UGUIDE 2025 Food Plot System - Pheasant Hunting
January 25, 2025 by UGUIDE South Dakota Pheasant Hunting
Please refer back to the 2024 article on pheasant hunting food plots for foundational information.
We have another year under the belt and another increment in the food plot system. Last year we pretty much put a lock on solving an 18 year problem of having untreatable sandburs and giant foxtail (dog hunter's worst nightmare) in our food plots every year. After some meaningful conversations with some of the best agronomists at Pioneer and Corteva, I finally got the intel I needed. It was interesting that the info I was getting from my seed and chemical salesman was not getting the job done. I did not have the farming background and you really need good production agronomics to solve this weed problem.
What's really amazing is just about every outfitter in the state of South Dakota and beyond has this same problem. Even farmers that are great at growing profitable production crops could not get their arms around this.
As you may recall I had a 3 crop rotation in the mix for 2024. The findings from that rotation were that the RR corn and Double Team sorghum will make the cut for 2025. The custom Final Flush mix worked very well, but like many other small grain mixes, it just does not pass muster once you get into the cold season (Nov-Mar) for holding birds for hunting and also for sustaining survivability cover after hunting season. The picture in this article is simply THE best pheasant cover you can do in North America. I filled the drill with half red and half white milo. 7.5" rows about 6-8 lbs to the acre and 1/2 to 1 1/2" deep depending on soil conditions. 100 lbs of actual N fertilizer per acre. You're looking at probably 100 bushel/acre milo. The yield is not the key element. It is the clean rows, crop canopy, stem density and high foliage cover with food that makes it king.
The Final Flush worked well and is probably best for its brood rearing habitat. I have 70 acres of alfalfa firebreaks that is my undisturbed brood rearing habitat on 700 acres total. That's 10%. If you are trying to build pheasant numbers and don't have this high quality brood rearing cover, then the Final Flush will be an essential element to make your operation successful. We got back to our record harvest numbers in 2024; over 500 roosters. I feel the weather was the difference maker, but elements like the Final Flush could have made more of a difference than I am giving it credit for. I just simply feel I need the cold season bird holding hunting cover like milo and corn and the Final Flush does not provide that as you get into Nov. and beyond.
So for 2025, what I am doing (and my recommendation to my other UGUIDE Outfitters) is to standardize on what I feel is the industry standard best practice of a 50/50 food plot rotation of Round Up Ready Corn and herbicide tolerant sorghum (Double Team by S&W). So if you had 100 acres of food plots total, you would plant 50 acres to corn and the other 50 to milo and rotate those plots and crops annually. If you follow the herbicide plan laid out in my 2024 article, you will not have any weed issues including volunteer corn.
