Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - Deer Season '26/'27 Thread

Deer season preparations are now underway.

I always learn new information from our best deer management experts on the forum.

Please add any comments about what worked well on your property in previous years. (Or what turned out to be failed ideas or practices.)

Good luck to everyone this season!

Buried a water tank last winter. Critters (everything) started using it immediately. A few days ago a deer crawled into it and stayed for about 30 minutes.

My foodplots are crispy at the moment. Need some rain and cooler temps for the clover to bounce back. Also need better weather before I start thinking about planting fall seed.

Several bucks have been regulars this summer, but a few days ago a buck shed his velvet and newcomers started roaming through. Hormones are starting to change.

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Rod's last page on 2026

Personally, I have never heard of feeding cotton seeds.

Might be interesting to set up one feeder with cotton seeds and one with corn in the same area and set up cameras to observe the deer behavior with two food sources? Evaluate time-of-day, male versus female, seasonal food preference moving to late fall, etc.

Cotton seed showed up strongly last year, and now ASF and Texas Hunter are selling tall square cubes that will hold up to 300 pounds of cotton seed. I'm just starting with my morning deer hand feed out of corn and cotton seed beside the house. I'll free drop corn, then cotton seed, then corn, etc. By doing that, all the deer get to eat both, and the spread out helps deer from fights in a single pile. 16 to 20 deer is normally what I handle in early mornings. 7-8 of those deer will be fawns, and 2 bucks usually get run off by the adult does.

I've fed CS at night, but fire ants ruin it, so hand feeding is my only thing to do right now. Cotton seed runs from $16 to $23 dollars for 40 pound bags.

I'M not pushing either of these companies, but it lets you know what's in the cotton seed from fortifiedcottonseed , and Texas Hunter shows one of the cotton seed feeder.

Add on: Rod, I just checked that Kansas has tons of available cotton seeds, and have been selling it for a while. IIRC, most of it was going to cows.

Catscratch, those are really nice this soon.

I think this is the same buck that is standing in catscratch's water tank.

Most accurate answer in the pond threads, "It depends."

I was looking for common wisdom in the Deer Thread, turns out the answer is still "It depends."

It is almost like biological science is a complex topic or something!