00:00:02 Speaker 1: Welcome to the wire to Hunt podcast, your home for deer hunting news, stories and strategies, and now your host, Mark Kenyon. Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. I'm your host, Mark Kenyan, and this episode number three and fifty and today in the show, I'm joined by Lindsay Thomas Jr. Of the Quality Deer Management Association for a terrific and varied conversation about white tail habitat, improvement, in conservation and how we can all do better. Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Wired Hunt podcast, brought to you by on X. Today we've got Lindsay Thomas Jr. Here on the show, and Lindsay is the communications director over at the q D MAY. He is a terrific outdoor writer and an avid deer hunter and habitat worker from Georgia, and today I'm chatting with him on a variety of habitat and conservation related topics, things such as whether or not we should really care about controlling non native or invasive species, or why and how hunters can get better plant identification, or ideas for planting lower impact, environmentally friendly food plots. There's just lots and lots of interesting things here. To cover, and I think I think there should be said. I think there's there's a lot of content out there today teaching us how to create quick, fix, fast and easy habitat improvements that maybe help are hunting a bit here and there. But if there's any overarching message that I can take from the conversation I have with Lindsay, it was that we can we can do better. Whether it's food plots or timber management, or dealing with weeds and shrubs and non native plants, we all probably have room to do just a little bit better for the deer and other wildlife and for the larger environment that we all enjoy as hunters. And that's that's an admirable and worthwhile goal to strive towards. So with that going mind, that is what we're in chat about. Let's get right into it with the one and only Lindsay Thomas Jr. Alright with me on the line now, is Lindsay Thomas Jr. Lindsay, it's Grace talked to again, you too. Mark. It's it's good to be to be back on wire to hunt, and I hope you're doing well. Yeah, you know, we're just talking before we start recording that you know, I'm doing about as well as you can ask for right now, given us it's spring, We're in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic and all the various impacts of that. So so yeah, I mean, I think I can't complain too much because I'm healthy, my family is healthy, and we're still able to pay the bills. So that's about as good as you could ask for. Think, Um, how about you. You guys are doing all right? It sounds like, yeah, we're doing okay. You know, family wise doing fine. Qutu May is doing okay. Of course, facing struggles that unique conservation nonprofit conservation organization is looking at right now. But other than that, you know, the whole team and my family, everybody's okay getting by. You know, we're seeing, like you said, everybody in America is struggling right now to some degree. Um, we're seeing a lot of people step up to the plate and helping others and that's good to see. Um, you know, we want to help our our health care providers. Seeing seeing what those people are doing on a day to day basis is pretty incredible. So, you know, kind of seeing what folks are doing for each other through this has been good. But yeah, everybody just like you, like me, and everybody else to some extent is struggling with this, some some more than others. And but yeah, everybody here's okay, Yeah it is. It is. Um. The one silver lining, like you just mentioned, is is seeing people step up to play, seeing people rally together. Um. It's it's unfortunate that sometimes it takes uh tragedies of kind to bring folks together. But I hope if if one small tiny thing we can take out of this is maybe it brings the country back together in certain ways, and and I think we're seeing examples of that, so so that's good. Um, it's something you mentioned I do want to hear a little bit more about because something that's been on my mind, which is, you know, how the q m A is holding up and how conservation organizations in general are weathering this storm, because I mean, so many businesses are really really um having a tough time at it given the variety of different regulations and shutdowns and lockdowns in place. I've always assumed that conservation organizations are feeling that in a big way too. Um, Right, is that the case? How are things going? How is this impacting you guys? Yeah, I mean it's um, it's an impact and all I think I can speak for all nonprofit conservation organizations when I say it's tough times right now, it's lean times right now. Nonprofits you know, as you know, we we play it close to the margins all the time, even during good times, because UM, you know, our job is to put the money we make back into our mission, back into conservation and constantly be able to show our members and supporters that there are contributions to us, UM aren't going in a bank account somewhere that they are taking you know, making action, accomplishing things for white tails in our case, UM, but particularly UM. You know, like many conservation organizations, events are a big part of our mission work and our fundraising. UM. And that's true for almost all conservation groups. You know, we all of us have played over time with you know, online fundraising and digital gatherings of various types, but it was still UH, events and banquets and fundraising, the things where people gathered. We're still a big part of the pie there on the income side for all of us. And so you know, when when this all hit, UM, we managed to pull off our White Tail Weekend, which you know you ended up you were supposed to come to White Tail Weekend on March fourteenth, and the travel restrictions at the last minute you had to pull out of that, and a lot of people did. We went ahead with it because the day, you know, the day we were rolling and the thing was started in people in town. For example, here in Anthon's, Georgia, the University of Georgia was still open um. You know, the governor had not yet done a sheltering place regulation or any of that. And literally the day after we finished the event, that's when all that stuff changed, and the university clothed and the governor you know, did a press conference and things started closing up. So you know, if we scheduled that thing a week later, we have had to cancel it, I feel sure. But on that Monday, we came in the office and postponed about two months worth of our If you made branch events around the country, it's going to end up being longer than that, you know, before it's over. And you've seen the same thing among all the other non concert nonprofit conservation groups. They're they're shuttering these in person events. You know, I saw that that country hunters and anglers had to close their June Randee boos completely. UM. I was talking with Shawn Curran was Rough Grosse Society late last week and about this thing. And you know, for the Rough Grouse Society, for example, this has hit them at at during one of their peaks of banquet activity. Uh, Turkey Federation, you know, spring is a big time for them. So it it's not the peak of our banquet season right now, but we still have banquets on going on. We still have spring banquets and they are a big part of our income picture. UM for a deer organization. You know, spring is a slow time of year anyway. Folks are turkey hunting, they're thinking about fishing. UM. You know, we still talk a lot about habitat at that time. But you're about as far in any directions, any direction as you can get from a deer season looking back or looking forward. So it's um always a slow time of year for us. But still without those banquets, it was in a pretty big financial hit and we are taking steps. We we did furlough temporarily uh some employees. UM. We are hoping to bring them back home soon. But that was part of the sort of stop stop gap measure of of making up that difference. And we are, uh, we've we've launched a number of raffles, We're working on a number of online auction um coming soon and essentially jumping out there and just promoting every possible other thing we can do to keep to make up the difference in that income um that works you know, remotely and online. Uh. And that's what you're seeing all of the conservation organizations do. And it's you know, it can be. I'll be honest with you, it's it's um. Conservation is still important and always will be. But when you see when you look out there around the country and you see healthcare providers who need masks, and you know, folks who are hungry, and school kids who aren't getting their free school meals who you know, in some cases means they don't get a meal, it does make you stop and go, you know, uh, asking for money for white tails. I struggle with that. But um, you know, all I know to do is to tell folks, look, meet your community needs first, you know, give to share venison with neighbors, and give to what you can give to to your local community. Philanthropy, and if you can still support qtumy when that's over, if you can still support the other species groups and land conservation groups, help them to because we also, you know, need to stay viable through this process and emerge on the other side of it healthy and ready to pick up where we left off with, you know, full time conservation work. You know that said, what we've also pointed out is there's a ton of little ways you can help people like us groups like us. You know, even if if you're ordering stuff from Amazon, you know, have you have you used Amazon Smile, which lets you designate a nonprofit or charity of your choice, and every time you buy something and order something through Amazon, you get the same price, but Amazon kicks a little bit of your purchase back to that group. So you could set Q to you maaze your Amazon Smile preference and every time you order something we get you know, a little bit of change. You can do that with any group. So there's there's lots of little small ways out there that you can support us and support other groups that we've been talking about. It didn't have to be a big cash donation um or becoming a member, you know, things like that so all of us, all of the nonprofit world, are looking for ways to to do that, to continue helping our communities and but at the same time survived through this, continue doing important work for the species we're working on. UM. You know, during this chronic waste and disease is not going to go away. Hunter numbers are not going to you know, become less of an issue than they were before. An habitat conservation and all the other issues we're working on. UM, those problems aren't going to go away. We want to keep working on them. So so staying healthy, staying viable through this is you know. The other thing too, I would say, Mark, is that in talking with other folks and other conservation groups and friends in the in the industry, what we've also all pointed out and realized is that the challenges of this period are going to make us come up with creative new ways to do business that we may stick with after this is over. UM, it may completely change, and I think it probably will. This may completely change the way nonprofit conservation groups do business. It's going to change the way a lot of America does business after this, even after the disease is no longer a threat. So there will be some good that comes out of this, you know, us being forced to learn some new digital ways to reach people in fundraise and UM get our message out and do our work. UM. That's that's going to be beneficial in the end. Yeah, speaking of of things going increasingly digital, I know that you guys have have put a lot of time and effort into the digital Dear Steward one of course, and that's something that people might have a little more time at home and available free time to engage with something like that. And that's also a way to support what you guys are doing too. Is that something you can explain a little bit