Earlier this month, we met with Danny McVay of Buckventures Outdoors to discuss what he is doing now to prepare for deer season.

Taylor: Nice to be chatting with you, Daniel. So, what are you doing this time of year to prepare for next deer season?

Daniel: Right now is more or less our dead time until mid-July. Starting in mid-July, we really get cranked up on food plots and scouting. Since I hunt in a lot of Midwestern farming areas, we don’t need plots to provide the main source of food for deer. Our plots are really killing plots, so we don’t want to go in too early putting pressure on the deer.

Taylor: Your food plots are obviously very important to your deer hunting. What is the secret sauce to your food plots?

Daniel: The most important thing with planting food plots is variety. We use Tecomate variety packs and they seem to work really well. This keeps various plants ready and deer eating from the plots throughout the season.

Taylor: Once you get the food plots going, how do you use cameras to target the deer?

Daniel: We will also put out 130-140 trail cams and spend time documenting all of them. This will show us what deer made it and what they turned into. We only target deer that are 5.5 years or older and pick out about 10-15 target deer from the ones we get on camera.

Taylor: How do you use this data to determine how you set up?

Daniel: Some deer that we have are over 10.5 years old, we just haven’t been able to get shots on them. They don’t get that old from being dumb, so you have to be extra careful in your set ups. You need them to make a mistake and you can’t make any. This means that you have to watch the weather and the wind and only hunt the spot if the conditions are perfect. You can’t hunt these old deer the same way you might hunt a doe or a 2.5-year-old buck. They are totally different creatures, so don’t force it. We take the time to map out each spot and where the wind will go with the thermals and different directions to determine where we can hunt and when we can hunt each spot. It does help that we are running over 100,000+ acres right now. It’s hard work, but it gives us a lot of spots to hunt. We generally whittle it down to the best 10-15 spots out of that, which is enough that we can consistently hunt regardless of weather, wind direction, and pressure.