I never go the cheap route. Too much man hours and money on lime and fertilizer to take the chance of going cheap on seeds. It's like buying a Ferrari with a go-cart engine.

I figure it cost at least $300 to spray, lime, plow, fertilize, plant and ammo-nite an acre food plot. Saving $20 by buying feed oats doesn't make sense to me. I'll gladly pay the addition for BFO's, I know the deer like them, I've been planting them for 7 or so years. Not saying the deer won't feed on feed oats, I hunted over a patch of feed oats yesterday, just didn't see any deer yesterday.

This year we planted about 14 acres of oats plots in three different locations. It cost less than $1,000 to plant all those plots. Many of our current plots were planted in iron clay peas in the spring: No fertilizer was required when the oats were planted. Some of our oats plots were disked this fall, some were brushhogged and no-till planted.

We got some rain at the right time and the deer are hitting our plots that were planted with Chilocco oat seed and plain old horse feed oats. One 2 acre plot was planted just after a rain. Three weeks later those oats were two inches high and the deer had started hitting them: Now they are eaten off close to the ground.

As soon as it rains i'm going to plant about five more acres at that place using a pasture drill.