about. Yeah, you know, UM, and you've been involved with our Dear Steward course, which is our kind of advanced dear training UM and Level one is uh. We used to do it in person, but a few years ago we went totally online with Level one. We videoed UM one of the events and UM all of the speakers giving their PowerPoint presentations, and we and Clemson University helped us get it online so that anyone can go any hour of the day or week, can sign up, pay and get your keys and blog on and start watching the videos. At home. It's like sixteen hours of instruction from various speakers. So this was already in place, UM, we wanted to be able to reach more people with it who couldn't travel to do an in person Level one class. We kept Level two in person. That is still the you know, the hands on event where you go and you spend a weekend with these instructors and you're outdoors and you're you know, planning food plots in burning woods and aging jawbones and you know all of the hands on type stuff um that you that you really can't dig into in an online class. But Level one is online sixteen hours of instruction. We did go in and reduce the price some to kind of help folks out during this bunchtime because we're all looking at you know, financial crunches some extent. And but you know, if you're stuck at home, you're sheltering at home, and and you've painted the entire interior of your house, and you've rebuilt the deck and you know, done um everything else, mode the lawn uh twenty times and you really just want something else to do. Read all the books in your bookcase uh and finished all of Netflix. Then you know, this is a great way to um learn about deer hunting, uh and become a dear ninja at home with these instructors watching these video instructions. You know, it's not reading, it's not it's uh, you know, pretty fun video. It's pretty informative and fun instruction. Uh. So yeah, we're putting that out there. It's we were very fortunate that was already set up in online and we didn't have to create that too, uh to deal with this situation. We could jump right on it and say, hey, you know, drop the price a little bit to help folks out and great way to uh to learn about deer while you're stuck at home. Well, like you mentioned, I got to be a part of one of those in person classes I don't know about a decade ago now, which is kind of crazy, and that was that was such an important education event for me just in my growth as a deer hunter and as a communicator. And it's one of those first was early early in my in my career, I guess, and so so helpful. I mean, it's not just deer hunting. I mean we're talking dear biology, dear you know, habitat needs um. I mean it's just just fascinating, fascinating stuff. I I thought it was very very well worth the time. I think I think if somebody, as you mentioned, if they if it got the deck done and the honey deal list is checked off, I would highly recommend checking out this course because if if you love deer and deer hunting and you want to better understand the creature, their needs, how we can help, how we can hunt them, all that kind of stuff, There's gonna be a few resources I can think of that are probably, um probably better than this. So how do they How do folks find this if they want to sign up for the course and participate, how do they get in there? The real easy shortcut we set up is qtum a dot com slash d S one as in dear Stewart ds one after qtmy dot com. You can also just go to the qt May homepage and look under the conserve menu and you'll find dear Steward with all of the stuff. The in person classes. UM we did have a May level two course in Alabama that we have postponed. UM. I believe we've still got a habitat module in Pennsylvania in August. UM. So that's still going on at this point may not be postponed, so all of them. You can find out all about the dear stewart stuff at the in the conserve menu, or like I said, go straight to the online level one class at q d M a dot com slash ds one and you sign up online, um, and you know, dive in immediately with the videos. It's all as you know, and you've taken the course. Our instructors are professors, wild apologists. This is all science based stuff, um, but all deer hunters. UM. I've even we've had folks with state agencies reach out to us in the last few weeks and ask about getting their staff signed up to take this while they're stuck at home. So um, you know some of your professional deer managers and your state agency are deer stewards. So this is yeah, it's top level, reliable, science based information, just like everything else we put out. Yeah, it's it's it's good. It's not a knucklehead like me try and tell you what to do. It's it's the real deal. So highie highly recommended. UM. With with that in mind, kind of this this uh holistic educational opportunity, you guys other with DS one that that's also why I want to talk to you, Lindsay right now, because there's not you know, we we can't go traveling all over the country right now for a lot of people. Um, we can't for a lot of people go to work as normal. But something that hopefully many of us can still do is go to our hunting properties um or public land hopefully and and do some work to try to improve these places where we're able when budget allows all that kind of stuff. And I know that a lot of the things I've seen you share over the years related to this always always resonated with me, whether it be because you found creative ways to do things with less money, or because you're finding ways to improve habitat for deer while also benefiting other benefiting other species, or doing things in a low impact manner. Um. So I just kind of want to pick your brain and all things deer and wildlife habitat management right now. UM. I don't know, it's it's it's just it's something that I think can take our energy and attention off of the negative stuff and help us reavert it towards something positive. Uh. And you seem like the perfect person help us do that, So thank you. You know, is it fair to say that this is the kind of topic you enjoy talking about I do. I mean, I'm a deer hunter and I love diving into deer in their biology. But habitat is you know, the slip side of the coin for me, um, I love. You know a lot of people know me. No, I love planting trees and growing trees and plant food plots, but messing with native plants to and cover and forage and just learning about plants, and to me, you know, that's that's just goes hand in hand with deer management because to manage a deer population for optimal help, you know the habitat there, understanding that and how they live in it and how they benefit from it, and how the deer themselves impact the habitat, and your management of the herd results in quality habitat or poor habitat. Um. Yeah, it just kind of all goes together. So yeah, I'm passionate about both sides of it. Hunting the animal, but you know the other months of the year when I can be hunting them, um, messing around with plants and land. It's it's such a great way to engage with it and just become more part of that whole cycle going on out there. How long have you been doing this as far as actually actively improving or managing or or working on habitat and some capacity. UM. I can remember being younger than ten years old going along with dad doing prescribed fire burning woods. I mean, you know, as a kid, burning anything, it's fun, you know, So getting to go along and light the light things on fire and see that process was exciting and fun, but also occasional learn learning and understanding why we did that and what the benefits were. And even at around that same age, my dad would order tree seedlings every year and uh and take us with him. We'd go out and I was you know, yeah, we ran the post hole diggers dig in the hole of my brother and I did for the tree seedlings, and we planted things that, you know, crab apples and for simmons and oak trees and things that we could hunt around one day and actually are now has grown in hunting around some of those trees that we planted when we were kids. So that just you know, just like learning to hunt from my dad, so did the love of of habitat. UM My dad was a farmer and and I know he planted what was the first food plot I ever knew of, or saw um in uh in South Georgia. Not obviously one of the first plannings anybody ever did for deer, but he was early on setting aside a little patch over here and planning rye um and you know, setting that aside for the you're for hunting season. So yeah, that just was ingrained in me um from a very young age by my dad. And you've been then doing something along these lines professionally for for at least as long as I've known you so well over a decade now as well. I asked this because I think that I'm guessing that you have an interesting perspective on this given what you do. I'm wondering what you've seen as far as how this, how this community or this activity has changed over the years. You know, how how do you see how habitat management is practiced or how it's promoted? Um, how has that advanced or changed the most in your time paying attention to this stuff? What's different now? There are definitely some big sweeping trends you see across you know, my lifetime from like I said, witnessing some of the first hunters becoming interested in planting things for deer, whether it's trees or food plots, and seeing the food plot industry come along on a national level during the early you know, the late eighties and nineties for sure, and um into the two thousand's and become you know, a big industry um. But then also seeing that um that really I'm not sure whether the quality deer management philosophy lead to people being interested in food plots or the reverse or a little both, because you know you can if you start once you start getting interested in the health of the deer you're hunting, you start thinking how could I improve what they eat? And then you get into planning food plots and then what that ultimately leads to and I think has in a big, in a big sweeping trend. After you're done with the food plot, you start looking beyond the border of that literally and figuratively into the woods and going, well, what else can I do? What you know, what should those woods look like? What else should be out there for the deer? And you start stepping into the woods and and looking at what you can do there, um and to improve forage and cover. And that's I'd say that's really the broad a transition that I've seen is going through a period of interest in quality to deer management, passing young bucks eventually you know, learning to take the right number of those when you need to take some planning food plots hand in hand with that, both of the hunting approach and as you know, from a nutritional standpoint, But then that process leading to greater and greater curiosity about other techniques. Things you don't have to plant, how to encourage things that are just out there already naturally, how to get rid of things that aren't supposed to be there so you can have more of the beneficial species, you know, learning about fire, learning about timber management, and identifying plants and and all of this has That's that seems to be where we are now. Folks are still planning food plots, and we always will, I know I always will, UM, But I see more and more folks stepping beyond the edge of the food plot into the forest, looking like you said, using that word holistic, looking at the whole picture of deer habitat and what they need, um in terms of cover and forage in the works beyond just what you can plant, UM. And that's that seems to be where we are today, is a greater interest in um holistic management of deer habitat. And at the same time, you know, when the if you come in and bringing it back to food plots, UM, you mentioned kind of the low impact food plots that that has become in the last few years. A greater question we get is people asking more and more. Okay, look, I know about food plots, I know about planning and we need control and all that, but I want to do it without spraying weeds. I want to do it without