Conservation Plots?????

[Trapper62]

My cousin was by Jamestown yesterday and saw a huge snow goose feed so drove over by it and found them feeding in a bean field that was covered with corn cobs, said it looked like someone had taken a dump truck and covered areas of the field with corn cobs.

It was posted "conservation plot open to hunting", anyone ever see this before?

 

[Retired Educator]

Never heard of that term and not familiar with all the rules for the Conservation Snow Goose season but in the fall wouldn't that be considered baiting and a federal waterfowl offense. Remember many years ago when hunters in the DL area were getting tickets for hunting in burned off crops. All kinds of disease problems that year and a lot of crops were written off as not worth harvesting so they burned them. Waterfowl loved the taste of smoked wheat and barley..

 

[zoops]

My guess is it was a field that wasn't planted last year due to the corn not coming off the year before due to the monsoon. It probably got harvested in May/June or just plowed under. I saw a couple fields last year that were just littered with corn cobs due to this. I believe conservation plots are just a certain type of plots (they have different sub-programs for planting trees, etc). By the letter of the law it's probably baiting but unlikely you'd get pinched in the spring.

 

[Davey Crockett]

Sounds like it could be in the cropland for Habitat program .


https://gf.nd.gov/plots/landowner/habitats-cropland

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One of the management tools listed.

Provide properly distributed food plots for wildlife. Food plots should be properly distributed across the landscape to prevent unnatural concentrations of wildlife, which may lead to starvation, disease outbreaks or competition with domestic livestock food supplies. Food plots should be in blocks to minimize impacts of drifting snow.

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I might have read between the lines to much or got the tools mixed up. I was just reading about this program a few weeks ago. Another part of that program is "Provide food on conventional crop fields by leaving several rows or strips of standing crops adjacent to permanent winter cover".

 

[Trapper62]

I’m not sure either, but he said it was last years bean field and actually looked like cob corn had been dumped/spread around the field as the field was yellow looking when he was watching it. Anyway said it was loaded with geese, I’ll have to see if he took a picture of it.