, there can be a lot of underground litter holding the dirt together solidly. At this point you need to decide whether to use a farm tractor pulling a disk, or your ATV pulling a disk made for an ATV.

To break our overlooked food plot, we elected to use my Polaris Ranger since it has a powerful 900cc engine, four-wheel-drive, and a hard pulling low range. The field was disked three times to provide a good seed bed. After the first disking, we went over the field with an ATV pulled rotary harrow to rake up any roots, rocks, and so on. After the third disking, we once again went over the field with the harrow to level and smooth the seedbed.

Step 5 – Planting the Field
At this point, if the soil test had called for fertilizer, we would have applied it with an ATV pulled seeder/spreader, but our soil test report only called for nitrogen to be applied after the plants emerged.

Now it was time to plant our seeds. It was good to see the neglected field looking like its old self again. With rain in the forecast, we used a seeder/spreader pulled behind the Ranger to plant the field, being careful to follow the seed producer’s seeding rate.

Step 6 – Good Seed-to-Ground Contact
As soon as the seed was on the ground, we used an ATV cultipacker pulled with the Ranger to roll the field. This pushed the seed into the fine soil, giving good seed-to-ground contact.

We got a one-inch slow rain the day after planting the plot, and within a few days, the formerly weed-choked field was green with emerging new growth.

A new food plot is a lot of work to get established, so it’s never good to ignore the plot for a couple of seasons. However, when that does happen, with some effort, the food plot can be brought back into production following these steps.

A tractor with a PTO driven mower had to be used to begin reclaiming the food plot. Spot spraying will be necessary to kill all weeds. Once the foliage begins to turn brown, it’s a good time to clear the field of rocks, limbs, and vegetative litter. Disking the food plot may be done with an ATV pulled disk, or it may require a heavy set of tractor pulled disks.
Use a harrow to rid the seed bed of roots and rocks, as well as to level it.	An ATV seeder/spreader can be used for tasks such as liming, fertilizer spreading, and seeding the reclaimed food plot.	Good seed-to-ground contact is best achieved by using a cultipacker.	The once weed-choked food plot five days after planting and a good rain