fertilizer. I want to do it, you know, without causing erosion. I want to Can I do that? Can I do a green low impact food plots? So we're seeing those questions, UM, which you know raises the point that how you don't even have to do food plots if you really don't want to. We can talk about the all the things you can do from an habitat standpoint to to fill those needs of deer. And if you don't want to plant things, you don't have to. So UM, Yeah, that that seems to be where we are now. Greater interests, we're seeing increasing numbers of people using prescribed fire, um, using wise timber management, um, all of that seems to be where we're going now. In your role at QT MAY, I think it's safe to say that you engage and kind of get to get a lot of feedback from lots and lots of hunters and habitat managers out there, and you've got pretty good finger on the pulse. I think of what people are doing and what people are not doing. If I gave you a magic wand and I gave you the ability or maybe say I'm a genie in a bottle and you could rub the bottle and I came out and I was gonna give you one wish. Let's let's bring it this way. I'm gonna give you one wish that you could ask for in regards to getting hunters to do one thing that not enough people do or they don't pay enough attention to this thing. We're gonna say one thing beyond food plots that you wish you could get people to jump on board with and get into it. What would that wish be or what would you do with that with that special power I'm granting you right now? Wow? Wow, oh man, that's uh. You know several things come to mind there. Okay, so one thing beyond food plots, you say, and then what I got to tell you that the one rule of genes in the bottles. You can't wish for more wishes, So don't try to gain the system and just get you just get. One thing is I'm picturing wheel Smith. Just watched The Laddin with my daughters just last week. Wasn't too long ago. I watched that one too, my son. Oh man, so many Oh, I can't wish for more wishing, you know, I think it would be um so many. But one I think the first, literally the first thing that jumped into my head. I'll just go with that one is to get hunters to let other hunters hunt like they want to um. In other words, look, we all have our priorities in hunting, whether that is look I just want to put some venison in the freezer, or we want to do like I do where you know, you want to have a balanced age structure. You want to see more of the rut behaviors. You want to see more adult bucks out there. You want to have the right number of deer on the habitat. Take those when you need to improve the habitat and all of that. But you know, I think I just wish all deer hunters kind of understood that that there's many many forms of other deer hunters, um and as long as we're all doing it legally and according to the rules, than we should support each other and what whatever choice that is, and certainly not judge each other, and certainly not belittle anyone because they approach deer hunting differently than I do or someone else did. Um. I don't know. That's that doesn't really get us. It doesn't really advance knowledge or um, you know, improve anything for for deer and habitat. But I think it does improve the culture of deer hunting. That's that's something I just see a lot of And I know that social media and the Internet have made a lot of that possible because people will say and do anything on the Internet. We know that, um. But I think that's what I'd like to see. It's just more understanding of deer hunters for the different ways people approach deer hunting, and acceptance of and support for folks who deer hunt no matter how they do it. Yeah, that's that's a a very good point, A well uh A well thought through and in great use of your wish. I will say though, that you you did successfully gain the system, because now I'm going to give you another one because you didn't answer the way I wanted to Lindsay's good of an answer as it was, so you you win the game, you beat the genie. Uh. So answer me with a second wish, something specific to habitat improvement, that you wish folks would start doing more, because I'm going to go into the assumption like you kind of laid this out that most people food plots is the first thing I think of, And even though we're getting more and more to the point that people are looking at the broader horizons, still I still think that food plots suck a lot of the oxygen out of the room to the sexy option. Um. But there's all these other things that you alluded to that people can be doing that can make a great impact, possibly with less time or money invested, possibly with less potential negative impacts of chemicals or different things like that. Um, if you could use your second wish to get hunters to adopt one of these other things or change their habitat management, philosophy in one way or another. What would that be? That's that's where're gonna push you. Okay, then let me just say that I'd wish that, Um, all deer hunters could walk into the woods they hunt right now and no by sight ten important native plants that need to be there for deer, they're important to deer, and ten non native plants that need to go. Okay, because let's start there. If you can do that, even if it's only five, if you can you know, small handful. Um, if if the average deer hunter knew that could identify important plants they see around them and important plants that are uh, non native plants that are damaging or taking space away from those valuable native plants, then you can start doing all the things we can do to encourage those that are there that that true that dear need. And part of that encouragement comes from removing the ones that are you know, usurping that space. So plan I D skills. You know it starts from there. You know you I don't care what you set out to go do today. UM can cut, burn some woods, hacking scored um you know, burn an old field, manage an old field, whatever, it is. If you can't identify the trees you want to cut or might cut the trees, you're gonna leave the trees, you're gonna inge cut the plants you're trying to encourage. You know, if you can't identify them, those efforts might be misplaced, um might be even causing damage. So it all starts from from knowing a few species out there. So yeah, if I'm wishing, I'm gonna say ten. But what I would tell your listeners is start with one. This is not a you know, you don't have to pick up a field guide and learn every single plant in there before you step outdoors. It's not that big of a task, you know. It's Yeah, if you look around the woods at all the plants immediately that you may not know, it can be pretty over filming. But just start with some of the most common ones. If you learn one of the single most common beneficial tree out there and one of the single most common invasive or non native that's out there, you know you can start. You can start making a difference. Yeah, is there, there's my ways. Let's begin with plan I do. That's a good wish. I'm gonna I'm gonna give you give a high five for that one. That's that's uh, that's perfect for where I wanted to go, and thank you for teeing me up, but I failed on the first one. No, you just give us a really good bonus, a good bonus one which is which is helpful too, which is important. Um. But if people want to do what you're talking about, and they don't have a mentor or a family member who can show them some of these things, UM, what would be a resource or two that you recommend? Is there anything out there a book or an app or a website or I don't know anything that you've used to help begin this plan and I d education. Um, i'd say for anybody starting all of the above that you just said books, apps, there are apps, um. High Naturalist is one that comes to mind, and there are others. If you just search, you'll find a bunch and they are they are becoming rapidly advanced. I can't remember the name of one I saw advertise just the other day, but it was you know, you can take a photo of the leaf and then scans it and give you some options or and then there are others that you can upload photos to a community based crowdsource resource that that can help you identify, you know through apps, and some of the apps are just basic guides field gods. So there's that, there's books. Um you know, when I haven't used a lot of the apps honestly because um, I learned most of what I know a long time ago, and I mean I'm still learning new ones as I go. But UM, you know, if if the if the job was learned the top ten, um, you know, I'm already there. And it was a long time before anybody had a smartphone or an app. So but for someone new, there are apps. You know, you can get your your field guides. There are national field guides for for different regions East, Southeast, Northeast, Midwest. There are state specific field guides. UM. I check with your state agency, both your state wildlife agency and your forestry agency see what online resources they have. There are a lot of those, um and ultimately what you can do. Many of those agencies have people who will schedule a time right now. Maybe not you know, because we're social distancing, but under normal, normal circumstances would schedule time to come out and talk with you have a forester come out and you know, if you own the land, walk through, have them show you some of the valuable trees from a timber standpoint, valuable trees from a wildlife standpoint. Like I said, you just get them to show you the most common ones, um, both beneficial and those that probably should go. So you can get folks to walk with you. You mentioned friends, family, you know, ask around, just somebody who is knowledgeable. Maybe you know somebody who's a forester um and just you know, trade him some venison or a turkey hunt or some fishing or something like that, and have them come out and spend a few hours walking around with you, teaching you just a few. Like I said, don't try to bite it all off at once. Don't go out and look at all the woods and expect to go home that day knowing them all. You're not and you're not going to remember the ones. You identify someone you don't see commonly enough or only during certain seasons, and by next year when it comes back, you're you forgot what it was. That's okay. Um, the most common ones start there, because it's kind of like um sweet gums. A sweet gum is a native tree to the southeast. Um. There's nothing wrong with it just doesn't have any wilife benefit that I know, uh, and it is extremely prolific. It's one of the first shrubs saplings to pop up in disturbed areas and then quickly grows and crowds out and shades out everything else. So it's got invasive tendencies. Even though it's not a non native, it is a native tree well in the southeast. If you can learn to identify a sweet gum with leaves and also by bar in the winter when the leaves are gone, which is not that difficult, you can keep yourself busy from now to eternity killing sweet gum trees. You know, I could send you out there and say, look, go kill all the sweet gums, come back and let me know when you need to learn another tree. And it did a long time before you came back. Um, So you could be having enormous benefits to dear habitat by cutting down and killing sweet gum trees and opening up that space to something else and never know how to identify another tree. So that's why emphasize Look, just start with a few. Start with the most common ones, either that you want to encourage or that you want to get rid of UM, but yeah, a lot of resources apps field God's friends but especially state agencies talked to those clothes and get some help there. Yeah, I can at least vouch for UM. The app I last year started using I Naturalist like you mentioned, and that is very helpful. I mean most everything I look at there, I don't know what it is. So I take a picture of it and yet scans the leaf and it gives you a handful of potential options and then you can click the potential options and then look at more pictures and then you can match it up and so works works pretty darn well. Um. I've also got a guide from