Years ago, a “green field” was just about any grassy patch where deer would feed when the acorns supply had exhausted. It was a great place to wait in a shooting house for deer to appear, where you might be able to bag one in a place of easy recovery.
Today’s specialized food plot strategies have revolutionized this old-fashioned form of hunting and transformed it to a successful strategy that many hunters enjoy. Here’s a quick look down memory lane, along with a host of suggestions for turning grandpa’s ho-hum strategy into a whitetail dynamo, as reported in Whitetail Institute.
Once upon a time, your granddaddy’s rye grass field and an old, wooden tree stand was the only game in town. He planted the greenfield, hoping seed would sprout, the drought wouldn’t be severe, and that the deer had nothing else to eat. Today, that kind of thinking runs like a Model-T at Daytona. Just because your daddy or granddaddy did it, doesn’t mean it can’t improve. Take Fred Abbas, for example, a fellow from northern Michigan who retired with a challenging ambition to hunt trophy bucks in his home state of Michigan. Guess what? There weren’t any.
Perhaps he should have moved to Iowa, Illinois, or Kansas. No, Abbas believed that he could change the environment and create an incubator for big deer in a state with more licensed hunters than the standing armies of most civilized countries. Was he crazy? Maybe — like a fox. Today, thanks to a unique approach to the basic “greenfield” Abbas and his son have become so successful that they host Away Outdoors Television where they hunt on six leased farms and one they own to entertain mega-thousands of viewers on where, when, and how to harvest big bucks in the land of the pumpkin army.
