A year in the life of a farm

[JAGR]

Just out of pure curiosity, how many acres is your farm? What % of that is timber and farm land?

[elgato]

1350 acres
Roughly 300 acres in openings the rest thick timber with ~ 70% hardwood 30% pine.

[elgato]

I'm going through countless trail cam pictures now identifying bucks I want to remove. Before posting I thought I would share our philosophy on 'culling'.

To set the tone I think culling is the most misunderstood, abused, and and probably least effective tool in the managers arsenal. I wonder how many bucks have been culled at a young age when if left to mature wold have been plenty big enough to satisfy the majority of hunters. Or how many bucks get culled for smaller antlers when the nutrition available compromised his production.

We remove certain bucks each year because:
1) We have a lot of bucks with a ratio of more bucks than does.
2) Our nutritional plane is very high year round thus we can assume a buck is exhibiting his best potential for his age.
3) If we removed only does to reach the #'s needed to manage population recruitment would be compromised by having insufficient does in the herd
4)We rarely remove deer before 4 yrs. old and often they are older than that
5) We almost always know a particular deer and his history before removing him.
6) Removing any deer is about removing a mouth from the habitat...no more no less.
7) We leave most of our top end trophies each yr. and thin from the bottom up. It's not the deer you shoot that make much difference, it's the ones you leave behind that make a herd great.
8) There is no pretense that 'culling' changes the genetic makeup of the herd. It's all about nutrition mgt. for remaining deer.
9) Many of our culls would make many hunters very happy.

With all that said we will take about 10 bucks and 30 does this year. I will post up several examples of the ones we hope to remove soon.

[BillyloMexico]

Oh the anticipation!!

Bring it!!

[elgato]

It's not just all about deer on the farm

[BillyloMexico]

Frank the Tank!!!

Man he hates those gators!

[jkelbe]

Nice Gator.

So with a high buck to do ratio, why are you removing 10 bucks and 30 does. Are you still working to get the ratio higher?

[Mex. Bowhunter]

It's not just all about deer on the farm

It would be nice to have two of them in the Creak in Mexico to feed hogs to

[BillyloMexico]

It would be nice to have two of them in the Creak in Mexico to feed hogs to

Lol

[elgato]

Nice Gator.

So with a high buck to do ratio, why are you removing 10 bucks and 30 does. Are you still working to get the ratio higher?

It's purely an unscientific guess but I believe I need to remove about 40 animals to hold population in check. I will modify that if necessary as the season goes on if I think my estimates are off.

I figure I can run about 200-250 animals and not effect habitat. Best guess is that I'm at ~ 175-200 now. It's a wild *** guess but maybe ~ 100-125 bucks and ~75ish does. I may be a bit light here. Bunch of fawns with probably 100-150% recruitment ..now. That may change with the winter.

If I take 20-30 does that leaves 45-70 does ..again maybe a few more. With 100-125 fawns ( thats a # I'll need to watch closely to confirm } 50/50% ratio, I should replace the 20-30 does with 30-50 female fawns. This scenario still has population growing which I don't really want . Have to watch how natural mortality fits here. Certainly there is more male mortality than female.

I don't take any more bucks than necessary to meet population goals. I like seeing bucks. I've also seen too many bucks make big jumps in size to be very aggressive on culling. I don't buy the culling/genetic improvement concept. So we are very picky about which males get removed but I need to remove some to keep from overpopulating.

With all the above pattern been the norm for the past years it seems the ratio just 'normalizes' between 1.5-2/1 b over d. You can also assume all the #'s I used above are wrong...just a guess. Again will modify as season progresses based on what we see. Forecast is just an intuitive guess.

[Backwoods101]

I've never thought about it like that but your right, as long as you have a hand full of does to keep your population where it needs to be, and a nice little fawn crop each year, the more bucks you can run the better. I guess I just had the old school generic buck to doe ratio stuck in my head.
I have to give credit where credit is due, I have seen many highly managed ranchs over the years, what you are doing over there is a step above the others. Between your well thought out food plots, managing practices and the one that pushed you over the top in my opinion (introducing the bees) your doing a awesome job.

[jkelbe]

It's purely an unscientific guess but I believe I need to remove about 40 animals to hold population in check. I will modify that if necessary as the season goes on if I think my estimates are off.

I figure I can run about 200-250 animals and not effect habitat. Best guess is that I'm at ~ 175-200 now. It's a wild *** guess but maybe ~ 100-125 bucks and ~75ish does. I may be a bit light here. Bunch of fawns with probably 100-150% recruitment ..now. That may change with the winter.

If I take 20-30 does that leaves 45-70 does ..again maybe a few more. With 100-125 fawns ( thats a # I'll need to watch closely to confirm } 50/50% ratio, I should replace the 20-30 does with 30-50 female fawns. This scenario still has population growing which I don't really want . Have to watch how natural mortality fits here. Certainly there is more male mortality than female.

I don't take any more bucks than necessary to meet population goals. I like seeing bucks. I've also seen too many bucks make big jumps in size to be very aggressive on culling. I don't buy the culling/genetic improvement concept. So we are very picky about which males get removed but I need to remove some to keep from overpopulating.

With all the above pattern been the norm for the past years it seems the ratio just 'normalizes' between 1.5-2/1 b over d. You can also assume all the #'s I used above are wrong...just a guess. Again will modify as season progresses based on what we see. Forecast is just an intuitive guess.

Oh the math geek in me is so giddy. Great recruitment numbers. I feel my low fence doesn't have the same.

[elgato]

Here are a few of the bucks we hope to remove this yr.thinning from the bottom up. This is an ancient 10 pt.Brows are only 1" long .

[elgato]

Here's a 4 yr old 8 pt.

[elgato]

This is the only 3 yr old we will target. Normally we avoid 3 yr olds but there are so many much better