Dr Craig Harper that is a great resource for a lot of like old field species early successional type plants. That has been helpful to me too. So that's I can't remember what that one is called, but um, but that was a helpful through. The newest edition is called Wildlife Food Plots and Early Successional Plants UM, and we do sell it at QTMA dot com. So plug baill um Wildlife Food Plots and Early Successional Plants great, great, great habitat book, and yeah, Dr Craig hard persibent and enormous uh influence on me throughout his career. There's another one, I mean, we've got I've got one called Forest Plants of the Southeast and their Wildlife Uses. Dr Carl Miller at U g A. Was one of the co authors on that. That's a very good one if you're in the Southeast. There are other books for other regions, you know. There's there's one called Weeds of the Northeast that is pretty good just for helping you identified because you know, we don't don't anybody that hears that word don't don't be frightened away by the word weed. Many of the things we call weeds or things do you eat. So um, Yeah, there's there's a lot of good books out there. So here's the big thing though, when it comes to this topic of you you've alluded to, which is we need to be able to identify species so that we know how to take the proper management action. We know what to remove, what to keep. Um there's I have all sorts of questions and moments of confusion when considering this topic. Because you can look at a tree or a quote unquote weed, or a forb or a pile of brush or something and you can look at and say, Okay, is this beneficial to wildlife or not beneficial to wildlife? Is this native or is this non native? Is this invasive or non invasive? And all these different sides of the coin would lead you to think that you should keep or remove, encourage or discourage. Um and they don't always match up though, so like there might be a species that's non native but very beneficial to wildlife, or at least it seems to me like, hey, this is the best cover I've got around, and deer are packed in there. Why would I want to cut out all of my automotive when I've got all these deer using it is the best betting in the area. Um so. And I know I'm not the only one who Deevan's questions because I see these conversations and debates pop up on YouTube and on Facebook and social media. Um So, I I still don't know how to make sense out of it. It seems like the moral thing to do is removed non native things or that like it's it seems to be that there's this push to do that more and more. Um and So I want to try to understand that, but I'm still figuring it out. Can you help me with that? Yeah? I think so, Um, because yeah, you're try not to go into the moral ground. You know, I'm not telling people to get rid of invasive species because it's the right thing to do. Um. But doesn't that doesn't doesn't it seem like that's an argument that we hear today. I mean not necessarily in the dear world, but I mean this whole native versus non native thing is everywhere where. There's debates about mountain goats in Grand Teton National Park being removed right now because they were introduced there and they're not native to that specific ecosystems, so we're taking them out. Um. You're seeing this with trout, You're seeing this with you know, it's it's everywhere. It's not just dear habitat. But yeah, I start to interrupt you if you take this far enough back with the whole native versus non native and it's the right thing to do, moral approach, You and I are an invasive species. Are we gonna remove ourselves from North America? Um? You know, this landscape has changed dramatically, and it always has and and was changing before there were people. You know, continents drifted together, and animals and plants that weren't together before suddenly were through natural processes. So this is nothing new. Certainly, we have sped up the process in the last one two hundred, three hundred years in North America by you know, vastly increasing the flow of plants and animals and u and viruses and bacteria and every kind of you know, insects into this country that didn't along here. So we've kind of overwhelmed the system. So you can't really go down that that path of get of everything that don't belonging here, because it's the right thing to do, You'll, you just can't achieve that that's that's not achievable. Um. So when it comes to this whole, you know, and I've heard the apologists for things like automolive. I know what you're talking about. Hey, it has benefits dearer betting in this or dear or eating it. We can talk about Chinese private which we have a lot of here at qt May Headquarters and in the South Eastern General and probably I think the all of the East, um. And it's similar to automolive. And then it forms the deep deep tickets that head out and shade everything else out and there's nothing else there but but privot and and it eventually gets out of reach of the deer and they do bed up under there, just like with automolive. Um. I think when I go back to a phrase that I heard Craig Harper say. He was we were having a habitat work day here at the headquarters. He was leading it. I was actually filming him, and while he was talking to the group, we stopped and we're looking at some briggs of Chinese private that were coming up in deer had browed it. You could see that they've been hitting it. They will brow Chinese private in winter especially, and Craig pointed that out. Yes, dear, we'll use this, they'll eat it. It can be valuable winter food if that's what they've got. But Craig said, you can do better, and that's what has stuck with me since then, that phrase you can do better. You can do better than autumolive, you can do better than private. Now that doesn't apply to every single non native plant. Let's let's clarify that. I think that also speaks to what you're asking me here. If you list all of the non native plants out there where you hunt. I don't care what part of the country you're in. Here in the southeast, we've got them. You've got them, North, Midwest, Northeast, We've all got them. There's some overlapping species, but for the most part, most of us in different regions have a different suite of non native plants out there. And there's a whole long list of them, a bunch of them, but it's a pretty small percentage of all those nonnative plants that are truly invasive, meaning they are aggressive and difficult to control. Uh, and that they take over, that they form mono cultures that lockout any other plant, native or non native. And those are the ones where you can do better. They have benefits like deer browsing on embedding in prive it, like deer bedding in automotive Um, you know, we can. We can run down the list here, um of other things we can talk about kad zoo. Uh. There are some there are some invasive nonnatives that have no benefits and that's a no brainer. Um, they have no benefits for deer and they should go. But there are some that you can the apologists will say this has good benefits. There's this is good bad and cover or the deer browsing this. But with those you can do better. You can do better than Chinese private. And that's one of the things we've been doing on my family's land is getting rid of Chinese private. And and we can talk about how we did that. And I can talk about walking through there just a few weeks ago, where we over the last two years got rid of a bad bad thicket hell um private, hell um, and what's coming up there now and seeing the deer eat it, the native plants that are coming up there now, and seeing that I'm doing better automolive, the deer may bed in there. I'm just here to tell you you can do better than that. So yeah, so you should get sorry and illustrate that for me, what does better than those two things look like and and and help help paint that picture for what the alternative is. Well, for example, the private that I'm that I'm dealing with, when I you know, to paint a picture of it, it had done what you often see with automolive in some of the worst areas, and we got auto molive here too, but it hasn't really I'm not aware any of the places that I hunt where it has become you know, blanketed patches of our large areas like I've seen private do, like I've seen Kudzoo doo and some others. Um, but private, we've we've had that situation probably we had five acres or so of it and my family's land. Through an NRCS program that that we're enrolled in, we were able to get assistance from them. We had a multure come through on the skid steer a contractor. They molsted it all down. It looked beautiful, it was a nice park. But of course the private is going to come back. All you've done is pisted it off at that point and it's going to come back from the route and the stump. So what you had to do was follow up with a nervous side treatment after that and when the private started coming back from the stump, and and to finish it off. And we will still be mopping some up, will be spots praying on the periphery of that area for a while. But walking through there recently, uh, just a couple of weeks ago when I was down home for a turn. You know, um, there are species popping up in there now. Like American beauty berry, dog fennel, wild grapes, other things that are good cover. I'm seeing poke weed, I'm seeing partridge p which are good forage, high quality forage, far better than private, far better than private as forage. UM. I'm seeing wild flowers in that area that UM. Some of them I have learned recently because we didn't have them until we started releasing them. They were there. I didn't have to plan anything until we started releasing them by getting rid of the private So the diversity of things you see coming up in there, UM is just amazing, and it is cover. It is over time. It will be brooms edge, which is a native warm seasoned grass that we have in the southeast. Uh. It will be dog fennel and other things deer don't eat, like like the broom sedge that that make good cover. UM, it will be soft mast it will be these wildflowers that are good for pollinators. Dear don't necessarily eat all of them. Some of them they eat, some money they don't, but it's good for the pollinator community, for songbirds, migratory songbirds, butterflies, the whole suite of things. But then the food in there for deer is just way better than private is. It's just better. So the whole situation you've created there where that private once stood, is better for almost everything. Whereas before you could say, well, when you walked in under that, and some of it was so thick you couldn't literally walk through it. I don't even think a deer could bed down in there, it was so thick and there was nothing in there but that private. So the situation is just completely night and day in terms of diversity of plant life and the benefits for a host of of wildlife species. We can talk about turkeys too and how they're using that area for nesting and bugging and everything else, but there's just it's just night and day difference. So if you've got a situation like that with a very aggressive plant like autumotive um and deer are betting there, just remember that when you get rid of it, you're going to have stuff they'll still bed in and other things will benefit from as well. There'll be food they'll eat, there'll be wildflowers that will be things for a whole host of different species. Now it's all situational. If you've got land in Michigan and you've got a giant ten acre patch of solid autumnolive and that's the only cover from miles. Yeah, you don't want to go out there and eliminate that all overnight, because yeah, you've just gotten rid of all your cover. In a situation like that, I wouldn't tell you to do that. Um. Just like everything else, you want to break things up in patches so that at any given time you're offering a diversity of different stages of cover. But eventually I would say you should start getting rid of that a patch at a time and converting it piece by piece to something different that you can put on a rotational basis, because you'll be doing better. You can do better