Our land is actually in Clarkridge up 201N - pretty close to Norfork WMA. On that land we have about 80 acres and we always keep 3-5 or so acres in food plots of some sort - usually something we can share with the deer, like corn, turnips, sorghum cane etc that we harvest some of and let the deer eat what they want. There's no way the land we have would hold all the deer we see, but we grow enough groceries that they're constantly moving through to feed. None of the neighbors put in any food plots, or at least none on the bordering farms.
Lewman,
I see your point, and I agree that we should be working to get more bucks, but you may be ignoring a critical point. If a piece of land can only hold x number of deer, say 100 for simplicity, then you can only have 100 deer on that piece of land. That's it's carrying capacity. You can increase that by planting food plots or increasing native browse, but that increase is really artificial. So if you can only have 100 deer, and 70 of them are does, then only 30 can be bucks. If you want to increase the number of bucks you MUST decrease the number of does.
I think zone 3, or my area at least, is pretty close to it's carrying capacity already. By this logic you can only increase the number of bucks in the zone by decreasing the number of does. Not killing does will always produce higher total numbers of deer, but if it's more bucks you want you gotta take out more does than bucks to get the ratio equalized.
Additionally, I predict the deer herd is gonna take a dive over the next several years. Food plots artificially inflate carrying capacity, and when folks don't have the money to plant them there will be more deer than food, and herd numbers will drop to the 'natural' carrying capacity of the land. They may actually spike for a year or 2 since the deer will be moving around more looking for food, but harvest numbers will drop in the long term.
Again, just speculation. Opinions may vary.
