Duck Hunting Club Secrets | Planting for Ducks | Tips to Compete!

there are several things that big duck clubs do to be successful that they don't want you to know about one of those things food I'm not talking about a ribeye at dinnertime what I'm talking about is corn should you plan it is there anything any better well I'll tackle those questions and more today I'm Joel Strickland and this is surviving duck season thanks for watching surviving duck season where we feed your waterfowl obsession and help you to maximize your experience now for most of my years duck hunting I've hunted a combination of public areas and private ground and there's positive and negatives to both but if you have the right private spot you can do some amazing things to improve the habitat for waterfowl there's a lot of hype over planting corn for ducks really planning lots of different things for ducks and on this video I'm gonna talk to you and show you some things that I've done that's worked and also let you know about the challenges and problems that you might face if you decide you want to do some of that yourself now today's video is brought to you by Mojo outdoors and high and dry waders do you ever plant for ducks well if you have leave me a comment and let me know what you plant and how it works for you this is going to be longer than my normal video but there's a ton of really good information and examples that can help you to get some of the ducks that might be hanging out over at the big fancy duck club nearby or at a waterfowl sanctuary so hang with me there are some legal things that you really do need to consider when we talk about planning for wildlife when you intend to hunt if you plant something for ducks that you do not harvest and that you plan to hunt over you cannot manipulate that crop that means you can't mow it knock it down drive over it with your ATV stomp on it with your feet burn it or in any way make it easier for the ducks to get to it at any point during that season okay otherwise it's consider baiting you can flood it you know but that's it on the contrast if you are hunting an agricultural field that has been planted and then harvested you can knock down the stubble if you want to you can burn it and then also if you're if you're in an area where that maybe is fallow that hasn't been planted the regulation is not the same for that is considered naturalized and so then therefore you can manipulate that this is federal regulations so it's you know this way in every state but your state may even be more strict do your own homework do your own investigation and make sure that what you do you are legal in doing so with all that out of the way let's get into it so what's the fuss about corn there's a lot a lot of hunters and big duck clubs that plant corn for ducks corn is excellent as a food because it's it's a high carb food we call it a hot food source so when it's cold and ducks need quick energy they can really really pound the corn corn is the number two highest value per acre for the amount of days that a duck can actually feed in a field before they use it up well it's it's number two if you don't harvest it unharvested rice is number one but whether it's rice corn soybeans or any other crops that a duck might want to eat as soon as you harvest it the percentage of food that's left in a field is just it's so small compared to what was harvested you know a harvested rice field or a harvested corn field typically you know they're trying to get 200 bushels an acre and then how much is left in a field like two or three bushels an acre most of the combines are so efficient these days there's just not a lot left over there's been several studies out you know to determine you know what a duck needs in a flooded field and so if you go to a but duck goes to a flooded rice field for example and there's maybe like two or three bushels per acre that's left over that is a decent you know environment for a duck to thrive but once it gets down to about 45 pounds per acre of accessible grain that's when they decide to leave because it's not worth the energy and the effort for the duck to try to find that amount of food well 45 pounds is about like a bushel okay so you know they're starting at about 2 or 3 bushels and once they feed out you know about half of that then they're gonna leave the field now for those of you who are kind of nerdy about statistics and information like I am I'm gonna leave some links in the description below some documents that you can download from the NRCS Mississippi Wildlife and Parks really really good information planning commercial crops for ducks can be great if you're a farmer or if you can hire a farmer to plant and grow them for you but let's be honest doing that is not realistic for most people but commercial crops do have some downsides one is once they're flooded they deteriorate quicker meaning late in the season they may be completely unavailable because if there is any left that haven't been fed out it may be rotted but there's something that the most successful duck clubs are doing either instead of corn or in addition to corn or rice that I'm going to tell you about and it can even work on a small piece of ground these are three things that I've been doing for nearly 30 years even when I was a kid and didn't have much money I could do some of these things they are one managing and hunting moy sole habitat to flooding fallow fields and three planting millet now more so habitat is a seasonal wetland that grows naturally native grasses and plants throughout the summer and then it provides a winter habitat for ducks and other wildlife once it's been flooded now I'm not talking about a swamp they can turn into a swamp if they're not managed right and the water doesn't come off of them but moist soil environments slowly dry out you know in the summer and that causes a variety of plants to grow the wild millet Sprengel top toothed cup painted grass smart weed tufa lots of other things a lot of things that we consider weeds but they are great for for you know for a wildlife this is this is a natural wild millet they call it barnyard grass and this has got a tremendous amount of food value and there's a lots and lots of it as you can see growing this right here is smart weed which is another favorite duck food and these flowers here are going to turn to seed pretty soon and they'll be there's lots and lots of it growing out here and there's there's tons of other native you know food sources for ducks not to mention the abundance of invertebrates and and you know other kinds of little bugs and whatnot that that live in this and mosquito larvae which is another highly sought-after food for a lot of different types of ducks in the wintertime and so you got just a smorgasbord of food for them to eat there's a lot of weeds that are not of any food value but like this is what we call coffee bean or sis pania is actually with it what the true name is but it's coffee bean and when it grows in large stands it's a it's a good windbreak it's a thermal area where ducks can kind of get in out of the wind and warm get themselves warm but it's also makes if I can see where we put the blind over