than that blocked out um automolive ticket. Yeah, and that was exactly what I was going to ask you about next, which was trying to understand how to prioritize where and when, because I think it was maybe dugg Dern or somebody I was talking about this with who said, you know, trying to go your full scale war on automolive or something like that, or buck thorn or whatever species you're dealing with, it could just take up all your time. You'll never never be able to completely beat it in most in many cases at least. Um. So he recommended trying to do what you can, have a management approach, have a plan, fare out where your highest priority places are, and do what you can there. Um. And and that that's got me thinking about, Okay, how do you how do you pick your spots? How do you rank order? Okay, this is the most important you know, invasive species management? I can do. I guess I'm curious or what I'm trying to get at is is how do we go about deciding how to actually try to manage this. We can't wave a wine and have it all go away. Um, how do you pick your poisons or pick your spots? Um? In that kind of way? Yeah, I asked this question not too long ago. I was talking with Mark Turner, who is at Auburn University right now. Um, he was at the Southeast Dear Study Group. He just got done with some research into the forest stand Improvement method f S. I now, that's a term that Craig Harper coined two offset the concept from timber stand improvement, which he thinks the word timber tends to evoke commercial timber harvest and management. And I agree with him there. So he came up with f SI Forest and Improvement to talk about what you and I do when we walk outside with a chainsaw and try to improve covering forage for deer. So Mark did some Mark Turner did some some research into forest stand improvement with some different treatment areas, and he and I we're talking about his results and all that. This is something we've been doing at QTY headquarters under Craig's guidance. Um, I've learned a lot from him in that process and and been practicing a lot of what I've been learning from him here at qt May. But I asked Mark, I said, you know, same, same similar question. Okay, so we've got a hundred fifty acres that qt May my family has landed south east Georgia. What whatever it is you're dealing with where if you're hunting a hundred acres or ten acres, you can't walk out there today with your chainsaw and go I'm gonna do all of this today, or I'm gonna start in on this corner and work my way all the way across. That's just not manageable. Whatever did you're trying to do, whether you're sending the forest, to produce for aging cover of killing invasive species, all the above, what you know, whatever, all at once, you can't tackle it, and all at one time you'll go nuts, you will lose track of the work you've done, You'll it's just you can't take it that way. So I asked Mark, you know, what's the what's the best way to decide where you start with forest and improvement if you're gonna do it. And he had a pretty simple answer that made a lot of sense to me. He said, how about start with a place that you can easily put fire breaks around, because then you can come back and burn it. And I thought, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Um. In the Southeast we use prescribe fire a lot. There's no reason you can't use it in the North, as you and I have talked about before, and more and more people now are using prescribe fire. So whether we're talking about burning woods or hardwoods, or whether we're talking about burning an old field, you know, prescribe fire is an important follow up method for maintaining the early successional covering for it you've created through your daylight work, through your invasive removal work. Fire helps you easily come back and reset the clock on those taches. So, following Mark's advice, if it made me think, you know, you really need to divide things up in the patches. Ultimately with fire things work best on a rotation. We can get into that in terms of the interval of the time interval, because it varies depending on the part of the country you're in, the length of your growing season, and what your ultimate goals are for wildlife. But you once you have treated a patch, whether you're removing invasives, whether you're daylighting the forest, whatever it might be, and you follow up with fire, you're gonna want to come back through there and follow up with fire again at some interval to reset the clock on that cover again and set it back to zero. When I say color, I mean the understory cover. So starting by designated A a patch that you can easily put fire breaks around, or that already has fire breaks around, whether that's a creek and a woods road, a field edge, a fire break that already exists, or someone or a place where you could easily put one in. Start there and go, oh okay, I could easily put fire breaks where they already exist around patch A. So I'm gonna start in Patch A, which is one acre or five acres, whatever it is, some small manageable size for you, depending on whether you've got you know, family and folks friends that can help you, or it's just you and your chainsaw, and start in and do that patch first, whatever it might be. Putting sunlight, more sunlight on the ground, killing automotive, killing the privot that's in there, killing all the major invasive trees and shrubs that you can find in there, and putting some on the ground, and then following up with some fire then you can start next year on patch B and Patch C and Patch D and so forth. Now, so fire breaks would be one way to look at the easiest way to pick your first target area. The second one, I think obviously would be your hunting strategy, if not your first one, because when you improve these things, when you kill invasives, when you put sunlight on the ground, like I've seen and I was talking about a minute ago, you're gonna start seeing forages and cover and things that deer eat that attracts them sometimes immediately. Um So this can affect your hunting strategy, your your hunting access. So think about if you're gonna be enhancing cover and in patch A, where do you want that cover ultimately to be in the picture of your your hunting infrastructure and where your stands are and how you reach those stands and where the dear bed and where they feed and how you want that all to flow. That's obviously I'm a very complicated UH formula to workout with your aerial map UM, and we probably don't want to dive into all that right now, But but that's where you start tick a patch and think about what makes the most sense from ease of access for you and equipment you need to get in there for fire breaks, for your follow up fire and for your hunting infrastructure, and just starting on bite size pieces UM. Then you know, as you get further down the road three, four or five years, you're gonna be following back up at Patch A. It's time to burn Patch A again. So you're you're following through with fire and this keeps the maintenance and upkeep of the work you've done at a manageable level. Every year, you're gonna be doing a little burning, a little additional chainsaw work, NERB side work, and invasive removal work. But you're not doing it all at one time, and eventually you're going to get to a place where you know your cycle, you're cycling back and coming back to the places, and it all gets easier from there. That makes sense. Yeah, yeah, that does make sense, and it's it's right in line with something we're trying to do on the on our back party property over here in Michigan. Um, we have this area on the property that has a lot of a lot of automolive and buck thorn, and in the patches that that's not there though, we're getting We've got this really cool remnant prairie ecosystem with a lot of native prairie species that aren't found many of the places anymore in Michigan. They've all been paved over, hild up, etcetera. So we'd love to try to get some more of that in there. Um. So we're gonna try to manage some of those invasives through the processes you just outlined. But rather than trying to remove everything, which just seems daunting and impossible and hard to do with everything else, I'm taking sort of that Patrick approach where I'm going to try to, you know, just bite off a piece that I can manage, so taking up patches and then burning, and then you know, the next year we come in and take out a few more and maybe do a burn again in the new area. Um. But that leads me to a very tactical question, selfish tactical question. UM. I was going to go in and start cutting down um automolive and buckthorn at the base and then applying an herbicide to the cut stump. So doing the cut stump treatment is what I've been looking into, and it seems to be the best option I have with the equipment I have. Um, But while I was researching this, I read that they tell you least what I saw. I said not to do this in the spring when plants are producing SAP. And that totally killed my buzz and really bummed me out because I wanted to do that right now. Because I have the time, I can't do anything else but go to this property relatively close and do a little work. Um. Is that true? Or will I be okay? Can I get away with applying the herbiside on the cut stump now and it'll still work and we're gonna come in and burn still a month from now or whatever? So that'll happen too. Can I Can I do that work now or do I really need to wait until summer or fall? I think you can. I asked Craig Harper about this because that was something I'd heard for a long time too. You can't do this in spring. Caused the sap flowing and it will push the herb side out of the cut um. But you know, Craig has just like Mark Turner's new research, Craig is Craig and his students at University of Tennessee. You've been researching this stuff for years. And you know what Craig said was, look if you if you girdle the tree or you cut this stump you're talking about, and you literally see sap flow out visibly um like you do with some species that at certain points of spring are very heavy sap producers. And literally with a cut, you know, juice starts draining out. That's the the primary situation, he thinks, where the herbicide effectiveness is reduced. Otherwise with growing plants. When you do it, uh, you cut the stump or you girdle it um and there's not sap literally flowing out visibly, you should be fine. So I would say in those cases, go ahead, if you've got time to do it, go ahead and do a test. You know, the worst that will happen you cut these automotives down. You've got a stump. You paint the stump well, and you know the technique is you spray the the outer cambium layer. You don't have to paint the entire stump, but you spray the circular ring on the outside with the herbicide and see how it works. You know, if in a month you're seeing shoot stump shout shoots coming out, you know it didn't work and you can hit that at least now it's easier to combine hit that with a backpacks prayer. But in most cases that's gonna be effective. Um. You know, it's mostly when things are immediately leaping out and yeah, there's a ton of SAP flow and because leads are growing. But once you've kind of hit that point where the major spring rush of leaf growth and SAP flow is over, you can you can get busy. Um, that's what Craig has told me. Unless you're seeing sap literally flow out visibly, if you make the cut, you're gonna be fine. Well, thank you for giving me that that bit of confidence. Now I can now I cannot make some kind of progress again, which feels good. That's good. What what are some of the You mentioned something a little while ago about about weeds quote unquote weeds, and how a lot of that isn't really we we we put this label of weed on something. But in fact, many of these species are great for wildlife. A lot of critters like them. They're very beneficial. Um, if you had to pick just a handful couple, two, three, four of the weeds that hunters should start being able to identify and and take advantage of in some kind of way, what would those be that we should start keen in a little