The plant community depends on the amount of sunlight, the soil type, the amount of soil moisture, fire Intensity, fire frequency, and fire timing………

You could probably add “herbivory” to that list…….That’s like the impact a herd of buffalo would have

shut up Harold

That’s right. Disturbance of the seed bed.

Yeah…..it resets succession kinda like fire but with a little different nuances and probably somewhat different plant communities in the end ……It could actually be pretty substantial differences over time if you greatly improve soil conditions in comparison

I would bet someone's done a study out West, where it's not that uncommon to have fires sweep through 10s of thousands of acres, to see how fast game comes back. Not exactly parallel to the hypothetical presented, (different game densities to start with, different species than the SE) but would give you an idea of what would happen. I know the big quail plantations burn on a 3 year cycle, so about 1/3 of the place actually gets burned every year. They carefully checkerboard the place into relatively small squares (50-100 acres).

Back in the nineties I had a lease in TX and we had a natural burn (lightning). This was in August. Burned everything on the place. A month later it rained a lot. Best deer and turkey season we ever had.

Now this is what I'm talking about.......

Looks like SW Georgia.
I was down there last week quail hunting.
That’s some beautiful country.

i understand this is site specific but I'll take cover over food all day in our area . We do as much habitat work as possible on our property including burning , timber thinning , summer feeding trapping etc & it still doesnt hold a candle to my neighbor's property directly across the highway.. His place is majority timber co land with tons of bedding & very little food with no burning / thinning etc. His place is an absolute deer heaven..

Looks like throw and mow heaven to me.....

Apparently Ted Turner owns that first plantation I posted.....

Dern boy…you attit again

Check out a zoomed in look ……That’s some seriously intense management…….I’m assuming all of the circles are for fire breaks where they’re burning off small patches maybe?…..I wonder how many man hours it takes to pull that off across an area that big??

Yes exactly, called ring outs.

Billionaires have a full time staff on these places and an unlimited budget - “quail hunting paradise”

Not only man hours.

It takes truckloads of money. Management on that level would probably cost $150/ acre or more annually.

I was hoping someone would point out that they are disking all of those fields to manage them… ..Its kind of funny reading that article with it talking about how they are restoring the place back to being au naturel when what they’re doing is manipulating the landscape far beyond anything natural…..I figured someone like Ted Turner would be one to try the cattle management approach as the means to “natural management”

I’m just throwing this out there because I know other plantations look to really mimic what these places have success doing……That area appears to be in prime agricultural territory just going by the mass amount of pivot irrigation around them…..Prime ag soil can take being disked over and over and still support productive plant growth without soil organic matter being present…..That’s not true though when you move to the poorer sandier soils like we have here…..If you try and mimic the same thing they are doing in that ag soil somewhere like Midway for example where they literally mine sand….you probably wont get the same results…..Something that I know for sure occurs here in sandy land is that the plant community changes with the amount of SOM……0% tends to result in undesirable plant species and the better species grow when OM builds…..

I would really be interested to see what it would look like for someone to manage one of these places with one of the main goals being to build SOM levels to “climax” conditions over time across the whole property…..That should be a MAJOR root driver of productivity….especially in poor soil areas…..That disking technique whether they have this in mind or not when doing it is mimicking the seed bed disturbance effect of a herd of buffalo……But the buffalo herds simply stirred up the very top layer of soil while trampling down the vegetation on top of it…..They helped to BUILD up soil organic matter and promote rich diversity…..

At the places I see that are trying to mimic this will disking they are doing it will big heavy machinery and large disks that are really aggressive at turning soil and I bet they end up burning up the SOM as a result……I imagine most of these “fallow fields” that are getting turned over and over again are all void of SOM and are plant species limited as a result…..as well as overall productivity being limited…….The whole idea of managing one of these places with cattle is to set it up pretty close to how they have it but use the cattle to manage rather than the disks……Disturb the soil, trample the vegetation, and poop everywhere while consuming the grass……I bet a dollar to a doughnut that it would produce a more diverse and productive plant community…….The reason I was asking about man hours is at some point even though cattle would be some work…..I don’t think it would be nearly as much as what they are already putting into something like the pics above.....The method they are using seems like a huge amount of inputs going into it