With protein going up and all the discussions we've had lately, I thought something that might give us hope and show that there is potential benefit to spending the money. It's a story of a deer. If you read TTH you read the story of the kill. This is the story of how he got there.
I've always gone against the general thinking in protein feeding in two regards. The first is that you don't stop feeding it. You feed it year around, as long as you can afford it. The second is that it doesn't take years for it to show fruit. If the right deer puts his nose in the feeder and stays there, that deer can show dramatic growth the first year.
I've put together a progression of pics showing him from the end of the season in 06 to the end of his growth in Sept. He had protein all through the season, but his horns didn't change, so I just included enough to show him during the season.
We had fed L/E feed for a couple years. The deer didn't like it. They would MAYBE eat a sack a month per feeder. We begged, pleaded, and stomped and held our breath to get them to change. We told them if we were going to run the feed program, we needed to use something they'd eat. We managed to get about 4 test pens set up with Antlermax and convinced them to change. This buck came in at the beginning of that change. So, it wasn't a long term effect to his growth. It came about in one year.
The year was a dry one. Overall buck growth was poor. This buck used a minimum of 6 pens. You can see from the pics that he used a number of pens.
Here he is in hard horn from the end of the 05/06 season. He scored 163. That's considering he had 18 inside. We found both sheds. One was laying right by a protein tube.
I've always gone against the general thinking in protein feeding in two regards. The first is that you don't stop feeding it. You feed it year around, as long as you can afford it. The second is that it doesn't take years for it to show fruit. If the right deer puts his nose in the feeder and stays there, that deer can show dramatic growth the first year.
I've put together a progression of pics showing him from the end of the season in 06 to the end of his growth in Sept. He had protein all through the season, but his horns didn't change, so I just included enough to show him during the season.
We had fed L/E feed for a couple years. The deer didn't like it. They would MAYBE eat a sack a month per feeder. We begged, pleaded, and stomped and held our breath to get them to change. We told them if we were going to run the feed program, we needed to use something they'd eat. We managed to get about 4 test pens set up with Antlermax and convinced them to change. This buck came in at the beginning of that change. So, it wasn't a long term effect to his growth. It came about in one year.
The year was a dry one. Overall buck growth was poor. This buck used a minimum of 6 pens. You can see from the pics that he used a number of pens.
Here he is in hard horn from the end of the 05/06 season. He scored 163. That's considering he had 18 inside. We found both sheds. One was laying right by a protein tube.
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