bit and giving them a break? Uh? In the south, Um, ragweed is a really good one. Um. People you know everybody wants to talk about their allergies when you mentioned that one, but that I'm sorry. It's a it's a great deer forage, and it is one that pops up in food plots and agricultural situations, and farmers don't like it. But if it's in your food plot, let it go, dear, We'll eat that. Um. It's a very beneficial plant. Dear, we'll eat it. The seeds are good for upland game birds and a lot of other birds. It's a good plant to have out there. UM beggars lice Desmodium it's another good one. In the southeast. There's prickly lettuce and wild lettuce, which are basically they look very similar to each other, but one of them has thorns and one of them done high high quality dear forage. UM poke weed is another big one. Things that you see pop up in disturbed areas, you know, after fire or at the edge of a food plot where you've done some soiled disturbance, poke weed will pop up. UM partridge p is another good one in the southeast. Some of these you may be seeing in where you are in other parts of the country. I'm up into the middle part of the country in the northeast too. But um everybody has species like this where they wherever you are. I'm just throwing some of the ones out there that that are most familiar to me. UM. There's others that come along a little later in the successional stages. They're not you know, the immediate weeds that come up, but some of those that come along in year two or beyond Greenbrier and and some others. I just the other day shared on Twitter a patch of Devil's walking stick that I saw coming up where we had done some forest and improvement right here in front of the qu May office and and followed up with fire. And that wasn't there before, And like two weeks I tried, I took pictures of it, and I walked back by and the deer had hit it and browsed it. So um, but yeah, ragweed, beggars, lice, the lettuces, poke weed, some of those or some of those that jump to mind as some of the quote weeds we even see in our food plots that people think they need to get rid of it are pretty high quality deer forage, you know. And and there's a there's a lot of others. And then there are some that have no benefit whatever pistols, garlic, mustard, uh, coffee weed or sickle pod is a bad one in the southeast, you know. Um, those you need to go um, whether you're gonna spray them or whether you hand pull them, um whatever. So yeah, I learned again going back to that importance will plan, I d learning ragweed would be a good one because then when you spot it, you're like, ah, that's a good one. Let it go. Um And if you see coffeeheat or this, will jump out of the vehicle and pull it. When you see one, yeah, and kill it. You mentioned um, you know, being able to identify some of these things in a food plot, and it makes me think of this idea of like clean food plots or clean farm fields that a lot of people right there. They're pretty, They're what we kind of envision when we imagine what our food plots should look like. This beautiful carpet of green mono culture, just this lush forest floor of carpet or of clover. But ah, as as we've talked a little bit, and as I've seen some of the things you've put out and some of the things I've been looking into over the last year. UM, to achieve that sometimes requires a certain amount of impact, and there might be some negative, some potential negative impacts of trying to achieve that beautiful, perfect, pristine U field that we see in the magazine spreads. And you Ti, you tackled this um in a video I've seen you tackled this in an article I read discussing these low impact food plot ideas, which you alluded to earlier in our conversation. Um, can you can? We may pivot to talk about that a little bit, because if we do, if we do, you know, decide we want to do some food plotting. Um. I you know, I learned how to food plot from a lot of the resources you guys are putting out there ten years ago, a lot of the other magazines and books and stuff out there, and there's kind of a standard approach to doing it. Um, that was just kind of all it seemed to be out there. But there seem to be small ternatives. Now, would you be able to set the stage for us first by just describing a little more of what you mean by a low impact food plot or green food plot? Um? And maybe the best way to do that is to describe what the opposite of that is. But I don't know. Can you can you first set the stage by what you mean by this or what kind of ways we can reduce impact with other food plots? What am I getting at here from your perspective? Yeah, it kind of goes back to, like I said, the whole reason I wrote that original article and followed up with the video and really started playing with some of this myself. Two things. One was you know, the email and phone ringing here at the headquarters of people going, um, can I do food plots without herbsides? Um? Can I do food plots without lime and fertilizer, chemical fertilizers. UM? Can I do it without disking and soil erosion and all this other stuff? You know, just people saying this feels really intensive to me, and I'm wondering if I can do food plots without all that or with less of that. So that that was part of the thing. But then also the bigger trends in commercial agriculture lately over the last few years has been more and more towards no till practices UM sharing the science of that and pointing out how UM farmers can save on fuel, save time, save on herbicide and other things, UM save on fertilizer by using more you know, quote organic. I'm not talking about you know, trademark organic. I'm talking about you know, natural processes for building soil fertility and using less tillage, which you know what the experts are saying that These were the folks I was listening to on that side of the of the conversation so I started practicing these things myself, finding that they worked, and that was kind of where some of our content has come out of. But but really what it means is UM doing food plots with less soil erosion, with less chemical inputs, whether that is chemical fertilizers, mineral fertilizers in t K that you bring in a bag, and with less serbicides, less chemicals in general that you're putting out there, less fuel expenditure and burning less fuel in your vehicle with repeated tilling and repeated trips out there with the tractor. So that it's kind of all of that. I think there are people that are interested in different parts of that, and people are interested in all of it. They want to do low impact food plots UM, So that's what we looked at. How do you know, how can you do all of these things? That's really what he comes down to is food plots for deer that have benefits for deer and wildlife, that don't put dirt in the trout stream down the hill, UM, that don't drift herbicides into natural plants that deer would use if they weren't killed. Those kinds of things, and then you've got you know, there's a there's other sort of looming dark issue is out there, like the neo nicotinoid herbicides that are applied now to most soybean and corn seed in North America. It's on the seed, so it goes into the plant endemically when when the plant grows, and there's concerns there about pollinators and the honey bee collapse problem and whether that's related to those types of herbicides. And then other people have GMO concerns. I don't want to plant anything that's genetically modified. So yeah, there's a whole suite of things that go into that how you know, low impact food plot. Yeah, so let's let's tackle this first on the herb side front um. I started again, a lot of this started coming up for me last year as I took on the back forty project and I started trying to kind of re examine all the traditional ways I've done things and and try to see other better ways I can do this. And this brought to mind then as you as you mentioned, you know, what is the impact I'm having with herbicide? Is it okay that I'm doing this? So these chemicals safe? Is this? You know? Am I negatively impacting other things that I don't realize when I'm going out here trying to trying to clean up a food plot or trying to prep a food plot or something like that. UM. So I started reading a whole bunch of different stuff. I At the same time, the e p A was putting out a report about glyphos fate, so round up UM. And when that came out, I saw you write up a really great take on it, which then I read and used, and some am I writing to reference. UM. Can you talk a little bit about your perspective on using herbicides and how you think through any potential negative impacts of them. Also, is there a negative impact from from what you understand? Can you speak to that too, Um? Yeah, in in a general sense. First of all, herbicides have a place in food plot management and in agriculture. There are simply and certainly in invasive plant control. UM. If you did not have herbicides to get rid of that autumnotive on the back forty, you'd be in trouble because you could cut it down, but it's gonna just come back from the stomp. UM. So there's a place for herbicides in all of these applications. There are there are things you may need to do to improve dear habitat that are gonna be very difficult to accomplish without herbicides. But you have to look at what's really necessary and what didn't. Go back to the ragweed. If you uh plant a food plot and you know, and of the field comes up with ragweed in the middle of your pretty clover or whatever it is soybeans, don't worry about it. Do you eat that. You don't have to jump out there and go, oh, I need a broad leaf selective herbicide and to come out here and try to control this ragway or whatever. You don't need to control it. So to start off, plant I D can help you eliminate times you don't you know when you need think you need herbside. Uh. These plants that are beneficial, it doesn't matter. Let them go, encourage them even. Don't be worrying about spraying if that's the plant you're dealing with. But then if Johnson grass or thistle um, coffee weed, garlic mustard, some of these others that really are bad weeds that are out there in the soil in many places, particularly those that have an agricultural history, and that's coming up in your food plot. You're gonna be hard pressed, um over time, to be producing significant amount of of deer forage in that spot without doing something to control the weeds, because the weeds will take over and um you surpu the soil productivity and the moisture and the space and the sunlight. So you'll have to do something now. Sometimes with those, you can hand pull some of those in a small plot. If you've got the time and there's not enough, you know there's a small number of weeds, get out there and pull them up by the route before they go to seed, and you can have an effect there. Other times you might be able to minimally do spot spraying with a backpack s prayer. You're not spraying the whole field. You're walking around like with a thistle uh thistle for example, if you take a sling blade and cut down that stalk before it goes to flower, you have prevented the dispersal of a whole lot of thistle seeds and a whole lot of headache down the road. But you didn't kill the plant, and it's going to produce another flower stalk after you go back home. However, if you hit that with a court of glaph to say from your backpack s prayer, you've killed the plant and it's gone. So these are the choices you can make to eliminate or minimize some of your herbside use. The bigger picture here is to remember this that you know you asked about herbicide safety. Just remember that the label on the herbicide is federal law and it is there. It is federal law because it is based on the best scientific research available done by the e p A and other agencies that have to look into these um to approve these products for use by the public, there has to be that label and it is enforceable by by federal law and it is backed up by science. And if you follow the label, you will be using the product safely to the best of our knowledge. So let's take delfe of