It doesn’t seem to. I’ve never seen one sick from it, and I see the same ones on cell camera night after night

Deer are in ours and so are the turkey
On the deer, keep in mind there are a lot of forages that are new and tender right now. The main benefit with clover is the amount of biomass they produce and the high quality of that biomass. If a deer comes into my clover and spends 10-30min+ and moves on then overall I have increased their protein intake on the day. Any high quality is better than none and in another month or two when other plants get woody the clover will still be succulent and they will still be browsing on them. It's hard to see browse in them right now as fast as they are growing. When you get down there though you can see the leaves and flowers nipped off.

I don’t disagree with any of that but the original idea was that basically they could still be consuming that same amount of clover plus also getting benefit from consuming other top tier plant species as well….. I think you have the potential to grow other things in these field settings that the wildlife likely wont get anywhere else…..deer and turkey both…..and with turkey you also have the more dynamic insect food web that will likely not be found in many other locations…….

Just for example, here is late summer utilization of a patch of teaweed with exclusion cages in the back. You can just see the green post sticking up that’s holding one of the two cages…..I didn’t plant it….it just started growing once the soil conditions improved…..I really think the lime and high levels of Ca was a big part of that…..At this point in time tests were showing over 4000 lbs/ac of Ca in my topsoil…..You don’t get those type conditions in burn units…..

Again, don’t get me wrong……I’m not saying Buxton’s methods are wrong or anything…..I’m just suggesting that there might be a more optimal way of managing these big fields where you actually produce more benefit for the wildlife even if it’s a little less beneficial to the camera lens and doesn’t sale quite as well

Buxton don’t disagree with you. He promotes variety in food plots. Just not all mixed together. If it’s all mixed together it’s harder to spray for the unwanted plants.

10-4….I was just going off of what I see him post on his page……Seems like he really promotes growing fields of pure clover

Another thing to keep in mind, a weedy plot with a diverse mixture of species is likely a bigger benefit on a tract with a majority of acreage in closed canopy forest. If you have a good portion of your property in varying stages of succession like utility ROW, clear cuts, old field etc I don’t see it as being such a big deal to have a few acres dedicated to clover.

If I had small food plots of an acre or less kind of situation then I could see that being the case……But with these huge multi acre plots like he shows…..I look at that like having “X” amount of space to produce tier one plant species that cant be grown in those other locations…..Adding all of that lime and other soil amendments and raising the OM level up to 3-6%, etc produces different growing conditions that tends to produce better high end plant species from a nutrient standpoint….For example the teaweed I showed is just about nutritionally equivalent to soybeans and I dont tend to see it growing wild in many places…….

If I have a 5-10 acre field like some of these he shows to produce high end forage then I wouldn’t want to waste that space just to grow massive amounts of clover that doesn’t get utilized by the deer…..I think you could be pumping more high end forage into the herd if you offered them more variety……I mean its sort of like if we had a big garden and we used it to grow all tomatoes and we ended up with 1000 quarts more tomatoes than what we had use for……Someone might say…..”Hey why don’t we use some of that space to grow some corn and beans too and few less tomatoes”

I really think we get hung up on how pretty it looks to us and lose perspective on how much true benefit its actually providing..... Not that it isnt providing any benefit but not as much as the picturesque beauty leads us to believe……I will say that one pro should be that you if you can grow clover all summer then you should have some N to run your fall cereal grains off of but in a fertile situation with high OM I’m not sure that it would be limiting anyways even with less summer clover……The exclusion cage pic above of crimson clover and cereal rye was grown without any additional N inputs or summer clover crops and grew fine

Some of the field maybe pure clover. Some of it might be a different plant. He is really big on checker board burning thinned pines (like most habitat managers are) so a lot of the diversity you are talking about is not far away. On the properties he manages, it seems like his food plots are just a complimentary food source to the rest of the habitat. They are not always the main source like they usually are on a timber lease