there it's a really good spot to hide a blind you don't want to let too much of your more soil grow up in that and a lot of us depending upon when you let the water in and out as to how much of that you have grow but what we have here is just kind of perfect now on average moist soil property that's not even managed properly can have more food available than a harvested crop field and a well-managed morsel property can have ten times or even more the amount of food compared to an Ag field and it will last like the entire duck season the entire winter even after duck seasons over with and Ducks are still hanging out for a while before they fly back north it's a really really really good type of habitat now fallow ground also can be great for ducks too depending upon what's growing if it's grasses and and those sorts of things then more than likely once you have flooded it the Ducks will use it and unlikely it's gonna have more available food than like I said Harvard's a crop field would have there's all kinds of really great grasses that grow in that that are similar to what grow and moist soil habitat so we do that quite a bit sometimes a farmer will leave a field fallow or doesn't get in there and we don't have time to do something else with it we'll just flood the field and a lot of times it works out really really well for us I've also planted a lot of Japanese millet and golden millet and even some brown top millet now these are all great duck foods they're very easy to plant I'm in Arkansas and so we typically will plant these in late July August all the way up til about Labor Day okay and don't feel bad about planting as late as Labor Day if you you know if you're in a little bit of a warmer climate because it will work Japanese millet is what I started out planning you know a little over 25 years ago in the last probably 10 12 years I've been planting golden millet and I love golden millet it's it's fantastic it comes up really really high it withstands water a little bit better than then Japanese millet does the head is on it's really really big now like I said the millets are all great duck food and very easy to plant ideally you would disc up an area and then broadcast the seed and then drag something behind your tractor or a four-wheeler or something like that to you know work some soil over the top you don't have to really plant it in you're just really kind of getting a dusting of seoul over the top like a quarter inch or even less just to keep the birds from you know get into it and then also making a little bit better for when you know when the determination period takes place but it's not necessary to do that if you are working with bare dirt or mud you can just broadcast it right over the top of it and then just wait for the rain the rain will beat it into the ground if it's a mud flat it'll just germinate with with the moisture you can even throw out the seed in just a few inches of water and then as long as it doesn't get eaten up by something then when the water recedes and then it reveals it as a mud flat then it will and began growing I recently watched this video from Virginia outdoors Unlimited Thomas does a great job of showing the entire process of hand seeding a pond I remember doing that stuff a lot when I was about his age and I'll leave a link in the description section you should check out his videos pretty cool now there's so many places that you can you can plant millet I've done it in openings in the woods along edges of crop fields where I've got permission to do it I'm going to show you some examples of some things I've done over the years to plant some of my hunting spots now this is in 2007 this particular place had grown up in tall weeds and undesirables it wasn't being planted and so I I paid the landowner to disk up part of the field not the whole sixty acres just part of it the coffee beans and and some of the other weeds made really great cover to hide in and so I left plenty of that now that year we planted it up in golden millet now right here I've got this product called seed coat which is a biostimulant it's a dry powder that we just mix with the seed this is not something that you have to do but we do because it helps the seed to kind of start off better now this is a hand cedar and you can pick one of these up really inexpensively you can see my buddy here just walking and turning the crank it spreads the seed out it works great in the areas that you can't take a tractor or your ATV or if you just don't have those things now this is the next year we did the same exact thing except this time we've got this bigger broadcast cedar that we put on the four-wheeler these work great it's a lot faster and a whole lot less walking now when you plant in August like we do there's a lot of times it's just bone-dry and there's no chance of rain in sight but usually we have the ability to irrigate in some way I have a three-inch trash pump with a hundred feet of hose a lot of times though it's not near enough length so I bought some poly pipe and then we that to the end of the hose then we can run the water pretty much anywhere we want to do I mean hundreds and hundreds of yards I've been working with Scott Kerr at Cypress crossing duck club for the last nine years and we've been utilizing moist habitat flooded fallow fields and planting millet usually we plant smaller areas but in 2018 we had the opportunity to plan a couple of 80 acre fields in golden millet and we were very excited about it and as you can see it's fantastic looking I mean it's one of the most impressive millet stands I've ever seen to be honest with you it's really really nice the thing that's great about millet is you can top so it we can broadcast it on top and not do anything can any average guy can just sling out a bucket of seed and be able to grow a stand of millet obviously the better you know the more of like a farmer you try to do it the better it's going to work one thing I have noticed about it is the Ducks can find it and eat it out really quickly so you've got to run the geese off and you got to make sure you you get in there and shoot the birds when they're there so that you know if they do eat it out you haven't missed the opportunity managing property and a duck Club is a lot of work check out this video right here and see what I'm talking about and also check out this video right here to see one of my favorite duck hunting videos that I've put out and feed your waterfowl obsession god bless I'm Joel Strickland and I'll see you on the next video

Channel: Surviving Duck Season

Views: 25,497

Rating: 4.9501247 out of 5

Keywords: Planting Millet, planting millet for ducks, planting golden millet for ducks, planting japanese millet for ducks, Planting Corn for ducks, Moist soil habitat for ducks, duck hunting tips, duck hunting tips and tricks, duck hunting, duck hunting vlog, arkansas duck hunting, joel strickland duck hunting, duck calling, duck calls, duck season, how to duck hunt, mallard hunting, surviving duck season, how to call ducks, joel strickland, mojo outdoors, planting rice for ducks

Id: aPnTBLlse8k

Length: 14min 47sec (887 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 05 2020