sate for example. There's a whole lot of controversy around that term, as you know, which is you know what you and I both talked about and road about last year when that e p A report came out. There's a certain group of people out there that just think glipe of sate is evil. And then that's the end of the story, and you're not gonna commence him other ones. But if you read the glipe of state label, you know it tells you how to be safe with it. It's one of the least toxic ERB sides out there that we can work with UM, which is one of the reasons it is so common. Everybody's got some in their garage. You can buy it at the local gas station just about And that's one of the reasons I think too, that it's so controversial. People see it everywhere, so it's in front of you all the time, and I think it's that's sort of why it's become the the scapegoat here. But UM. But if you read the label, it tells you how to use it safely, not only for your own safety, how to keep it out of your body, how to keep it out of your eyes and not breathe it and not get it on your skin. All these things are on the label. It tells you what to do, but also how not to impact the environment when to use it. Some people think that you know, you spray as much pop life to say as you want on a food plot, as many repeated times as you want. No there's a limit, and if you read the label, it will tell you don't spray it more frequently than you know once or twice in a certain period of time. That's how we have ended up with things like the life of State resistant weeds that can't be killed by it anymore, from people spraying too much life and say too often, or using the ineffective solution rates. Again, go back to your label. It tells you how to mix that stuff to be effective, and it's there for a reason, and it's people using it off label. It's how we've ended up with glife of State resistant weed. That's how we've ended up with the controversy. Um. That's one thing I wonder about what life sate just you know me personally, is it's so common and it's so available, um and so uh you know, useful even around your house and then your in your lawn and your garden. Is you know, people just pick them up using all the time with no gloves and no eye protection and not worried about when direction and not paying a whole lot of attention to their solution rate. So the point is, if you follow the label, um, all of these herb sides out there and if you're using them for the right application, a labeled application, under labeled practices. Uh, you should be safe. You should be safe, and the environment should be safe. But that's that does not mean it's not a good idea to try to minimize their use. I still feel that way. I believe what I just said about the label in my own safety, but I still prefer to keep them in the jug and not buying to start with. I don't have to, that's just me, Um. I use them what I need to because I understand sometimes you've got to that I can't. I can't kill private for example, without an herbicide. I won't be able to overcome that battle. Um. But when I you know, but I don't want to just be using herbicides all the time because they're there. I still want to minimize it. Yeah, that seems to be where I've settled to is trying to minimize as much as possible when I do have to use them though in those certain applications, just doing it as by the book as carefully as you possibly can. Um. That seems to make sense. Another another impact of planting food plots. In another suggestion you had for ways to lower your impact was to think about erosion. Um, can you speak to why erosion is a bad thing within an ecosystem and or a field in surrounding areas? And then secondly, when we're working on food plots, how can we help prevent that? Yeah, so you know, erosion is your food plot, dirt, your top foil going away somewhere else, whether it turns to dust and blows away in the wind because there's no crop there at the time, or because it drifts you know, rolls off down the hill with rain water because you're trying to grow something on the slope that's too sleep steep um, or because um, you don't have some kind of a buffer around that field. You know, you you've planted a food plot on a slope right next to a stream. Well, what's gonna happen when it rains? That stream is going to turn the mud and impact those species in there, whether they're trout or whatever, um, waterfowl. I mean we can, we can going down the line. And this is this is why you know there's a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico from all of the nutrients and fertilizers coming down the Mississippi River out of the heartland. So this is something to be avoided, UM in many ways, but the basic one is, you know, it's counterproductive to you trying to have productive soils, nutrient rich soils that will grow a crop that will be beneficial to deer because ultimately, the nutrition or benefits that deer to get out of a plant they eat that's grown there come from the dirt, and preventing erosion and growing healthy soils naturally increases the nutritional benefits of those plants and reduces the amount of fertilizer you have to bring in. So that's that's what I've learned about this process. And it comes back to a basic idea you'll you'll come across if you listen to the folks in the commercial agricultural community, and that is or really any organic soil community. That is that healthy soil is built from the top down. UM. It starts with its multch dead vegetation, the previous crop on top, and that gradually breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces and filtering with rainwater down into levels of the soil. And that's how healthy soil is built. That's how you get the microbe, the earthworms, the life forms and in there that helped break all that down and produce the nutrients that the plants use, and all of that prevents erosion. It prevents dirt from drying up and blowing away in a winter wind, it prevents it from washing away of the rainwater UM. And so that really comes down to the basics behind why many of the experts are encouraging farmers not to tell anymore to use no tail practices, and so I've tried to bring those into food plotting as well, and it and it works pretty good. So you're trying to build soil from the top down, disking totally turns that process upside down. It buries the heavy organic matter deeply where it can't break down and can get enough air and oxygen to break down naturally. It brings loose soil to the top where it can blow away and wash away. It brings weed seeds back to the top where they can germinate. So disking really sometimes you need to do it. But disking too much, as we're all used to doing, is really counterproductive to healthy soils, to preventing erosion, UM, to low impact food plots. And so that's that's the way we've been trying to go, and you can do it. You know, when I say no till, a lot of people picture a big, giant, expensive no till grain drill. And if you've got one of those, which can borrow one of those or a lot of you know, soil conservation agencies have grain drills available for loan and rent um, so there's access to those, but you don't have to have one. Um. I've done no till food plots without a grain drill, with nothing but a hand trank seeds broader and a little culti packer before behind the four wheeler. So uh, no till is possible. It's really the ideal way to go if you can. If you and avoid telling uh and start going towards that process of building your food plot soils from the top down, increasing the nutrients, preventing erosion, keeping that healthy soil there in that plot instead of in the stream, instead of blowing away in the wind. Um it all has trickled down benefits for your fertilizer bill, your fuel bill, and of course the wildlife and habitat around you. Can you can you outline exactly how you've done those no till food plots without the drill, because I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that are in that scenario and are wondering about this. UM, could you just give a little more detail of exactly what process, what tools? UM. I know you mentioned a couple, but exactly how you do that? Okay. So it's a few quick steps on outline. First of all, you've got a crop there that whether it is weeds in an empty field or fallow field, or the remnants of a crop you grew last year. UM. You come in, you mow the at if needed, and the mowing is to break up all the bigger chunks and get them down on the service in the most layer, but also to facilitate the herbside treatment. UM. And that is usually a requirement of this process. And I'll people immediately go, what I gotta do herbside, But just hang on. So you come in, you mow, that facilitates the herbside treatment and gets it, you know, the growing weeds and this thing down to you know, six inches or lower, so that when you spray with life state to kill everything, you get a good effective kill. So you kill everything, and then all this happens about the time you're ready to plant whatever season that might be. I've done it with warm season plots and this time of year, I've done it with cool season plots in the fall. And then you wait for a good rain and you get out your broad trest spreater. You have your seed ready, you know how much you're gonna put and when there's a good rain coming in the forecast, and I mean a strong chance. I don't mean a you know chance of thirty minutes of like missed this afternoon. I mean sure enough, you know good rain coming, you jump out there ahead of that and you broadcast onto the mulch layer you've created, and then with a good rain you may be off to the races. I've done it without any additional steps. But the other step I often do is take a particularly with large seeds like soybeans, um take a small culti packer behind the fo wheeler and pull it around over the top of that just too lightly, kind of mash the seed down into the most layer and stir that mulch a little bit, just to kind of get the seed to settle in. That's it. That's all you need to do. The rain comes along, it further settles that most layer and the seed together, so you get decent seed to soil contact and the seeds germinate and they take off and that's it. You're off to the races. So you know, there's a lot of questions the folks have about that process. You know, what about this? A little about that? Can I use a drag and I'm you know, et cetera. But that's the basics. Create you want that crop residue there, you mow it to chop it down and get a nice most layer and an effective surface forth spraying the turbicide and contacting all the weeds that are existing there, and then you broadcast you seat over it with a rain coming and that's it. You're going um Now. Over time, like I was talking about with the disking, disking brings weed seeds to the surface and stimulates those weeds to grow. So a lot of times disking keeps you in a perpetual weed problem in a in a plot. Over time, if you can keep this cycle going, I'm not disking, And just like you know, planting into the crop residue from before, you're reducing your weed problems, particularly if you're using fast growing annuals um. You know, your cowpees soybeans, lab lab things like that in the summer that you know your cereal grains, you're fast growing cereal grains and braskas in the fall that pop up quick and put some shade out there and quickly compete with any weeds that might be coming along. That additionally helps suppress what weeds might germinate. You throw in some hand pulling and you know, some additional spots praying. Over time, you're you're going to reduce your weed problem to the point that, um, you may not need to do that life of state treatment prior to planning. But that's it. Yeah, it's not. It's it's not out of the realm possibility. I think for a lot of people to be able to do something like that, it's I think we sometimes come into this, I know I did early on thinking that you need this picture perfect farm process that you see on TV to get a food plot, and you really don't in a lot of ways. And you don't need that perfect food plot either. If it's a little messy here and