Texas A&M Kingsville is where I got my degree in Wildlife Management, I personally know all the guys listed in the study, most of them were my professor at one time or another.



Dan O.,

There is no grassland in south Texas. Down here people run hundreds of head of cattle generally on thousands of acres of land, so it is almost impossible for the cattle to "compact the land". Alot of ranches in Texas rotate cattle from pasture to pasture after a period of time. The reason they do this is because the brush down here is so thick that the cattle are used as a form of brush control. There are alot of ranches that have completely removed the cattle and their only focus now is wildlife, deer and quail in particular, because a deer hunt and even a weekend of quail hunting can make the ranch as much money as 3-5 cattle did. On these ranches they use other forms of brush control, like disking, fire, root plowing, and bulldozing, etc. In south Texas, we do not have "grasslands that need destruction to allow brush to take hold on mineral soil" we actually have to much brush.


Russ,

You are right, the studies that are conducted down here are done on a very large scale because the ranches down here are normally very large. I know alot of landowners, and not a single one of them own less then several hundred acres, most of them own several thousand. The fact that these ranches are big, is one of the main reasons why deer management is so popular in Texas especially south Tx. On my familes ranch we planted over 200 acres of food plots and on one of the ranches that I work on we planted over 600 acres of food plots last year. If we planted only a few acres of plots then it would be about the same as pissing on a house fire, it would do no good.