You need to decide if you want to improve the health of you animals with mineral vitamin supplements or just get a hole dug on your property.

While salt is required in a deer's diet it is not a antler building mineral and very small amounts are needed. It's similar to ice cream for humans in it produces nothing much used in rack production for deer other than it tastes good and is attractive during the spring and summer months.

If holes are what you want then use salt, it's cheap. If you want to build quality animals by offering them minerals and vitamins possibly missing in their diets you better use something more than salt. I suggest low sodium mineral vitamin supplements. From what I've read, anything over 40% salt is really wasting money. Some of the most popular products are as low as 1.5% salt. To me that sounds more like what you would want.

I have never understood how so-called experts say mineral supplements are of no value to deer. Farmers use mineral vitamin supplements on horses, cows, pigs, chickens, fish and just about every animal in the world that people want to improve in size. Why not deer? It just doesn't make sense. The animals mentioned above are usually fed quality feed and forage on high quality foods and deer are expected to forage the woods and reach their potential...............impossible.

Salt is fine but in very small amounts, just enough to make them eat the good stuff.

I think this forum has too many people trying to see how cheap they can hunt. Not how effectively. They want to save money on the most important things and blow it on the latest camo patterns. Don't get hung up on saving $50 on nutrition when you have a $30,000 4 wheel drive, $6,000 4-wheeler, $1,000 in land cost (understated), $1,000's in clothes and other crap. Feeding the deer the absolute best minerals, food plot forages and practice good deer management. It's cheap based on what you get and it's the only thing you do to improve the animal quality.