there, that's not the worst thing either, too, right, that's right. No, Um, you know food plots may not look perfect. That Yeah, we have to not worry about this, Like farmers like you want to have this award winning clean crop. Um that deer don't care. Um, they're gonna eat the crop. Uh, they're gonna eat some of the weeds that come up. Some of the problematic ones you need to get rid of if you can. But but other than that, deer really don't care about an ugly food plot. There's got a few weeds come up in it. Many of those weeks, like we talked about, are just fine with the deer. But you know, let's let's think about this in a minimal scenario, or somebody doesn't even own a four wheeler. UM, with a small enough patch, you could get out there with a sling blade and chop down the heavy cover, take your backpacks, prayer and spray if you need to to kill that. Here comes the rain. You got a hand crank broadcast better spreader, you know, left less than fifty bucks at the hardware store for that if you don't have one, or a push spreader. If you've got a garden lawn and garden push spread at your house, bring that out there and broadcast just ahead of the rain. For small seeds like brassicas, you really don't need to cultipack because the rain is going to settle those tiny seeds in there very well. Um, it's the bigger seeds, soybeans, and you know some of the bigger wheat and oats that you might want to cultipack if you can. Um. But again even just um, you know, driving your vehicle around over it if you had to your your truck or car would work for that, but probably again not necessary a few time it with a good rain. So there we go. We just put in a food plot with nothing but a sling blade and a hand crank spreader and maybe a backpack sprayer or you know, a little hand pump garden sprayer. And if youve got a couple of friends, you know you can do more than a tenth of an acre. You can maybe do a half acre or more. Even if you need to bring your push mover from home out there too mow you know a larger amount of cover. So you can do this with home and garden that you probably already on. Oh yeah, I I absolutely have have tried all those things you mentioned. I've I've used my home mom mower, I've used a push uh like fertilizer spreader, I've i got my lawn mower stuck once and had to have my wife come out and help me. When that when that was fun. Um, But yeah, you don't. You don't need big fancy things. You don't need a big fancy food plot to make a positive difference either. I mean, my first food plot ever, this was a ten eleven years ago. Maybe it was the size of a two stall garage probably, and it helped. It was a cool project. It made a difference. I you know, got to engage with the land in a different way and attracted deer in a new way. And and yeah, I mean you don't. You don't need to be a big time farmer with tons of equipment and money to be able to do some of these things. And I think being able to do them the ways you described, which are you know, even less of an impact or minimizing any possible negative impacts from an environmental standpoint, make it even better. Um. So yeah, I love it. You have two things real quick to throw in here now. But you mentioned fertilizer and I didn't that. I think it goes without saying in all food plotting, I didn't throw that in there in the steps of this, But that that's just goes without saying you should pull a soil sample, get that tested, and find out nutrient levels for the crop you intend to grow, and let that guide you in line and fertilizer. Line to adjust the pH level of the acidity, and fertilizer to bring up any soil nutrients that are missing, and early in this process they're going to be missing. Eventually your use of that organic matter, keeping that on the surface, letting that breakdown, building those natural soils without disking, that's going to increase nutrient levels to the point that your need for fertilizery is going to fall off and you won't need as much, but you're gonna need some. So always pull your soil test and check on that. If you don't line when you need to um, the plants can't take up the nutrients are there, so you also need to adjust the pH. So that's that kind of UM goes without without saying there um. And then you know the other thing too, is just remember that many times we we we get excited about food plots and we're planning food plots because it's part of a hunting strategy. We're gonna plant something that's going to be highly attractive at a certain time of year, whether that is summer lagoons like cow peas and soybeans that we can bow hunt late, you know, in early fall while the deer is still coming to them, and that's highly attractive in a small little catch scenario. Or we're talking about you know, winter cereal drains in Braskas and those annuals like that that are highly attractive during the fall, you know, unless acorns or at peat production and can be particularly attractive later in the winter. So those are hunting opportunities were doing. But but the thing to remember is ultimately, if you're just interested in dear nutrition, um, you don't even have to worry about dragging the long are out there in the backpacks prayer and buying seed and buying fertilizer. Look to the woods beyond the food plot and look out there and see what you see. And if it's all shade and you can walk through their nice and there's no briers and nothing scratches you, and it's wide open and you can see a hundred yards to make a nice rifle shot, that's not good. You could be removing some of those trees out there. If you knew what they were and could remove some of the less useful ones, less valuable ones, maybe the invasive ones putting sunlight on the ground and having a much more cost effective impact on nutritional levels for your deer. So I just got to throw that in there. Don't forget that one of the options in low impact food plots is don't plant food plots. And that was how I ended that article. I wrote was, look, let's on a spectrum of intensive commercial agriculture food plots to the opposite of that in terms of impact. The other end of the spectrum is don't plant food plots if you really just don't want to buy a fertilizer in the bag and don't want to buy her besides, and you don't have to plan anything. The seeds are out there, the things that deer will eat and hide in and make use of are out there. All you gotta do is put somebody on the ground and encourage them. So, you know, I feel like that needs to be mentioned that if someone who's just really interested in super low impact food plots and just doesn't want to do any of these paints as we talked about period, fine, you don't have to do that. There is plenty of options, in fact, far more cost effective options for just simply producing dear nutrition on a large scale. Well you, Um, you make my job easy, Lindsay, because there's there's really something attracted to the human psyche. Two circles coming to a close. When things come full circle and you can end where you begin. It's pleasing to the ear, it's pleasing to the mind. And we're so perfectly doing this with what you just tied me up with because we let our conversation talking about the the impacts of the current health crisis and how that's hurting people's budgets. So folks are trying to find cost effective ways to still make a difference. You made a wish to the genie of Mark Kenyon that you could help people identify plant species, and now you've just illuminated how one of the best, most cost effective habitat improvement projects requires knowledge a plant identification. And that just leaves me with the perfect way to end it with what you just shared this, Lindsay, that was really nicely done, and um became full circle in a great way, And I think this is really interesting stuff. I've been reinvigored to do a better job identifying things, understanding my natives, my non natives, invasive versus non Um. I'm going to try to do even more this year to learn about all that and then applying that into these low impact solutions. So man, a lot of good stuff covered here. Thank you, Lindsay. Well, I've enjoyed it this. I love talking about this off. You know, we could go on and on and on, but you know, just I think remember what Craig Harper said to me about when it comes to some of these you know, invasives that are really problematic and aggressive, but that deer used to some extent, you can do better. Um. So you know I think about that, and I think about deer management. Um. You know, all of us to some extent and want to be deer managers and have better deer hunting. If Mark, if you quit worrying about whether you need to take a doll or two, and you quit protecting young bucks and it was just shoot the first dear that comes by, and you're just you know, gonna hunt for the freezer, would you continue to have deer hunting. Sure, deer hunting will still be there, just like deer are still gonna be on your place if you don't kill that automotive and you don't kill that private or whatever that aggressive invasive is you're dealing with. But could you do better? Could your hunting be better if you protected a few yearling bucks and maybe took a doll or two when you needed to to encourage more nutrition for the deer to remain? Yeah, you're hunting could be better. You can do better. And it's the same thing with habitat management. With those invasives, you can do better than that, and your deer can too. So um, that's yeah, really a pretty simple mantra to live by, I think when it comes to this, but but a good one. Definitely a good one. If if folks have been intrigued by what you've been sharing with us today, if they want to learn more about some of these ideas, and or if they want to go back to our original beginning of our conversation, if they'd like to get involved with qut may donate or get involved the d S one or become a member. Where can they find all this stuff? Qum a dot com just that simplest place to start, yep, best place to start where, of course, on all the social media channels that the qum a Facebook dot com, the q m a Instagram and Twitter as well at the same address. But start with the website QTMA dot com. Got a ton of free information there. Have a store with books like Craig Harper book Wildlife, Food Plots and early Successional Plants are Quality Food Plots book. Um, all of these resources that are there free. But of course we'd appreciate the support. We'd appreciate folks becoming members, uh donating doing whatever they can to help us another nonprofit groups right now through the current crisis. Yea, and hey, speaking of books for selling your website, I saw that my book That Wild Country is available on there too, So how could I have forgotten that one? Yeah, yes, we now have the Wild That Wild Country by Mark Kenyon my website. So if reading list by the way, hey, well I hope you get a chance to check it out. Um. And yeah, if anyone listening hasn't picked a copy up yet, pick it up from qt may and help them out a little bit too. So yeah, I appreciate, I really appreciate the time. This has been fun. It's always informative, and um, I'm just gonna I'm gonna keep on bugging to come on again because I never run out of things to talk about with you, Lindsay, I'm enjoyed it. Mark. I appreciate everything that you do. I appreciate what you do for Q do you may well. You've been a big, big help and fan and support of ours up for years and and no han to thank you enough for that, but I really really enjoy talking with you and U yeah, look forward to doing and again sounds good, Lindsay, thanks again, and stay well, be safe, you do the same, take care all right, that's gonna do it for us today. Thank you all for tuning in. I hope you are doing well, safe and healthy and enjoying some some outdoor time, whether that's turkey hunting, mushroom hunting, scouting, white t hellivet improvement, white tail habitat improvement, that's a mouthful. Whatever is you're doing, I hope you are breathing in some of that fresh air and enjoying sunshine with friends and family in a socially distance safe way. Uh So, all that said, thank you and stay wired to HU