Most deer hunters will never kill a Boone & Crockett whitetail deer, yet we can all dream. We can even take steps to make those dreams come true.
Since many hunters ply their trade close to home, the notion of building your own record-class bucks makes sense even if you don’t own property. One of the reasons more big bucks are being killed lately is simply that there are more of them out there; they’ve been allowed to grow to maturity. Noted outdoor writer Gerald Almy looks at this situation in this article from the Whitetail Institute website.
Question: Have you checked the trends in the Boone and Crockett and Pope and Young record books during the past 20 or 30 years? If you have, you’ve probably noticed something stunning. There has been an explosion of whitetail deer entries starting about 10 years before the turn of the century.
Guess what else happened around that time? Ray Scott founded the Whitetail Institute of North America and singlehandedly began the food plot phenomenon with the introduction of Imperial Whitetail Clover — still the greatest perennial seed for growing trophy whitetails. Since then, the company has grown exponentially. With help from Ray’s sons, Steve and Wilson, who joined the company in 1990, and many dedicated employees, Whitetail Institute has expanded to meet the high demand for its established food plot products while continuously researching ways to improve existing products and to develop new, innovative ones for the wildlife land manager. The timing of the beginning of the food plot craze and the dramatic increase in trophy bucks is not coincidental. In fact, a strong case could be made that one is largely responsible for the other. Just how dramatic has the increase in record-book bucks been? [continued]
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