Drop-Tine Podcast -The official deer management, food plot & habitat podcast · Jason R. Snavely

Food Plot Research Update + Quail & Turkey Talk

·49 min·2 clips

Luke says one surprise is that some ag-heavy sites still show a major regenerative advantage, but access can be the obstacle.

Jason checks back in with Luke Resop. Luke is a Mississippi State graduate student, and his project looks at conventional food plots, regenerative food plots, and old field management across nine study sites in Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Missouri. The talk stays grounded. Jason compares some of Luke's findings with what he has seen on his own Pennsylvania farm and on client properties around the country, using those parallels to reflect on how the field work matches lived experience. Turkeys enter the picture fast. Jason folds the conversation back to the late 1990s, when he worked as an undergraduate technician on bobwhite quail research at Mississippi State under one of Dr. Westberger's graduate students, Mark Smith, who later became Dr. Mark Smith at Auburn University. That memory is not just nostalgia. Jason points out that Smith's doctoral research, published around 2005, along with work by Hearst, Palmer, and others, helped set the table for the turkey foraging efficiency research now underway at Mississippi State. The method talk gets specific. Luke explains D-Vac sampling as using a cut-off 35-gallon trash can and a leaf vacuum to pull invertebrates out of a defined sampling frame, giving the team a measure of what is present in each treatment. The comparison matters. The turkey pulps then show what the birds actually use, so the project can compare availability with use instead of guessing from one side of the equation. The first year is still early. So far, the team is seeing more invertebrates in the D-Vac samples than in the turkey pulps, which suggests that many insects are tucked into dense green vegetation where the birds cannot reach them as easily. Habitat structure keeps showing up. Jason notes that the old fields in the project were burned the winter before last, which means they have now gone through two growing seasons without fire and have built enough perennial cover to conceal an adult deer standing upright. That is a lot of cover. It means the insects can be present without being equally available, and that difference matters if you are trying to understand how turkeys actually feed in the field. The conversation does not stay narrow. Jason closes by pushing for more open, good-faith conversation across differences, and he frames wildlife management, hunting, and politics as subjects worth arguing through rather than avoiding.

As heard by us

A practical field chat where food plots, turkeys, and long-running research all stay tied to real properties.

It stays anchored in Luke Resop's nine study sites across Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Missouri, while Jason keeps the discussion tied to what he has seen on his own farm and client properties.

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Why you'd press play

For a turkey-and-food-plot update with real field data and a few rabbit trails.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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